Ausflug 35

Back to the Beaches of Bermuda

June-July 08

Day 5: Helmet Diving and Visiting the Crystal Cave on Bermuda

Somewhat exhausted by the non-stop activities of the previous day, we took some time out in the morning and read books in a sunny alcove beside a picture window facing the town of St. George. The reef dive we had signed up for started at 11:30 a.m., and the first leg of our trip was a short trip in a 30-foot dive boat out through the "cut" leading into St. George's harbor. The boat had racks for air tanks and looked like it could be used for SCUBA diving, but for our dive the rear of the boat was equipped with 7 big, red, metal helmets with thick glass plates in the front and sides.

Once outside the harbor entrance, our boat turned East for a mile or two until we anchored in a sandy area among some underwater coral heads maybe 20 feet in diameter and 7 feet high. The sandy bottom between the coral heads, where we were going to walk underwater, was 10 feet deep I was told, and since my disposable underwater cameras claimed to be waterproof down to 35 feet I hoped to get some decent pictures. That water might have been a bit deeper than advertised, however, because I had some problems equalizing my ears and one of the cameras had water in it when we went to have the pictures developed.

The diving helmets were really heavy so that they would stay on top of your head and shoulders even when filled with air. They also had air nozzles on top that were plugged into a central air compressor on the boat via long air hoses. Although the base of each helmet was open, the basic idea for this type of dive was that the pressurized air supplied by the ship's compressor would keep the water pushed down at the bottom of the helmet so that we could just walk around and look at things while breathing naturally. That sounded great in principle and for most people it worked just fine, but, as I was soon to find out, you could still fill the helmet with water by the simple expedient of falling over.

Since there were 25 of us, the Captain divided us into 4 groups of 7 or fewer. Monika, Lois, and I were in the second group, and when my turn came I dutifully climbed down the sea ladder at the rear of the boat and waited while my helmet was being lowered over my head. It was far, far heavier than I had expected--I later learned the helmets weighed 75-90 pounds--and the rungs of the ladder were far, far slipperier than I had expected, with the result that I lost my grip on the ladder and went plummeting down to the ocean floor. Fortunately the air hose was plenty long enough to reach down that far, but when I hit the bottom my knees buckled and I started to stagger over sideways, whereupon water rushed in from the bottom of the helmet while the air rushed out. If I had been been Archimedes I might have shouted "Eureka" or something more earthy about discovering the water-displacing-air principle, but since my face was by now in the water I couldn't say a word much less shout anything. Fortunately I quickly regained my balance, stood bolt upright, and just waited for the pressurized air to push the water back down out of the helmet so that I could start breathing again. It surely was nice to get that first breath of nice, clean air again, though. As the old saw goes, air is just like sex in that you never really notice it until you aren't getting any!


 

Fortunately I was the first one in the water in my diving group, so no one else was around to see this less-than-stellar performance. Each of the others in our dive group came down the ship's ladder and then our SCUBA-equipped guide took us on a short tour of one of the coral knobs near our boat; the distance we could walk was, of course, limited by the length of the air hose connecting us to the mother ship, so to speak. The coral knob we inspected "up close and personal" on our walk was an intricate, crowded little ecosystem of many different forms and colors of coral, some of which we had seen on our previous dive and some of which were new.

The coral knob also had its fish denizens, of course, and they were lured out of their nooks and crannies by old, stale pieces of bread that we were given to hand out. When we did so, we were immediately surrounded by a school of black and yellow striped fish eating the bread right off our fingers, plus a much larger thin-nosed silvery fish that cruised around picking up the crumbs. We of course took pictures of each other feeding the fish, but it was only when I had those pictures developed that I noticed Monika was still wearing her brilliant red "Charging Charlie" Northern Virginia Volksmarching club walking cap! On a hard-hat diver at the bottom of the ocean, it certainly did look incongruous but when I asked her about it later she said she had just forgotten to take it off and never even noticed having it on under water.


 

Our dive was over all too soon, but fortunately I had brought my goggles, snorkel, and Aqua-mits with me, so I donned that gear and went snorkeling while the last 2 groups made their underwater pilgrimages to the coral knoll. Looking down at them from above was eerily like the scene from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea where the crew of the Nautilus is out walking on the sea floor in their diving suits. Monika, Lois, and some of the kids joined me in swimming for a bit, but for the most part I had the surface of the ocean to myself.

There was, however, both a noticeable swell bouncing me up and down (rather pleasant), and a current that seemed to be trying to drift me inshore away from the boat (rather irritating). As a result, I actually had to work rather hard just to keep on station with the dive boat which was moored to a line attached to a couple of old car engine blocks down on the bottom. I also saw some other flotsam or jetsam down below, such as an old wooden boat ladder, which was heavily encrusted with new coral growth and thus well on its way to becoming a part of the ancient reef. I finally reboarded the boat shortly before the last group came back up, after which our boat slowly motored back to its berth right beside the cruise ship dock in St. George's harbor.

Curiously, the diving had been so much fun that I was energized rather than exhausted, so after a quick lunch back on board the Majesty we all set off, bus tokens in hand, to visit Crystal Cave. Crystal Cave is a true limestone cavern, complete with stalactites and stalagmites, that is located just off the main road between St. George and Hamilton, the capital and main city on Bermuda. There is, fortunately, a bus stop at the junction of the main road and the side road leading to the caves, and we disembarked from the bus there. A friendly local person guided us right to the entrance of the cave area, and even friendlier local folks took our money for the 25 minute guided tour of the cave.

We descended the 85 steps into the main (and only) cavern and saw beautiful stalactites and stalagmites as we got to the bottom. On our way down the stairs we also felt water dropping on us a few times, which made it clear that this was a living cave. However, our guide explained that the formations only grew about an inch per century, so "alive" is really in a geological time frame rather than on a human time frame.

Down at the bottom we found a walkway supported on pontoons floating on a clear pond of water tinted a bit emerald green. Our guide explained that the pond was salt water flowing in and out via subterranean passages to the nearby lagoon. Those interconnections meant that the pond also experienced high and low tides daily, and if I heard our guide correctly the tides were 2-3 feet, although it was hard to see how the pontoon walkway could rise or fall that much and still allow people to walk upright on it.

The water was absolutely transparent as the cave is totally dark except when they turn the lighting system on for the cave tours, and thus nothing grows. Similarly, there were no fish as there was nothing to support a food chain and no light for them to see once they were in the cave. But the crystal clear water allowed us to see the underwater formations quite clearly. The water's surface had minor ripples both due to the drips from the ceiling and the jostling of people rocking the pontoon walkway, so the ultimate effect was like looking at the bottom through a layer of that old fashioned, ripple-surfaced glass you sometimes see in Colonial era windows. A beautiful effect, really.

When we arrived at the end of the pontoon walkway, our guide turned off the lights for a couple of minutes so that we could take pictures of the formations in the dark. That depended on using our camera flashes, of course, and so for a couple of minutes we were in total darkness with different formations of the cavern suddenly lit up as if by bolts of lightning. I found that if a formation was within the range of my flash and the camera could focus in the dark I could get what looked like a decent picture, but not otherwise. Still, it was fun to try.

I would not have minded seeing the other cave in the same complex, called Fantasy Cave, but that would have required buying another entrance ticket. Besides, we wanted to continue on to Hamilton to see things there, so we walked back up to the main road and waited at a bus stop with a pink pipe in the ground that signified the buses stopping there all ran toward Hamilton. Similar to ancient Rome, all bus routes on Bermuda (if not all roads) lead to Hamilton and the main bus station there. The bus lines leading away from Hamilton, by the way, are marked by pipes painted a royal blue color, so despite the busses running on the "wrong" side of the road if you pay attention to the color of those pipes you should know which way your bus is headed.

Right next to the bus station in Hamilton was City Hall, complete with an art gallery. Unfortunately by this time it was after 5 p.m. and the art gallery was closed, but we still made use of the nice public bathrooms before wandering around the city. Lois later remarked that every bathroom she used in Bermuda was sparkling clean, and that was also true for Monika and me. It may not be that big a deal for many folks, but for us clean bathrooms are at least one bellweather indicator for the level of Western civilization that characterizes a particular country, and not even all the countries in Western Europe score that high on clean bathrooms!

Another bellweather of civilization is how well parents are training their children, and on that bus ride to Hamilton we observed two soccer coaches and what looked like a mixed gender "peewee" soccer team returning home from a game. Those gentlemen were clearly training the boys to respect old folks and old women in particular, as several times during the trip the coaches gently but firmly directed one or the other boy to give up his seat for an older woman. I haven't seen that happen in the U.S. for at least several decades, and the training in Bermuda was effective as I later saw even teenagers give up their seats to older, more infirm folks, so Bermuda is more civilized than the U.S. in that regard.

From City Hall we walked around back to Victoria Park (many children playing on carefully manicured lawns) and then on to the Anglican Cathedral, which turned out to be a rather grand, stately old church with a beautiful set of stained glass windows. The cathedral was clearly built in the High Gothic architectural style, with the soaring arches and high vaulted ceilings of that style. The cathedral was in a basic cross configuration with the altar at the head of the nave and the pulpit just off to one side of the main aisle. All in all, it was a beautiful church and much larger than we had expected.


 


 


 

From the cathedral we walked past the Sessions House where Bermuda's parliament meets, which is a very pretty white-with-brown-trim building situated on a hill overlooking Hamilton's harbor. The architecture of the Sessions Houses reminded me of Renaissance Italy; it featured a colonnade with graceful arches out front and a clock tower on the side. We were too late to walk in for a closer look, so we continued downhill to Front Street where Monika and Lois found some nice ankle-length skirts for $12 at Davison's going-out-of-business sale. Lois chose a brilliant red dress that seemed vaguely Mexican to me, and Monika chose a bright yellow dress for parties together with a rather severe black dress for more formal occasions. Befitting my more plebian tastes, I settled on a $6.95 T-shirt with a pretty island sunset on it.

By this time we were all getting rather tired, so we stopped off at the ferry terminal to see if we could catch a ferry back to St. George, but no luck. So we curled back uphill to the bus station and climbed aboard the next bus heading in the direction of St. George. Once back on board ship we had dinner, but then Lois and Monika noticed some kind of drum and bugle corps playing in the town square beside the dock, so we all went ashore once again to investigate.

The music and marching demonstration turned out to be a once a month session of the Bermuda Pipe Band and the Bermuda Regiment Band. The former had a bunch of bagpipes and the latter a bunch of horns and drums, and together they made a lot of curious-sounding music. I found it particularly odd to hear the German folk song "Muss i denn" played by bagpipes and bugles on a basically British island. As Martin might have phrased it, that music was a regular "brawl of cultures"!

The music was combined with precision marching and close-order drill that would have put many a drum and bugle corps to shame. We listened and watched until they finally gave up and disbanded for the night and then we returned to the ship. It was a surprising and very pleasant way to end our day, but by the time we got back to our cabin I was completely exhausted and simply collapsed into my bunk.

Copyright 2008 by Robert W. Holt and Elsbeth Monika Holt
Prolog
Day1

Leaving Baltimore

Day2

Sailing to Bermuda

Day3

Docking and Swimming

Day4

Snorkeling

Day5

Helmet Diving & Crystal Cave

Day6

St. George and Leaving Port

Day7

Sailing Home

Epilog

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