Lilly Corrigan

Terror from the Sea

Imagine yourself with a flexible sheet of plastic conformed to your nose and mouth, a cloudy white window in front of your eyes, and a thin tube covered in salt and sand shoved into your mouth that you’re intended to breathe from. Now imagine that you’re plopped out in 40 foot deep water a 20-minute swim away from salvation with no means of flotation besides some old worn out ducks’ feet strapped to the bottoms of your legs. This is how I feel about snorkeling.

            Let me take you back a bit. In my family, when you graduated from high school, you got to pick a place to go on vacation that summer. My older sister chose to go to Ireland--absolutely beautiful, but a bit cold and rainy. When my time came to choose a vacation spot, I wanted a place that was more tropical. I ended up choosing the US Virgin Islands, a group of three islands in the Caribbean Sea. We planned out our trip in the months leading up to my graduation; we would stay a couple of days on St. Thomas, the more popular island, and then spend most of our time on the quiet and tranquil St. John.

We were very excited about snorkeling. All of the travel books my mom looked at talked about how it was some of the best in the world, “The Virgin Islands offer some particularly outstanding sites.” They raved about places “where fish swim around the reefs as you float downward,” and “fish dart about in colorful schools.” My parents and sister had all snorkeled in the past and really enjoyed it. I had tried it once, but was unsuccessful. I figured that now that I was a little older, I would do just fine. I mean, people talk all the time about how amazing snorkeling is; wouldn’t I love it just as much as them? I would come to find out that the answer is no, no I wouldn’t.

After months of planning and the hustle and bustle of graduation, the time finally came to get all packed up and get on a plane. Three planes actually; the trip took about eight hours of flying altogether. We arrived in St. Thomas on a beautiful June day, surrounded by water and cruise ships and native islanders. Our first couple of days on St. Thomas were very enjoyable; but the most memorable parts of the trip came after a ferry ride over to the smaller and more secluded island of St. John.

In St. John we rented a small cottage on a hillside. It was called Mountain Haven, a little place my mom had found online at VacationRentalsByOwner. It was absolutely gorgeous; very small, but we didn’t need much room. It was owned by a couple of very interesting people indeed. Thom (pronounced “Tom”) and Jackie were the owners, two Americans who had divorced their first spouses and moved here together to “get away.” They lived in another cottage down the street, made a living keeping up rental houses, and hadn’t been to a doctor in years because “it’s a scam.” Regardless, they were very helpful. They too told us about the wonders of snorkeling, and directed us to where we could rent our snorkeling gear.

We went to the local rental place the next day. It was at the bottom of the hill, a short drive from the cottage. It was a brightly colored and haphazardly built shack, with a sign on the front that read “Crabby’s.” There was also a sign on the door with their hours: 9ish to 5ish. As it turns out, 9ish is 10:45 and 5ish is 4:30. We drove around a lot on our first day waiting for them to open. But that’s good old Island Time for you.

When they finally did open, we went in to get four snorkeling masks and four sets of flippers. The flippers were in bins with labels like “Bigfoot” and “Cinderella.” The masks were kept in the back, where a rather crotchety man had to fumble around to get them for us, his attitude fitting the name of his place of employment. We got our gear, some basic instructions, and a couple recommendations for good snorkeling sites and we were off.

We went to a snorkeling spot that was supposed to be one of the best. It was called Waterlemon Cay and was a part of Leinster Bay. According to my mom’s Fodor’s Caribbean travel book, “Although just about every beach has nice snorkeling—Trunk Bay, Cinnamon Bay, and Waterlemon Cay at Leinster Bay get the most praise.” We decided to try it out. I got my mask fitted on and jammed my feet into my “Cinderella” sized flippers. I was ready to learn how to snorkel; I mean, how hard could it be? My dad proceeded to show me the proper snorkeling technique in shallow water; breathe through your mouth, let the flippers hold you up on the water. Once I felt pretty comfortable with this, I started to paddle farther out. At first it was fun; I could see everything underneath me, fish came and swam around me, and all of the equipment seemed to be working. There was a whole other world underneath me, a world of multicolored parrot fish, purple fan plants, and little schools of fish that ebbed and flowed around my fingers. Hey, I think I’m getting the hang of this!

After a few minutes though, my mask started getting cloudy. Drops of water started dripping in around my eyes. What if my mask is broken!? I stopped to tread water as I looked at my mask. My dad swam over too. Nothing was wrong with it; it was caught on my hair and water was getting in. I adjusted the mask placement and I tried tightening it, just like the crabby guy from Crabby’s had told me to do, but nothing seemed to work. I tried again and again, but water kept getting into my eyes. Not only that, but I started getting nervous. With my head covered in plastic and my face down in the water I felt like I couldn’t breathe, like the salty sea would suffocate me. I called it quits before the rest of my family that day. They stopped soon after. I would try it again, the sides of the mask were probably just wet and wouldn’t stay on well. I’d get the hang of it eventually.

 It only got worse from there. Every time we went snorkeling I had to stop multiple times because my mask was cloudy or I had salt water in my eyes. I would get so anxious that I would start crying while I was in the water, which really didn’t help the water dripping into my mask situation. Not only was I uncomfortable and freaking out, but I was getting frustrated. Isn’t this supposed to be fun? Why don’t I like this as much as people said I would?

My parents didn’t get my dislike of snorkeling at all. I explained it to them as well as I could: As they knew all too well, I’ve had reactive airway disease ever since I was little. It’s similar to asthma; it causes me to wheeze and have tightness in my chest when I’m around certain triggers like dust. I figured that since I’ve struggled to breathe before, I’m just scared that my mask will malfunction and I won’t be able to breathe.

“It’s that fear of not being able to breathe thing,” I said to them. “I just feel like if anything goes wrong, I’ll drown or something!”

“I know, Lil. You’ve been quite a trooper just trying this with us,” my dad responded. I thought that was promising; maybe it meant no more snorkeling! But alas, it did not.

My parents acted like they understood, but didn’t do anything about it. Every day they wanted to go snorkeling. So we did. I tried to go, each time with a ridiculous attack of nervousness and tears and having to stop early. Eventually I just started walking along the beach by myself while the rest of my family went out in the water.

I confronted my parents again about halfway through the trip. This vacation was allegedly my gift, why did we have to spend a good portion of it doing something that I hated?

“I just sit there and do nothing while you’re out in the water. Why can’t we do something that we all actually enjoy?” I asked.

“This is probably our last chance to go snorkeling in a place like this, so we’re going to do it. If you come to an island, you snorkel. It’s what you do,” was their reply. I allowed that to sink in; they were snorkeling no matter what and I was going to have to deal with it.

The last day of the trip, I didn’t even try snorkeling. I told my family to go in the water without me, which they did a little more readily than I was hoping. Still, I made up my mind to somehow enjoy myself. I walked carefully along the rocky beach we had come to; rocky beaches are better for snorkeling, another reason to avoid it. I made my way to a large red-orange rock.

I climbed up the rough side of the rock and looked out over the sea. We were in a small inlet, a place that travel books and locals raved about. It was called Haulover Bay, a place right off the highway but hidden by trees. According to the Frommer’s travel book, “The snorkeling is dramatic, with ledges, walls, nooks, and sandy areas set close together. At this spot, only about 180m (591 ft.) of land separates the Atlantic Ocean from the Caribbean Sea.” I looked over the water stretching out in front of me, clear blue-green that got darker as it got deeper. Impeccably clear, and teeming with life. Spiky purple sea urchins crowded the water around me. I had to be careful not to step on them. As I looked closer, I saw purple fans, salt water plants, little snails and fish. I could have seen a lot of these things while snorkeling underwater, but not with the same tranquility and clarity as I did above the surface. All of them lived quietly around me as the ocean water swelled in and out with each wave. If I sat just so I could let the water swirl up over my feet without disturbing the sea life around me. It was breathtaking.

The sunlight poured over the water and illuminated the world underneath. I pulled off my T-shirt and let its warmth soak into my skin, basking in the glow of the scene around me. The calming sound of the water put me at ease, the smell of the sea reminded me of the exotic location, and the beauty of it all made me realize how lucky I was. If I had my face pressed into the water right now I would have missed all this; the sun, the sea swell, the calmness.

A scuttling sound to my right jolted me out of my calm. A palm sized crab had decided to share my rock. It was about the same color as the rocks around me; it could very well have been there the whole time. As soon as I looked at it, it scurried away. It hadn’t been scared of me before I moved. That more than anything else made me feel at one with that rocky beach.

 Soon after that my family came in from their final snorkeling adventure. “Did you have fun?” my mom asked.

I realized that I had enjoyed sitting on a rock alone far more than I had enjoyed suffering through snorkeling with them. “Yes, yes I did.” That was our last day on the beaches of St. John.

Even at the end of the trip, my parents and I hadn’t come to an agreement on the snorkeling subject. They were still hardcore advocates, and I hadn’t budged on my position either. But that experience did teach me something. I was able to have fun by myself; I didn’t have to do what everyone else wanted to do. The travel books weren’t right about me, I didn’t get lost in the beautiful escape of the undersea world, or whatever flowery description of snorkeling they gave about the “Best Snorkeling in St. John.” I sat on a quiet rock, and that was more fun for me, believe it or not. I’ll leave you with a cliché: beauty is in the eye of the beholder. And sometimes you only find that beauty if you choose to behold it instead of going snorkeling.