Under Agua
I love beaches pretty much everywhere I go. I don’t really like the waves and how they tower over me or how sand is glued to every part of my body when I get out of the water. I don’t like how the sun hits my shoulders and the sunburns it leaves or the salt that lingers in my mouth for the rest of the day. But, somehow, when I walk on the beach at night with the water grazing my feet as it retreats into its wide, salty home, it makes up for everything I don’t like. The quiet of the night, the cold water on my toes, the calmness of serenity, and a chance to be alone with my thoughts are all reasons why that one thing can make up for the four things that I’ll avoid to the greatest extent. The feeling is the equivalent of the feeling I get when I run, just better and without the exhaustion.
But, of course, there are other things I like about beaches. But that depends on the beach. I liked Uruguay’s waves, Rio’s soft sand, and Malaysia’s clear water. It amazed me how clear that water was. It looked like you could touch the bottom of a 10 foot deep section in the ocean! Seeing ocean water that’s clearer than you neighborhood pool is probably one of the weirdest things you can experience. And when you realize that fact, it gets even weirder. I tried to capture it’s glass-like, unreal beauty on camera. But it all seemed too fake and like no one could believe it, so I guess you’ll just have to take my word for it. There are no real waves on the Small Island of Perhentian in Malaysia, it was like what you’d see at a lake.
I’m always scared of waves and, obviously, terrified of tsunamis. I can’t help but imagine tsunamis occurring at any beach with decent waves. I’ll find myself checking for the signs of a tsunami repeatedly until I’m either too occupied to think past what I’m doing at the moment, or I’m a safe distance away. But I find that hard to imagine with this small island’s calm motions and flat horizon. It’s too safe and reassuring to think anything dangerous there. When I walk on the beach at night, the only thing I wish for is to be able to live on a beach sometime in the future, but in daylight on beaches with big waves, I doubt how much I would enjoy that. Living on an island like this small Perhentian Island is the perfect compromise.
Because of this amazing visibility, I was ecstatic to snorkel and dive. I was not disappointed. We started with a two hour snorkeling trip to see which of those stops we would most like to dive in. The first snorkeling place we visited was a great place to look at coral, hence the name, Coral Garden. It was a great first place to start and was filled with color. But it was immediately off the list for diving. After so many snorkeling trips and dives with a variety of coral, we were starting to get tired of it and we were looking for something new. And we almost hit the coral just floating on the surface. We rushed that first stop because the next stop was called ‘Shark Point’. There wasn’t one person in our family that didn’t want to see reef sharks. Many of the people that we met on the previous nights of our stay said that they saw up to twenty sharks! That got our family excited. So we were restless on the boat. I wasn’t expecting to see sharks right out of the gate, but I was expecting to see them sooner than we did. We were supposed to swim to some rocks and circle back around. Once we were about halfway to the rocks, we started to split up. Liam went over a little and I sped up. Mom and dad stayed together and saw one full grown reef shark. Mom swam over to me to tell me about the shark and I saw it swim about seven feet in front of me and over towards the rocks. Liam didn’t make it to see the shark because he was too far for any of us to tell him in time. We tried following it, but it just disappeared. We saw no other sharks until we got to the boat when dad claimed to have seen one. Liam left without seeing any sharks and dad left with seeing two.
Our third and final stop was Turtle Point. During the boat ride to it, we saw one turtle surfacing and the second we got out of the boat, we saw a gigantic turtle. He was about 2 feet across the shell and 2 ½ feet lengthwise. He was the biggest turtle any of us have any seen with the exception of the giant land tortoise. But there were so many people crowded around him that the best option was to dive under them. For this reason, my dad and I went out to look for others. We didn’t see any until Liam and my mom came over to join us. There was one more turtle that we saw surfacing and it was easily ⅓ the size of the first one. But there were no other people there, so we stayed by the smaller one rather than going back to the biggest one. We got back in the boat just as all the other people noticed the second turtle. We were very satisfied with our snorkeling and the votes were unanimous, we were going to dive at shark point. But before we dove, or reserved our dive, we were determined to show Liam a shark. My mom and dad went snorkeling earlier and told us they saw about 10 sharks just along the beach! Liam said he would go if I would go and my family bribed me with a milkshake. But the snorkeling there was just as good, if not, better, than the places we went on our snorkeling trip. And there were so many tiny baby sharks! The full grown ones were easily six feet, so I was surprised to see babies no bigger than my forearm! They were so small and we saw about 10 of them.
We did two dives total. Our first dive was at D’lagoon where we saw turtles, grumpy clown fish, barracuda, stingray, and many more. Our maximum depth was 11.8 meters and we were under for 57 minutes. I had some problems equalizing at the start, but it got better as we got deeper, surprisingly. And I have so many cut and scrapes on my legs because I have a habit of picking at scabs. That was a mistake. There were Cleaner Wrasse fish that kept sneaking up on me and nibbling at my cuts. Too bad there isn’t a way to tell them that they can’t get rid of a cut by picking at it. About half way through the dive, we saw a turtle It was just nibbling on some coral and never once acknowledged us. It surfaced twice in the 15 minutes we watched it and it swam so beautifully. It was like watching it in slow motion yet it moved pretty fast. The water wasn’t as clear as I was expecting, but still shockingly clear. Maybe it was our depth that made it look more murky. Our second dive was at shark point. I honestly wasn’t expecting much since we saw only one shark there snorkeling and 15 right along the coast, but it exceeded my expectations. There was nothing there the first half, but we were enjoying the fish! At the start, we went over to check out a Panda Clownfish and they were fiercely defending their home! Violent little things. And we were also being stalked by a Remora. It would swim behind us and do little figure eights around our legs and bumped us on more than one occasion. When it touched you, it felt like slimy sandpaper. Our dive master found our first shark about half way through the dive, though he was the only one that saw it. He saw almost four more after that without any of our family seeing one! I sometimes saw a little black tip going away, but that was all. The first shark we saw was huge and swam right by our faces! It was even better than I anticipated since I was convincing myself that I wouldn’t see any on the diving trip. After that, sharks just seemed to be surrounding us! There was never any better sightings than the first ones, but we saw a lot and they stayed in sight for a decent amount of time. We saw about 6 sharks by the time we exited the water. Luckily, I had no equalization problems this dive because of our shallow 9 meter max depth. That dive was 63 minutes long and amazing. I overall like being underwater more than on the beach because of the silence and how everything seems to move in slow motion. But still nothing can beat the nighttime walks on the sand.
Hi Shia,
Just love the way you write! It’s almost as if I’m (or the reader) is out there walking on the beach with you! Me too, I love beaches anywhere and agree with you about the night time beach walks! Isn’t it nice when you aren’t distracted with the sight of the big waves (or just see them in the moonlight) but you can hear the waves lapping on the shore and crashing against each other. It’s so cool to read about the big shark and baby sharks. I’m wondering if they make noise? Kinda makes me wonder what the shark thought of swimming by your faces, or most likely he doesn’t think and just keeps swimming, just keep swimming! Thank you so much for writing your thoughtful and interesting blogs to all of us here on dry land! Love, Cathy