Key Largo dive spawned young girl’s passion for scuba

It was during a cruise on the family boat from Hamilton, Ontario, to the Bahamas that Tess Miller came to appreciate her parents’ passion for scuba diving.

Just eight years old at the time, Tess, from London, Ontario, had taken some scuba lessons before the journey began. But she first experienced the beauty and serenity of diving in Key Largo. They were waiting there to rendezvous with two other families who also had their own boats, before going on together to their Bahamas destination.

“We dove every other day. It was amazing. I found it so peaceful,” says Tess. “It is my favourite thing to do. Any problem you have is wiped away under water. Everything is so quiet and beautiful. The water is crystal clear and the fish are stunning. I was very comfortable.”

Charlie Miller, Tess’s father, says Pennykamp, a protected coral reef off the Florida Keys, was their prime diving site in that area. It has great coral and aquatic life. “We were two months in that area.”
One of the things Tess saw underwater near Key Largo was the Christ statue, 30 or 40 feet down. “It is life size or bigger. I couldn’t really tell.”

Later, near Staniel Cay in the Exumas, a district of the Bahamas with almost 400 islands, she dove with her family in the Thunderball Grotto, a rock formation with a huge opening. Popular with both scuba divers and snorkelers, it was featured in two James Bond Movies, Thunderball and Never Say Never Again.

“That is my most vivid dive,” says Tess. “There is a hole in the ceiling and the light that shines through made it surreal. The whole cave was filled with fish. It was amazing.”

Her other favourite dive is the shark dive off Paradise Island in the Bahamas. “It’s a planned event. You sit in a circle called a ring and there is a person feeding the sharks. They don’t bite the hand that feeds them.”

The boat trip itself was an experience. Originating in Hamilton, Ontario in mid-August of 2004, the first part of the trip involved navigating the Erie Barge Canal, which connects the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean at New York. When they got to Baltimore they left their 53-foot vessel there for repairs, before continuing on. There were several other repair stops along the way. The southbound trip was made in segments of a week at a time. They arrived in Fort Lauderdale, Florida a few days after Christmas in 2004, before moving on to Key Largo.

From there they headed to the Bahamas, with their first stop there being Cat Cay to clear customs. Then it was on to Chubb Cay, 35 miles west of Nassau. Some good diving followed.

“We started to anchor out and felt we were remote. We were out for days just living on the boat,” says Charlie.
Nassau was the next stop to get provisions before heading south for the Exumas islands. “It (the Exumas) was magnificent. The beaches are unbelievable. They are like the postcards,” says Charlie.

There is an island there inhabited by pigs that swim out to meet boaters, who have been feeding them for years. “The pigs will come up to the boat and you can feed them,” adds Charlie.

The Exumas has a “land and sea protected park.” Fishing is not allowed.

Underwater, the Millers found an old shipwreck that was “crawling with lobsters.”

The family started to work their way home in May, beginning with restocking in Nassau. “Then we went out to Eleuthera, a really exclusive series of islands northeast of Nassau, where we dove some wrecks, Charlie says.

They reached Freeport by mid-May of 2005 before heading on to Fort Lauderdale. From there it took them just 21 days to get back to Port Stanley, Ontario, on Lake Erie’s northern shore. They accomplished that by running 10 to 12 hours a day, as well as some “all nighters.”

It was the end of June by the time they got home, but on July 15 they decided to take the boat north to Killarney, Ontario, in the North Channel.

“When we got back to London we were still prepared to go for another trip.”

Diving has been a long-time passion for the Miller family, beginning with Charlie’s diving certification about 30 years ago in the British Virgin Islands. He was the first to dive the 250-foot, steel-hulled freighter SS Wexford, which sank in a storm in November of 1913 eight miles off the Lake Huron shoreline from Grand Bend, Ontario. That discovery was made on Aug. 25, 2000.

Tess, now 17 and on schedule to finish high school soon, has now logged about 75 dives, of which 40 to 50 were on the boat trip to the Bahamas.

There will be many more dives for Tess. As well as easy access to summer diving in Lake Huron, she has passage to warmer waters much farther south.

“I have a 55-foot Sea Ray, full of dive gear in Nassau,” says Charlie. “It’s a great dive boat. We go down once a month from October to March. We have 10 special dive sites around Nassau.”

Access to great diving with her family has whetted Tess’s appetite for diving much farther away: “I would like to do some of the big dives, like the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, things that most people that dive would love to see.”

Kathy Dowsett
www.kirkscubagear.com

Japan's ama divers: still fishing after all these years

Mieko Kitai takes a huge gulp of air as she surfaces from the clear, blue waters of Japan's Pacific coast with a large abalone in her hand.

Now in her 70s, the dive -- with nothing more than a mask -- does not get any easier and the pickings get slimmer with every passing year.

But she and her fellow "ama" divers reap the fruits of the sea in a way that has been practised in parts of Japan for thousands of years.

"Finally, I got one," she says as she climbs aboard the boat and pulls the mask off her weather-beaten face.

Kitai is one of a dozen free divers who gathered on a recent sunny day in Shima, Mie prefecture, in western Japan.

They chatter loudly from excitement and necessity -- some have suffered hearing loss because of the high pressures experienced at depth -- as they rub their masks with a kind of slimy algae to prevent fogging.

Some join hands and utter a Shinto prayer for those they have lost, including an 80-year-old who died last year on a dive. "Her heart gave out," said one of them.

Each has a weight belt around their waist to give them a little help when they jump overboard into water up to 20 metres deep. Some are gone as long as a minute before they surface again with a shellfish or an urchin.

"Today, the fishing was better than I thought it would be," said Kitai as she dropped an octopus and several turban shells, a prized shellfish delicacy, into her catch net.

"In the past you could get as many as 40 abalone in a day, but now getting four counts as a good day," said fellow free diver Sumiko Nakagawa, her face lined by her years in the salty water under the beating sun.

Pollution and overfishing have taken their toll on abalone, the main source of income for these women, with the creature's population dropping by 90 percent in the last 40 years in Japan.

A kilogramme of wild abalone sells for around 8,000 yen ($80), although most consumed in Japan are now farmed.

In 2011 local authorities released young abalone into the ocean in a bid to prop up their numbers. They also ban the use of scuba tanks and limit catch to specimens over 10 centimetres (4 inches) long -- a size they usually reach around the age of 10.

This kind of fishing was once the sole preserve of women, who were commonly believed to be better at coping with the sometimes-cold water because of a thicker layer of fat under their skin.

It was also traditionally done topless, although their most famous cinematic outing -- in James Bond's 1967 effort "You Only Live Twice" -- saw sultry actresses cover their modesty with skimpy bikini tops as they cavorted with Sean Connery.

The advent of wetsuits opened the profession to men, says professor Yoshitaka Ishihara, director of the Toba Sea-Folk Museum.

"Now there are almost as many men as women," said Ishihara, whose museum houses skin-diving artefacts dating back 10,000 years.

The scant rewards and the high risks have discouraged many young people from taking up the profession, and many fear the tradition could die out when those in their 60s, 70s and 80s pass away.

Younger divers who take up the profession find it is not easy.

"Initially I made virtually nothing," said Satomi Yamamoto, 37, as she grilled sea urchins on the harbour in Shima. "But I got better and four years later, I was earning about 100,000 yen a month."

Yamamoto is one of a handful of women of her generation to have embraced a way of life they were not born into.

"I was raised in Osaka and I had always lived in a big city, but I am much happier since coming here seven years ago to join my husband," she said.

Yoshitaka Ishihara says as Japan mechanised its fishing and farming, the way of the ama changed a little to keep up.

"Until 1970, girls started fishing when they were about 16 or 17 and learned from just watching their mother," he said.

"Now recruits have to undergo a tough initiation and for the first four years have to work with an experienced diver."

But despite the shrinking number of creatures in the sea, there is a real camaraderie among the ama of Shiba.

"We never compete for fish," said the now-retired 83-year-old Yuriko Matsui. "If we did, all the shells would have disappeared by now."


Kathy Dowsett
www.kirkscubagear.com