…BOOM
I found myself 30 meters under the surface of the Gulf of Thailand with my Marine Ecology Scuba instructor, swimming away from the reef and into the blue.
Cloudy visibility and grey morning light meant that schools of hundreds of thousands of fish would appear and disappear in an instant. Up and down were concepts that took some concentration and the compressed air I’d been breathing from the tank had me feeling like I’d had a large glass of wine on an empty stomach. I flicked my fins and adjusted the too-tight wetsuit. And among the silence as I drew in a breath through my regulator followed by the crackling of popping bubbles as I exhaled, came the body rattling “…BOOM.”
What I thought would be a year of travel after leaving New York City in January of 2020 turned out to be an accidental residence on the island of Koh Tao. The infamous backpacker and Scuba diver island was my place of quarantine and safe haven as Covid-19 ravaged its way through life as we know it. I did what most other “stuck” travellers do when they find themselves on the island longer than they initially planned: I began to train as a Dive Master. A “DM” is the first professional certification one can pursue as a scuba diver. If you took your Open Water or “PADI” certification on holiday then it’s a DM who takes you diving once you’ve been certified. I’d spent the last six years working in an office in New York City and thought this would be an amazing way to pass the time while the world was shut down.
About half way through the certification programme, I was learning about “pelagic apex predators.” The kinds of fish that swim in the deep blue water beyond the reef to hunt other fish. That morning on the boat to the dive site, I’d been reviewing the waterproof teaching manuals examining photos to remind myself of the anatomical differences between a Great Barracuda and a Spanish Mackerel. This training dive was meant to help me see the fish in situ so I could learn to identify them from a distance in order to include them on population count surveys later in the program. They both have elongated silvery bodies with dark grey markings on the side and both of their jaws snap shut with an audible force when they’re eating. Perfect. No problem.
Piers, my instructor, reminded me that we could only hope to see one or two, “if the viz is good” but that we’d do the dive out in the blue nonetheless. Even if we didn’t see anything, it was, as always, about being in the water. Piers said something about remembering to watch my depth. I wouldn’t have the visual aid of the reef or pinnacle. Making final preparations to jump in, I recalled my training: should I become disoriented, I’d watch which way my bubbles moved — that way is up.
A splash, a descent, and back down at 30 meters, out of the clouds of detritus and microscopic plankton a school of half a million Smooth-Tailed Trevally appeared. Within thirty seconds, we were surrounded by a ten-storey tall cyclone of swirling fish, innumerable to my compressed-air tipsy mind. Flashes of scales and light were everywhere against the blue-ish grey atmosphere with darts and flicks from the occasional hasty fish. Hovering mid-water, we watched and waited accompanied by rhythms of silence and bubbles, silence and bubbles and silence and “…BOOM.” A stream of silver screamed across the frame of my mask its teeth and racing stripes causing the cyclone school to jump into complete chaos for a split second before resuming its orderly pattern. Six feet of bones, muscle, and instinct, the Great Barracuda was in and out of sight just long enough to identify it. My hands shoved the regulator back into my agape mouth and I turned to Piers whose body was contracting with ecstatic laughter and the wordless but oh so apt rock-and-roll gesture. It was terrifying and powerful and beautiful all at once.
I would learn later that the “…BOOM” was not the sound of the Great Barracuda closing its jaws around the body of an ill-fated fish. Rather, the “…BOOM” was the sound of half a million fish tails displacing a million gallons of water as the entire school changed direction at the same time. That millisecond of chaos where the school broke form to escape their predator, reverberated through my chest down to my toes. The masses changed direction without a clear destination. Some kind of order followed shortly thereafter, but it was not the same as it was.
Slowly ascending to the surface, we ended our dive.
