Diving with Dragons

“I’m gonna Mexican the shit outta this!!!”

Close to six years later, on another little island in the middle of nowhere, David is still one of the most happy-go-lucky, sincere and driven guys I’ve ever met… and he’s also still chasing sharks for life. Except this time, instead of helping me clarify whether something is Kosher for Passover with our Galapagueño host, we’re parking in a slightly cheeky position in downtown Hobart. We spend the next two hours catching up over cider and beer and smoked salmon… and really terribly taken selfies.

Hobart becomes my home base for a few days. I hike up through glistening veils of fog on Mt. Wellington’s forested slopes as my friend Dan teaches me differences between primitive and more evolved ferns and points out cockatoo totems, and we watch translucent alien flatworms shoot across soft, leaf-littered earth. I drive to Bonorong Wildlife Sanctuary, where Tasmanian Devils hold their heads high and proud as they carry prized chicken carcasses around their enclosures. They’re raised here as one of several backup populations in Tasmania, ensuring their species’ survival despite the Facial Tumor Disease so prevalent and so easily spread amongst the territory’s dwindling wild population. I hand feed monster papa kangaroos and bitty baby kangaroos as they lounge like kings in the sanctuary. Back in the city, I lie back on playgrounds under the night sky and watch clouds move at superspeed over my head.

And, David takes me diving for the first time in six years.

The Huon River runs so dark with tannin carried from Tasmania’s buttongrass highlands that it stains the sun’s rays beneath the ocean’s surface where it empties into the Pacific. The unassuming reef at Nine Pins Point hides surprising treasures: a monster blue-purple eel lurks amongst the rocks and coral. An orange anemone covered in electric blue stripes appears more to be a mass of fish eggs than a single organism. And a single, small golden fan anchors to a rock six meters down, the water’s reduced light allowing this understated gem of a coral to survive in the shallows, opposed to its usual happy place at 35 or 40 meters’ depth.

Three days later I drop into the water once again out of Eaglehawk Neck, a slender spit of land connecting Tasmania’s mainland to a world of plunging dolerite sea cliffs and spindly, teetering stacks. The wind that day whips in so furiously that whitecaps form in the opposite direction of oncoming swell, spraying over our small boat as we motor out of the harbor. The thousands of black swans teeming in tidal bays yesterday have disappeared from sight.

Chaos turns to calm as we sink into the water in a small, sheltered cove where we’ve dropped anchor. So much grass and kelp blanket the sea floor that its hard to tell if I’m moving, or if the floor is moving, or if it’s simply the water’s rhythmic oscillation. The sea dragon, when we find it, appears as an ethereal work of art. He’s over a foot long, a red giant compared to the seahorses I’ve seen elsewhere. His spotted body turns to green under the belly, and broad, fanning yellow and crimson dorsal fins extend from its back. His slender tail carries pearly eggs as his trumpet-shaped snout reaches far in front of him, tiny mouth opening to collect microscopic krill as he flutters his way unhurriedly amongst the weed.

The next day we head southward to Cape Huay, where a colony of New Zealand fur seals  lounge and fight and play amongst a chunky pile of rocks cradled in the interchange between the swell’s spray and dark plunging cliffs. The 7-mm wetsuits we wrestled on before leaving the dive center cut the water’s chill as the water’s roll pulls us up and down and weed dances around us. Seals twist through the water and loop around each other, passing through our bubbles as they dip downward amongst us.

On our way back we drop down to explore the peninsula’s walls. A maze of passages and shallow caverns twists beneath the waves, betraying millions of years of battering against soft rock. Light leaves the water as caves close above us, and walls blanketed in yellow-orange sea pens give way to yawning shadows. Back in the light, cuttlefish lurk beneath narrow shelves, camouflaged against the sand, stubby tentacles curled close. Wrasse teem against the walls, something related to Dori fins its way past me, and I return to breezy open air with a smile.