Flipper Prints: Egypt - The Instructor’s Dark Side

What does a diving instructor do when he happens to be on vacation? The specimen with a normal working brain goes to the Tatra mountains to map out the feeding habits of mountain goats. The truly twisted one goes diving. He goes diving and enjoys that his time underwater is not spent with emptying masks and with the demonstration of how to rise above emergency situations but rather with careless floating. Naturally, there are some mean ones among these twisted specimens for whom the off-duty (incognito) dives hide further enjoyment – the tormentation of their on-duty counterparts.

When our skinny, smiling Egyptian dive guide, Salaka, blessed with a healthy dose of optimism, asked us on the first day of our South safari how much experience and how many dives we had, I answered with no hesitation:

- I had my OWD exam two years ago in a Hungarian lake. Unfortunately I haven’t been diving since.
- Then how many dives do you have actually? – asked Salaka, still smiling but the first faint sign of worry had begun to appear in his eyes.
- Well, four. I haven’t been diving in the sea before and to be honest, I’m a bit scared. But I’m sure everything will be ok…

Salaka’s smile broke into tiny pieces and fell onto the boat’s deck like porcelan tiles. He mumbled something in his mother tongue and I seemed to hear the name of Allah at least four times but fortunately most of his speech was foreign to me. I could really relate. We signed up for a week-long Deep South safari and we looked forward to dives full of drop-offs, currents, sharks and mantas. He, however was standing in front of a poor beginner whose life he had to guard. I felt sorry for him for a minute and I almost revelaed my disguise but then I remembered my own experiences. Like when I was guiding a safari for a week in the most beautiful part of the Adriatic Sea and my beloved boss shared with me two small details about the trip only a few minutes before our departure:

- the boat was overbooked, so I did not have a cabin and
- there were two 12-year-old diver newbies onboard who were not permitted to dive deeper than 12 metres and I was to take care of them.

That trip was great – I was chewing on sea grass like a well-behaved lamantine at a depth of 10 metres and on every dive I was desperately trying to find some new kind of moss for the kids to show. As we were wandering on the uninteresting reef tops, the adults’ equipment let out long strands of bubbles from the deep and burst on the surface just like my own illusions fed by the beautiful life of a diving instructor. In the evenings the boat was loud of adult conversation and bets of who saw the most crawfish, eel and murena. And there was the unmistaken message in the kids’ eyes that I must have been the worst instructor in the world since I had not been able to show them any of these things during the week. I tried to improve my reputation with an octopus but to my demise, that day at 35 metres the others found a metre-long catshark. And who cares about the octopus when you can have a catshark?

So, I was even more determined to stick to my original plan and be a beginner diver or at least until the first dive. There were problems already when putting my equipment together: I put the INT stage on the tank backwards, my BCD was not secured to the tank, I put on my suit the wrong way and I was just standing there looking like a sock turned inside out and filled with wet cotton balls. To Salaka’s credit, the smile returned to his face and he kindly corrected my mistakes.

The only time his lower lip trembled slightly is when I put the breathing apparatus in my mouth incorrectly but he gathered up his strength, smiled again and showed me the correct way. My friends in the back were rolling on the floor laughing and were trying not to be noticed and not to blow the cover off my satanic plan. My friend Tibor Fazekas who had introduced me to the world of instructors years before, bringing shame to Lothar Matthaus’s coaching qualities, was hissing from the back: „Make your knees tremble, let him see you’re scared!” Now looking seriously worried, Salaka made me say again the golden rule: „Never hold your breath under the water!”, then with a gentle push, he helped me in the water.

Once in the water – I am almost ashamed to admit –, I gave it my all, everything I had seen from my beginner strudents during my 3-year instructor odessy. My mask was filled with water, my breathing was heavy, I used my hands instead of my flippers, I turned onto my back and I was staring at Salaka with my eyes wide open: „Now what?”

Salaka fought a heroic fight to calm me down on the sand bench at 5 metres deep because every time he turned away, I let the air out through my spare regulator and after 10 minutes, I managed to get below 100 bars. Salaka could not believe his eyes and was staring at my pressure gauge then into my eyes. The latter he could not see much of as my mask was half filled with water and the other half fogged up. I do not think he was ever this close in his dive guide carreer to whip out his knife and put an end to both of our miseries. I felt I should not push it any more and anyway, my dark side was getting further in the back and I actually wanted to enjoy the dive. So, I emptied my mask, took my floating position and asked Salaka to guide me.

Salaka was looking at me with growing satisfaction but not without suspicion. Slowly he let go of the tap of my tank which up until then he had been holding on to by both hands to prevent me from doing anything stupid. He kept showing me the „OK” sign with a growing smile on his face and I saw hope slowly returning into him. It was time to give the final blow. I removed my mask, reached into the pocket of my BCD, took out the sunglasses I had put there before the dive, placed it on my nose with a cool move, showed him an „OK” and tried to continue diving with a straight face. Then it hit him what actually had been happening until then. Unfortunately I was not able to see his face without my mask but my friends, watching us from close, later on the boat told me of our guide’s reaction.

After a couple of minutes I put my mask back on and finally we were able to dive without a worry, though Salaka was giving me signs under the water I had not seen until then and if I figured them correctly, he wanted me to initiate sexual relations with one (or more) goats. Later he slowly cooled off, just laughed and shooked his head and we began circling the wreck of an unfortunate fishing boat at 15 metres deep.

Visibility was approaching infinity, bending the sandy sea bottom which was dotted with bold coral-covered towers looking like gingerbread houses. The ship, resting on her side, – the captain must not have been navigating to the best of his availabilities if he had not noticed the reef peeking out of the water – provided a cozy home for numerous coral and fish species. In front of the cabin a team of hesitant masked butterfly fish gathered just like ladies bound for the opera at the foot of the velvet-clad stairway – I could actually hear as the orchestra was practising inside. The prima donna, a 2-metre-long murena, was looking out of the cabin nonchalantly, practising her scales while preparing for her performace. Below him a few prawns were scramming like the orchestra’s feather-brained strings who mixed up their sheet music and of them just realised that he had brought to the permier his favourite recipe collection instead.

The ancipitation was growing. As was the school of butterfly fish holding their council meeting. The gaping of the murena and the mad dash of crabs was speeding up. And the conductor arrived at last – an eagle ray swam over the wreck out of nowehere, its tux elegantly floating around it. The usher, a titan triggerfish with an especially mean stare, made everyone aware with aggressive sand digging antics and bulging eyes that getting into the audience before the show can only be done over his body.

After the performance we carried on swimming by the wreck, back towards our boat. Though my computer said there was still plenty of time, the air wasted at the beginning of the dive took its revenge, so soon we had to return to the surface. Under the boat a giant Napoleon fish with a typical nonchalant attitude checked us out from the corner of its eye then swam away. Its bulging forehead could have easily stood for enormous intellectual assets but those who are familiar with the undewater world know these species hardly go beyond the „eat – look to the side – empty” thought process. Perhaps some will go as fas as wondering „does that diver have some boiled eggs, my favourite snack?” and when the answer is affirmative, they devour them not thinking this action could cost them their lives. On the other hand, in the midst of these thoughts, they seemed quite satisfied unlike some of our fellow city dwellers who live their unhappy lives mulling over much more complicated problems. As I was looking at the close-to-two-tonne body slowly swimming away, all of a sudden I was not able to determine who actually got the best of evolution.

We slowly ascended and I tried to leave the water quickly before my kind dive guide could take his matching revenge on me on land. Helping hands stretched towards me on the ladder and Mahmoud, one of the handy guys on the boat yelled in my face using all his English knowledge with a toothless grin: „Everything OK?”. Later we found out, he freely used this phrase not only after dives but also in place of saying good-bye, saying hello and the weather report. I answered with the manditory „Everything OK” and got myself onto the deck.

There Salaka, forgetting about his tank still on his back and the weights on his waist, wobbled towards me.
- You… you.. you! You know, you are a… you are a… – repeated his opinion about me.

Then with a wide grin he patted me on the back and I gave thanks that he got to be only 60 kilograms during his active diving years. During the next few days I often got these back pats along with various hints about in which historical era should people like me, blessed with this kind of „humour”, have been liquidated. But every time I could see the relief in his eyes that he did not have to suffer through the week with me.

And me? I had a peaceful and sound sleep every night, probably with a smile on my face. Who said the bad always get what comes to them?

Translated by Anita Riberdy, based on the original short story “Az oktató sötét oldala” by András Szepesházi