Rescue at Sea

In February of 2004, I went on a dive trip with some friends from the Shedd Aquarium to Curacao, which is located in the southwest Caribbean Sea between Aruba and Bonaire. I was not used to the diving style on Curacao which, unlike Cozumel with which I was most familiar, doesn’t rely heavily on drift diving. I love drifting along with the current – flying along with almost no physical effort combined with the opportunity to see more of the underwater landscape makes me a happy diver. On Curacao, since there’s very little current, the majority of dives involve descending to a “deep” level, say 80 feet, and swimming along for awhile, then ascending to maybe 50-60 feet, turning around, and swimming back to the moored boat. You see different sea life at different levels, so it’s not all bad – just a little more exertion than drifting.

On perhaps our third day of diving, we were on our way back to the boat when I spotted something off in the distance that looked worth investigating. I pointed it out to my dive buddy Emily, and we headed over to check it out. As we got closer, we saw that it was a cage of some kind, with a wood frame covered in chicken wire, and we could see something inside it. The “something” turned out to be 2 very large green moray eels, parts of several fish, and a couple of live fish. I took out my noisemaker, shook it, and motioned for the divemaster to come take a look. He could still see us but couldn’t make out what we were so interested in; I’m sure it looked like junk from his vantage point because he was looking at us like we were crazy. When he was close enough to see what was inside, his eyes nearly popped out of his head.

There were no obvious openings in the cage to let out the eels – no door, nothing. The divemaster took over untwisting the chicken wire and, after about 10 minutes, opened up a hole large enough for the eels and fish to escape. The fish got out relatively quickly. Eels, however, are quite blind and pretty darn lazy during the day, so they didn’t seem terribly interested in the rescue attempt. We finally picked up the cage, flipped it upside down so that the opening was at the bottom, and shook it until the eels made their way out. They swam off into deeper water to find themselves new homes without a word of thanks.