Swimming with the sharks

Katie has never snorkeled.

“Never?” I say.

Katie shakes her head.

Jale (CHAR-lay) is going to take the two of us out this morning. He meets us down at the dock with snorkeling gear and shows Katie how to rub a little toothpaste into her mask and rinse it to keep the glass from fogging (besides making your mask smell minty fresh, it doesn’t have the yuck factor of the more traditional spitting method).

“There are sharks down there,” Katie says as she sits on the end of the dock putting on her fins. “I saw them yesterday.”

She doesn’t say this with alarm. Just sort of matter-of-factly. Like you’d say, The water is warm today.

The three of us roll into the water, Jale leading and Katie and I following close behind. Jale and I have gone down to the bottom of the reef to look at a lobster hiding in a rock crevasse when Jale realizes that Katie isn’t with us. We swim up to the surface and look around. Katie is not far away, dog-paddling while playing with her mask. It’s leaking, she tells Jale. It keeps filling up with water.

Jale takes the mask, adjusts the strap, and has her try it again.

Jale darts in and out of the reef, his arms close to his body, his flippers kicking. Like a playful seal, he moves effortlessly underwater. Katie and I struggle to keep up. He wants to show us everything: a clown fish, sea slug, conch, sea fans, and, yes, some small sand sharks. A bright yellow sponge sits like a Christmas tree ornament in a pale violet tree coral.

We are swimming along with the current which picks up strength as it flows into the Beqa channel. Surges lift me up and carry me onto the soft coral reef and it’s tricky business getting back into deeper water without damaging the coral—or my legs. Katie has fallen behind. Jale and I surface, waiting for her to catch up.

“It will be more difficult swimming from here,” Jale says. “Do you want to go back?”

I look at Katie; Katie looks at me. “Maybe we should,” she says.

I look closely at her, trying to decipher what she thinks about all this. It’s difficult to say. I think she likes seeing this alien underwater world. But perhaps isn’t crazy about the whole fogged-mask-saltwater-down-the-snorkel thing. Or maybe the wave action has made her feel queasy.

We swim back to the dock and take off our gear. “What’d you think?” I ask her as we climb out of the water.

She shakes her wet hair like a dog coming out of a lake. “It was interesting,” she says.

“Did you like it?” Jale asks.

Katie nodds. “Yeah. I mean, I guess so. It was kind of hard to breathe.”

“You must get used to it,” Jale says. He gathers up our gear, we thank him, and then I’m off to the Banyan to have lunch with Marguarite and Christopher. When I ask Katie if she’s going to join us, she says, “Maybe later.” She’s off to take a shower and, I suspect, a nap.