Stories From Scuba Diving Off the Coast of Pensacola

“Just so you know, there’s a shark below us,” I say, spitting out salt water as I pull my regulator from my mouth. My father pauses in the boat above me and looks down to where I tread water in the Pensacola Bay. We have ventured out on this summer day in 2024 on his 24-foot Trophy Pro motorboat, searching for sunken barges. My father and I have been diving together for 10 years. 

My dad, David Hiers, who grew up diving in the fresh waters of Massachusetts and sometimes beneath the ice in winter, loves what lives underneath the surface. 

Once, when my parents were dating, my father leaped from a catamaran under sail off Pensacola Beach with a bucket to capture a seahorse and show it to my mother, Deborah Davidson. He released the small, magical creature back in the same spot, and my mother started to fall in love with him. 

Back in the bay, I dip my face into the water and stare into the sun-streaked depths. We’re in roughly 40 feet of warm ocean, and the visibility from the surface gives me enough room to glimpse a creature’s gray body again as it twitches through the water column below. 

Sharp fins, sharp tail. I have a good enough view to think, “shark.” I drift in the current while my father rolls backward off the boat—one hand over his mask and the other on his tank. A cloud of bubbles erupts upon his impact, and I relax. Now there are two of us, and I’m not just prey. 

I trust my father, and I trust the ocean because of him. He taught me to breathe through fear, even with the literal weight of the world—the atmospheres of water pressure felt when diving—on my shoulders. As a kid, I never wanted to learn to scuba dive—something I could never admit to him. 

A Salty Instructor

I earned my National Association of Underwater Instructors (NAUI) open water certification more than a decade ago at age 18 with my godfather, John “JK” Kaufman, a wiry Navy dive instructor with salt and sun baked into his skin. He has the same smile printed on his face in all our photos of him and my godmother, Dorothy Kaufman. He and Dorothy fold into the fabric of my childhood. I can still hear JK’s laugh when I think of him. His smile, which is framed by a chevron mustache, bald head, aviator sunglasses and floral shirt that looks like it could sing “Margaritaville.” 

JK taught me that every impulse we have on land is wrong in the water. Don’t touch anything. Don’t hold on to a rock to steady yourself. Don’t use your hands to swim. Never, ever rush to the surface for air. Crying underwater fogs your mask. Trust your partner and use hand signals to communicate whether you’re OK, cold or low on air. He cautioned that it was up to me to check my gear and monitor my oxygen levels. My head spun from processing all the information.

“I’ll always be there too,” Dad assured. I learned to scuba dive so my father could share with me a world he loves to explore. He brought me into the waters off Florida’s Gulf Coast and cultivated my curiosity in a place where I could simply observe the things I admired. I learned the hand signals for turtle and lionfish, octopus and stingray, little fish and lobster. I swallowed my fear and kept an eye on my partner, always remembering to check what was behind me. 

The Weird Below

Under the boat, Dad and I find the white anchor line and give each other the universal signal for OK—my thumb and pointer finger forming a circle while extending my other three fingers. We press the release valves on our buoyancy vests and descend, the bright rope guiding our journey to the 40-foot bottom. We clear our ears by pinching our noses and blowing. My right ear canal squeaks as a stream of air equalizes with the water pressure. 

I swivel my head back and forth, searching for the creature. A flash, and there it is again. 

Not a shark. A remora—a gray, flatheaded fish about 3 feet long with a saw-toothed suction cup on top of its head. They attach to sharks in order to feast on whatever the predator finds for dinner. I push away the thoughts of how this remora lost its host. 

The sharksucker flinches when I turn to look at it. The fish swims about 8 feet away from us, eyeballing my father and me as if sizing us up. Would I be a good substitute ride-along? I shake my head at the idea. The fish flits closer. 

I tap my father’s shoulder and point to the remora. Dad nods, unbothered, and turns back toward the ocean floor as the sandy bottom rises to greet us. We slow our descent. I hear Dad’s buoyancy vest inflate like an inhalation, his hand on the power inflator button, and I do the same. I feel my vest tighten around my torso, and I drift about 2 feet above the ground. 

The remora sidles over to me. I get a good look at its suction head, appearing like a layering of gills or a handful of vents. I can too easily imagine it shllllping to my thigh. I wave a hand at the fish, which remains unfazed. I do not want to be clung to by this weirdo. 

Dad is many feet ahead of me in the murky water, following the compass of his dive watch that he wears on his left arm. Using his right hand, he unravels a towline attached to the anchor in case we lose our way. We’re searching for the USS Massachusetts, a 10-ton battleship that fought in the Spanish-American War. “The Mass” was scuttled in the bay in 1921, and is one of the dozen underwater archaeological sites designated a preserve by the state of Florida. 

I flip my fins and start paddling after him, the remora fretfully in tow.

An Eye In The Deep

On one of my first dives while certifying as a teenager about a decade ago, I took a moon jellyfish to the face. This was back when my tank felt too big on my back, making me feel like a turtle that hadn’t grown into its shell. I was with Dad and JK.

After rolling overboard into the bay, I found myself unable to lift my head past the air valve on the top of the tank strapped to my back. The metal connection for my regulator tapped me in the back of the head like a warning. I circled my hands in the water like I was cranking knobs to rotate my body, trying to find JK and my father. 

Suddenly, a moon jelly collided with my face, enveloping itself across my mask and forehead. Everything I saw was through the gummy embrace of a jellyfish. If anyone had been around to look, they would have seen a mold of my profile on the jelly’s topside. I spun my hands to rotate into a backflip and peeled the jelly off. Drifting off into the current, the creature joined the school of moon jellies I had unwittingly dropped into. I was left confused and disoriented, with burning lines across the exposed skin on my neck and forehead. Of all the jellies I could name, moon jelly stings are the mildest. Instead of a garden of tentacles hanging beneath them, the edges of their dinner-plate-shaped heads are lined with small tentacles that leave more of a rash than a welt. 

I swam to catch up with JK and Dad, who were about 20 feet away investigating the wreckage of one of the Three Coal Barges off Pensacola, a site on the Florida Panhandle Shipwreck Trail. I kept my gloved hands in front of me, trying to hold onto the water to keep my balance, a technique akin to staring at a spot on the floor while standing on one foot. Only underwater, the sea pushes in on you from every direction.

I swam up to a porthole on the side of the barge. Blue, pink and brown corals and plants grew around the edges. As I focused into the darkness inside the barge, I noticed a large brown eye the size of my fist staring back.

Looking through the porthole, the eye evaluated me on a criteria I could never know. I felt both profoundly connected to and disassociated from the creature in front of me. My thoughts raced—was this akin to coming across a Florida panther or a black bear on a trail? Was it important to hold the gaze of this single eye or look away in deference? Should I look big, or shrink and not be a threat?

The eye belonged to a goliath grouper—a creature that can weigh up to 800 pounds—about the weight of a touring Harley-Davidson motorcycle. Grouper mouths open with underbite frowns so severe they look like disapproving history professors emerging from their dusty archives. 

The grouper’s eye blinked away from my gaze. With a quick flick of its pectoral fins, it continued through the belly of the barge. 

JK floated up next to me. His job was to watch me tour this wreck and evaluate how I handled myself. He glanced at the porthole just as the grouper passed by, its brown spiny dorsal fin flaring like the back of a sea monster writhing through the wreck. I saw the back of JK’s neck turn pale.

“No, it’s OK, it’s a fish,” I tried telling him, humming the words in my throat. I turned my hand on its side and waved it like it was swimming, like a flag flapping in the wind. The signal for goliath grouper—I didn’t know how to sign. 

Buddy Breathing

Back in Pensacola Bay, Dad’s eyes bulge underneath his mask. The remora stalking us has disappeared somewhere in the haze. Also missing is my father’s diving regulator, normally affixed to his mouth supplying oxygen. Dad hadn’t taken a breath to hold. I rip my regulator from my mouth and hand it to him. 

Dad shoves the rubber mouthpiece between his lips, takes a breath and begins what’s known as buddy breathing. I can see streams of bubbles at the corners of his lips where water pushes through.

Despite a decade of diving experience, I still feel claustrophobic.
—CD Davidson-Hiers

Now I’m holding my breath underwater, compressed air in my lungs. We are 30 feet below the surface and unsure how from our boat. Were we in a swimming pool and not an ocean, we could push off the bottom and sprint for the sun above, break through the surface and fill our lungs with oxygen. Here with compressed air, if we do that, we risk nitrogen forming bubbles in our bloodstream. Painful, possibly fatal. 

I reach for the right side of my vest and search for the rubber keeper holding a second regulator in place, coming up short. This is the octopus regulator, the fail-safe to buddy breathing. 

I have seconds to find my spare regulator. Dad locates it, rips it from its holder and hands back my regulator from his mouth. We are now both breathing from my tank. We take a moment to inhale and to exhale. We look at each other—his eyes blue, mine brown. We inhale, and we exhale together. I reach behind him and follow the hose from his tank to where his main regulator floats behind him. After another lung-filling breath from my tank, he takes his regulator back from me. 

This was an accident. We had been swimming in open water, unable to find the wreck marked on our map with just Dad’s guideline to bring us home to the anchor. Our plan was to surface and reorient toward the shipwreck. Dad took his regulator from his mouth to inflate a surface marker buoy. The bright red buoy, fueled by the air from my father’s tank, shot to the surface to let boaters know divers were down below. 

The tail of the buoy had grabbed my father’s regulator as it flew upward, knocking it behind him out of reach. I saw the second before Dad lost his regulator, the second before he turned to me, eyes wide and desperate. 

Despite a decade of experience diving, I still feel claustrophobic the first moments I descend. I calm my nerves by reciting the familiar steps to cooking eggplant Parmesan until the feeling passes. 

Dad recovers his regulator. Now breathing from his own tank, I follow him as he swims around the wreck. 

Salt eggplant. Pat dry. 

We finally find the USS Massachusetts and drift about the battleship, pointing out sea urchins and a school of fish. I don’t know yet about Dad, but my hands may be shaking—the scene from minutes ago keeps replaying in my head. I cross my arms over my chest as we swim.  

The remora is back, now with a couple friends. They flit about and turn to look at us from either eye. I wonder if they feel anxious without a host to pilot them through the ocean. Are they without purpose? I have nothing to offer them. 

I signal to Dad, pointing to the surface: I’m ready to go. He nods, and we leave the Massachusetts to find the anchor. The suckerfish seem to heckle at my fins. I blow bubbles from my regulator at them. If any of their thumbprint foreheads come close to sticking to me, I’m going to fight a fish. 

The remoras swim away as we ascend the anchor line. Dad and I sway in the current during a three-minute safety stop, gripping the anchor line. My hands steady as I take in how sunlight beats down on my father’s shoulders and reflects off his yellow O2 tank. He looks at me with a gaze that asks if I’m ready to leave this dive behind. Trust goes both ways, and I realize I’ve become someone he can rely on.

As a scared teenager, I couldn’t have known how special diving would become for me or how it would shape my love for Florida’s waters, a place without souvenirs. Diving with my father has given me calm and confidence, traits that he taught me can only exist alongside fear. Every time I enter the depths, I return home as someone just slightly new.

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