She beamed. With the excitement of a student just let out for summer vacation, she donned her mask and snorkel, slid into her fins, and splashed backward into the water. She kicked smoothly past the stern, then performed a quick lap around our dive site. She kept to the surface, breathing in and out of her bright yellow snorkel.
Just a few minutes after jumping in, she swam over to the boat and set her fins on the swim platform. Her eyes were massive, and a smile stretched from ear to ear as she removed her mask.
“That’s amazing!” she gasped as I offered a hand, helping her up out of the water.
“Pretty cool, huh?” Ange said.
Scarlett wiped the water from her brow, then motioned over her shoulder.
“I didn’t know there was anything like that in the Keys. How long has it been down there?”
She was referring to Christ of the Abyss, a nine-foot-tall bronze statue of Jesus with his hands raised and his head tilted back to look toward the surface.
“Since 1965,” Ange said. “It was cast from the same mold as two other identical statues. One’s submerged off the coast of Grenada and the other’s underwater in… shoot, Logan, you remember?”
“Italy. Just east of Genoa in the Riviera, I believe.”
“Who pays for something like that anyway?” Scarlett asked.
I grinned and pointed at her fins.
“He did.” She looked down, then back at me, confused. “Cressi,” I explained, pointing at the brand name printed in bold white letters across the fins. “Egidio Cressi, who founded the company with his brother, donated the statue to the Underwater Society of America. So, we have the innovative Italian to thank for both the statue and our ability to easily reach it.”
I handed her a towel, and after patting down her hair, she grabbed a dry erase board and marker from a locker beside the helm. Ange and I sat in the cockpit under the shade of the Bimini top with Scarlett across from us.
“All right,” she said after a dramatic clearing of her throat. “Today we will be freediving Christ of the Abyss. We’re looking at twenty-five feet to the bottom with visibility of over sixty feet.”
She drew up a quick sketch on the whiteboard, showing our boat, the surface of the water, and the statue. Dotted lines and numbers indicated various depths and corresponding pressure. Since we couldn’t go any deeper than the twenty-five feet, we’d be less than two atmospheric pressures throughout the dive.
“The water temperature on the surface is eighty-three degrees,” she continued, “and with the shifting currents and natural slight thermocline, it’s expected to be a few degrees colder at depth. Still, no wetsuit required. All three of us are certified, and we will have at least two of us down in the water at all times. We each have our dive knives and I’ll have a cute little can of Spare Air attached to my waist beside the weights. Any questions?”
“Not bad,” I said with a nod. “But you forgot about intervals.”
“Right,” she exclaimed. She grabbed a calculator, quickly punched in a few numbers, then said, “We’ll stick with two-minute surface intervals at least.”
The two general rules for freediving surface intervals are your dive time multiplied by two, or your depth in meters divided by five. Whichever is greater is generally the best one to choose.
With Scarlett having done a great job giving the dive brief and with all of us eager to get wet, we downed water and prepared our gear. Since Atticus didn’t require a leash to stay with the boat, I merely filled his water bowl and petted him behind the ears. We tightened our weight belts, then spat into our masks and rinsed them out to prevent them from fogging up.
Once ready, Ange and Scarlett jumped into the water. I waited a moment, making sure they were all good. When I got a thumbs-up from each of them, I dropped back into the warm tropical water, relishing the experience as the crystalline paradise swallowed me whole.
Peering downward, I grinned as I took in the sight of the statue and surrounding coral. Scarlett hadn’t been kidding about the viz. It was like jumping into a swimming pool, but one filled with assorted colorful life in all directions.
I watched as Scarlett went first. With great technique, she duck-dived straight down, then finned with big, smooth cycles. Ange and I followed right behind her, watching as she wrapped around the statue, then surfaced calmly. It amazed me just how much she’d improved since our first time taking her out on the water almost a year earlier.
I admired the intricate detail of the statue, which was caked in a layer of pewter-gray grime with patches of yellowish-green growth. The well-sculpted likeness of Jesus rested on a square three-tiered concrete base that I’d read weighed nearly ten tons.
We spent half an hour admiring the sight and surrounding marine life, snapping pictures and doing flips.
There are moments when all is right in the world. When you soak it all in, knowing that these are the times you will look back on with beaming satisfaction and a healthy dose of nostalgia. My dad always used to tell me to relish those moments with everything you have. That they, along with everything else, are fleeting, like the ever-shifting tides, or the weather and its broad spectrum of moods.
By the time we were ready to move on, three other boats had arrived and tied off to other mooring buoys around the site. A handful of people swam around us. I was happy to see others enjoying the islands’ most photographed underwater attraction, but the selfish part of me didn’t want the tranquility and privacy to end.
With Ange watching us from up
