Alexandra Rose
The year was sometime around 300 B.C.E., somewhere in the vicinity of Kalymnos, a little Greek island in the southeastern Aegean Sea, when Plato wrote an account of the islanders’ bathing habits. The legendary poet Homer had brought up this part of Mediterranean life, too, centuries earlier, and today the detail catches scholars’ eyes not because the ancient Greeks shared suds with river nymphs or scrubbed with the fuzz of golden fleece, but because of a single lowly object still found in households more than two thousand years later: the sponge.
To landlubbers, sponges might mean nothing but the porous yellow puffs hanging above their shower faucets. But to anthropologists, they mean the coral-like animals braced against underwater reefs, inaccessible by boat or raft. Retrieving a sponge means diving for a sponge, which means that humans have been holding their breath and taking to the sea for thousands—if not tens of thousands—of years.
Diving, salvaging, and hunting off the coasts of the inhabited world was not, of course, limited to the Mediterranean. Alexander the Great reportedly used divers to relay covert messages during the Siege of Tyre; female ama in Japan have been harvesting oysters’ pearls for an alleged two thousand years; spearfishers in Hawaii have long braved Pacific waves for a`u and kumu; and these days, just past the marshlands of Louisiana, in the river-fed Gulf of Mexico, a newer subset of adventurers uses the unique nautical landscape for underwater experiences unlike anything else on the planet.
“I call them iron reefs,” said Michele Browning, referring to the massive oil rigs operating miles from shore. A master diver, spearfisher, and registered nurse, Browning has been diving for years, as comfortable in Cozumel as she is in the water near the Grand Isle getaway she shares with her husband and fellow diver, Brent.
“Right now, the oil rigs are the only places you can dive off the Louisiana coast,” she said, noting that our state’s submission to the mouth of The Big Muddy means that it lacks the white sand beaches of Florida or Alabama. To the unacquainted, that brand of ocean may seem like a deterrent to anyone considering a swim below the surface. But if that’s what you think, you probably just haven’t looked deep enough.
“There are a couple of things that make rig diving unique,” said Steve Harvey, a spearfisher with almost thirty years of experience, and owner of Temento’s dive shop just outside New Orleans, a staple resource for divers and spearfishers since 1959, and for boaters since 1947. “The first is what’s called ‘excessive depth opportunity.’ If you were diving off a wreck in Florida, for example, you might expect the depth of the water to be around fifty feet—that’s as far down as you can go. But in Louisiana, we’re diving off vertical oil rigs that descend hundreds of feet beneath the surface.”
The result, he said, is the feeling of floating above a bottomless cavern, a potentially off-putting experience that a good diving education will try to anticipate and alleviate.
“The second thing to know about diving in the Louisiana gulf is the ‘murk layer,’ or the river water discharge that sits on top of the salt water,” said Harvey. “It stratifies because of the difference in salinity and temperature. You can drive twenty miles off shore, tie your boat to an oil rig, look down, and the water seems so uninviting, with no visibility. But maybe five or ten feet below that, it’s absolutely blue.”
For Mark Smith, scuba instructor and owner of Underwater Adventures in Baton Rouge, a solid diving education is crucial for any diving hobbyist, but is perhaps even more important for rig diving. Those open waters are a realm of uncertainty, with sunlight coming and going, and currents shifting as they choose.
“We sell spearfishing equipment here and service regulators so that people can dive safely,” he said. “Your regulator is your life support, remember. We want you to have fun, but we also want to make sure you have the education that helps you concentrate for a long time underwater, to help you keep your act together even if things go awry.”
Oil rigs, while the result of a human-driven desire for fossil fuel extraction—and, unfortunately, exploitation—maintain an ironic dual identity in the Gulf. Huge enough to dwarf a human swimmer, and abrasive to the touch, the rigs have become the de facto coral reefs of Louisiana, attracting whole ecosystems of colorful fish indistinguishable from those in the tropical shallows of a vacationer’s Mexico.
“A lot of people don’t realize the diversity of life down there,” said Harvey. “You’ll see corals, octopus—types of fish you’d expect to see on a reef in Indonesia.”
Browning, who enjoys the Gulf waters as both hunter and observer, has garnered a special respect for the strange apartments of the iron reefs.
“Sometimes I’ll leave my speargun or camera equipment at home and just enjoy the feeling of being an explorer,” she said. “But it’s always important to remember your diving education and keep your wits about you down there. This is the fishes’ home, not our home.”
Depending on your species, the rigs might even become, well, a bad neighborhood.
“Sharks? Oh yeah, there’s plenty of sharks,” said Rich McCloskey, Vice President of the Hell Divers spearfishing club and owner of Blue Line Charter Service out of Venice. But sharks aren’t his concern—they don’t view humans as food and generally stick to their slow revolutions around the reef. And anyway, they’re not what McCloskey is after.
Spearfishing in one form or another has been around as long as the taste of tuna lured our ancestors to the water, but in Louisiana, it’s a whole other ball game. Diving as a spearfisher, said McCloskey, who has been diving since 1999 and completed several supervised dives before being awarded a coveted spot with the Hell Divers, is for advanced practitioners only. Browning likewise dove nearly every weekend for a year before ever picking up a speargun, and one look at the game she chases will demonstrate why.
“There are fish down there as big as I am,” said McCloskey. “Amberjack, cobia, red snapper, grouper, tuna. If you don’t paralyze them the second you spear them—especially amberjack, which will flare their gills and start swimming down, instead of up—you’ve got to know when to give up and swim back to the surface.”
Spearfishing—like diving—has a different look in Louisiana.
“In Louisiana, we use what’s called a riding rig gun, which I’ve never seen used anywhere else in the world,” said Harvey.
Allegedly named for the rodeo-like challenge of spearing a big fish (even spearfishing tournaments, like other sportfishing contests in the Gulf, are referred to as rodeos), a riding rig protects the shooter by allowing him to release his rope and spear and swim to safety, if necessary. Once shot from the gun (which can range in length from 50 to 130 centimeters, depending on the size of the shooter), the spear shaft stays connected to a high-strength line wrapped around the gun, which is likewise connected to a larger, more malleable rope the diver can hold in his hands. That way, in a worst-case scenario when a speared fish begins to drag the shooter too deep, the fisher can release the rope, losing his spear but keeping his gun. The rope also means that shooters can wrap it around the rig in order to surface, restock on oxygen, and descend again to retrieve their catch.
And the hunt, Browning noted, doesn’t necessarily mandate a fish the size of a twelve-year-old.
“Lionfish have become an invasive species in Louisiana,” she said of the poisonous, barb-finned animal native to the Indo-Pacific. “It can be helpful for us women, especially, since we can’t usually wrangle the really big fish, to try and spear those if we see them. Most of them have adapted and grown into fillet sizes, now.”
Rigs and rodeos, rivers and red fish. All buzzwords that draw wranglers and divers to the unassuming flatlands in the southerly ends of the Gulf states too often ignored in favor of Atlantic sands and Pacific surfing waves. In the world above, we natives, slick with humidity, bear thunderstorms and rainfall on a near-weekly basis, and in the fall, threats of hurricanes electrify our senses in fear of destruction. But Louisiana has always been tied to the water. Our inlands thrive on it, our wilderness depends on it, and where it runs from rivers into the sea, it gives life to fish too large for wrangling rods, to porpoise pods, and to slow sperm whales well-adjusted to the dark. The moment we dipped our toes beneath the surface, whether to hunt or build or explore that other seventy percent of the earth, we became aquatic, too.
Homer made monsters of the sea, and Plato wrung histories from it, but we southerners have been taking stock of our waters with our own flair, as well. As the writer Jack E. Davis cited the Mississippi painter Walter Anderson, who wrote in his journals of Gulf island expeditions: “Why does man live?”, those of the coast know the only true answer: “To be the servant and slave of all the elements.”
Resources
divewithua.com
helldivers.org
bluelinecharterservice.com
tementos.com
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