As usual, friends ask me Monday morning : "How was it", whenever I come back from a dive trip. This is what I sent to them this morning :Yesterday morning we went to dive spot "Pinang " and did another fairly long swim under water over some of Malaysia 's finest mud plain to reach another pinnacle. There we found some good stuff, corals, sponges, rocks, lots of fish and also a fishing net hooked on so many coral structures.
It had snagged on the bottom. The crew of the fishing boat that had cast it just cut it loose for convenience sake and it dropped down to the seabed and covered and smothered corals. It also trapped some fish that swam into it unwittingly. Our Dive Master (DM) started to slice away at the net with passion and our newbie companion Sandhosh (just 10 or so dives) didn't know what to do or whether to do anything at all, so he watched, while I started to sever the thicker rope of the net at some points.
Then he spotted a little yellow fish caught in the filaments of the net that was pulled up in the water column by some buoyant float ball. He signaled DM "got fish trapped here". DM signaled 'leave it, its almost dead'. Sandhosh didn't take no for an answer and signaled back 'no, still breathing'. So I swam up to him and the fish and true, it still breathed and struggled. Sandhosh held the net taut below and above the fish, so that it could not move so much. Then I held it gently in my gloved hand and slipped my famous cheapskate shears under single filaments, that almost cut into the fish' flesh and cut them. After 3 cuts the fish was free and zipped out and 2m away. He stopped there, appearing confused, then turned around and swam up to Sandhosh, stopped in front of Sandhosh chest, looked at him, and swam off. You should have seen the look of pure delight on Sandhosh' face. The dive did not look as if it was going to be spectacular, what with the long swim over a non-descript mud bottom, but the fish net mission made the day for our buddy.
By "Ros"
No comments:
Post a Comment