Imagine two divers, each of us with a deep love for the sea and its creatures, and both armed with underwater cameras. Behold the pictures: soft corals, colourful beauties. Soft corals like clear water, and we knew we’d find colonies down there at 30 meters or deeper. Airport Reef, Desroches. At these depths, your primary concern is not the reserve of air in your tank, but the saturation of nitrogen in your blood.
The time the dive tables allow to stay below 30 meters is measured in mere minutes, if you want to avoid the need to follow a scheme of decompression stops when ascending to the surface.
Just a few minutes, with all these beautiful soft corals around us?! No. So our dive computers were beeping, urging us towards shallower depths, in order to avoid decompression stops when ascending. Usually you follow that digitised advice. But not this time. We just didn’t want to leave, period. We could not. Exchanging looks, we knew we were in agreement to push things to the limit this time. The decompression stops were a price worth to pay.
It was beautiful.
