There have been a few days in the past couple of months that I stayed on dry land, but not many. On a hot afternoon, it is impossible to resist the refreshing call of the sea. But even as the weather cools, I can’t help feeling that I’m missing something without seeing what’s going on beneath the waves. So I grab my mask and dive in.
It’s another world under the water, one where the roads, buildings and noise of the surface disappears. I am just a visitor here in this place where schools of fish glide past, and I never know what will next come my way.
The Mediterranean Sea is alive and moving with interesting creatures, but it is also a graveyard of human history, littered with treasures of our past. Always on the look out for ancient coins hiding in the rocks below, I spot something out of the ordinary and dive deep to retrieve it. It’s a broken piece of pottery, indistinguishable from anything else on one side but glazed and shiny on the other. It’s been in the sea for some time, but whether ten years or a thousand I can’t tell.
On another day I spot a shape far below shaped like an amphora, the storage jar used by the ancient Greeks to transport wine, olive oil, grain and other food items. It seems to have handles, but it is overgrown like any other sea rock. It is buried in the sand, I can’t hold my breath long enough to dig it out so I give up after a few tries and swim away wondering if I missed out on a vintage wine.
I’ve spent many days exploring underwater in many different seas, but there are always surprises waiting beneath the waves, from underwater caves to explore to strange looking creatures I never knew existed.
One such creature is the cuttlefish. I’ve certainly heard of them and even bought their bones before (pet stores sell them for birds to gnaw on), but I never realized what strange creatures they are until I met one face to face. It’s body fin seems to wave and it moves through the water like a helicopter. I followed one for a while until it decided to hide by burying itself in the sand so that only the protruding eyes were visible.
With long tentacles, but almost no body, the serpent star is another strange creature of the Mediterranean. Seeing the colorful striped arms crawling rapidly among the rocks, I thought I found some kind of octopus until I realized there was no body. It’s just a collection of long arms crawling around.
The Mediterranean is also home to endangered loggerhead sea turtles. They lay their eggs in nests on sandy beaches all over Greece and the hatchlings try to find their way to the sea. Most don’t make it. We were sad to see one such baby that fell just short of reaching the waves, but we were also lucky to see an adult calmly swimming by.
The most interesting creature of the sea, though, may be the octopus. These highly intelligent creatures are usually pretty shy and skilled in camouflaging themselves, but I got to know a few of them after becoming a regular visitor to a cove home to a number of them. At first they tried to avoid me and hide. One even shot out an ink cloud on a few occasions. But I would see the same octopods in the water every day and after some time they seemed more comfortable with my presence, curious even.
One day, I brought my underwater camera and dived under to watch the octopus. The Mediterranean Sea is so bouyant that I have to wrap one arm around a rock to keep myself from floating back to the surface and I hold the camera in my other hand. Seeing the camera, the curious octopus slowly made its way over to me. Very suddenly it wrapped its tentacles around the camera and ripped it out of my hand. In a flash, it swam off with the camera to its hideaway.
It took me some time to get it back and when I checked the photo roll later I had to laugh as the octopus spent five minutes alone with my camera doing nothing but taking selfies. After that we began bringing toys for them as they seemed curious to hold and play with new things.
Once, after getting in the water, one of them greeted me by latching on to my foot. I kicked the poor thing off as I was so surprised. Another one, this one not as comfortable around people, would hide in its cave when I approached. One day, though, I noticed it held something shiny in its tentacle. It dropped it near me and then returned to the cave. I picked up up the object, a gold cross that may have been lost from a land creature’s necklace and somehow ended up in the octopus den. I don’t know whether the octopus meant to give it to me as a gift or use it to ward me off from its cave, but either way I now have an interesting sea treasure.
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