My first experience skin diving was disappointing. At sixteen I went diving at Corona Del Mar, California with some high school buddies from Anaheim, California. I was familiar with swimming in the surf and riding the waves but had never used skin diving equipment. Denny Dickenson, (later a dignitary of Redlands University), dove to the bottom of a reef and brought up an abalone and told me to dive down and look under the reef. He said there were plenty of abs, and we should each be able to find our limits of five abs. I took a deep breath through my snorkel, dove through the cold water twenty feet to the bottom of the frightening sea weed and peered under the dark ledges of the reefs. There were abs clinging there, but my eyes had not yet learned to recognize them. I was frightened of this unfamiliar experience in nineteen forty six. When I surfaced, I threw my head back to breathe, but that was a mistake. The snorkel submerged behind my head, and I sucked in salt water that stung my lungs. I jerked off the mask, coughing and sputtering, and gasping for air.
My more experienced diving friends were having no trouble gathering their ab limits prying the abalone from the rocks with irons made from car springs. Denny tried to point out the abs to me under the reefs. I was unable to detect the camouflaged animals. The beautiful waving eel grass and the golden kelp was mysterious and forbidding to me. I felt in danger of being tangled in the vegetation or being attacked by sharks or other monsters.
Years later, I became a relaxed skin diver. During the winter the Pacific water is cold, so I wore long underwear and a sweater while swimming. Most of the time I dove alone and speared many fish that my mom cooked. My hunting instinct was strong, and the beauty of California reefs, plant life and fish was spectacular. I dove two or three times a week after school and on weekends usually between Laguna Beach and Newport Beach.
During three years of Navy life I spent a few months on Guam where I dove at Tumon Bay. I shared my fish with natives who had poor luck with their nets they cast in the shallow surf. The average fish they caught was less that six inches. I seldom speared a fish less than eighteen inches long, so the natives were very friendly to me. I shared my fish and they fed me from the food they had brought to the beach from home.
When I returned to California, my younger brother Ron was concerned about my diving alone, and he suggested I meet his friend Tom Berg. He and Tom had been linemen on a champion Anaheim High School football team. Tom made all C.I.F. and later was a star player for Santa Ana Junior College. He was respected as a small but very tough player. Tom was strong, very quick, and he enjoyed a battle on or off the field.
The first time we dove together, Tom was still in high school, and I was in my early twenties. Tom drove us in his pick-up truck to the Irvine family private beach home. The family owned thousands of acres in Orange County, and the green colored beach house was isolated and fenced. The gate had several padlocks hooked to a chain. Tom had previously sawed the chain in two and placed his own lock on the gate. He used his key to let us in, and we drove down to the beach and parked next to the green beach house. Nobody was home. We swam through the surf out to the reefs where the water was clear hoping to spear fish. Soon Tom said he was cold, and he swam one hundred yards back to the warm sand. Suddenly I heard the blast of a twelve gauge shotgun and the sound of pellets striking the water close to me. Tom fired several more shots, and I ducked to avoid the pellets. Between shots I peered at him through my faceplate and saw by his body expression, he was just having fun and meant no harm. I swam toward him mostly staying underwater with only the snorkel exposed. I was apprehensive but trying to act cool when I reached the dry sand. Tom had put the gun in his truck and was smiling happily at me. I smiled back and we rested on the warm sand.
On the drive home, Tom stopped at a trailer park for a shower to wash off the salt and sand. We ignored the private property sign and parked by the bath house. While we showered I got even with Tom for shooting at me by urinating on his feet. He responded by urinating on my feet. We had tested each other and no harm was done. We washed ourselves with soap and water in the shower. This posturing started a long friendship.
Eventually Tom lost part of his hearing in one ear from free diving too fast up to one hundred feet deep. When diving, it is necessary to relieve the pressure on our ear drums by forcing air into the eustachian tubes from inside. Some divers do this by holding their noses and mouths closed and blowing air inside their head. Others learn to use muscles near the inner ear to equalize the air pressure. If you have a cold, it is more difficult to clear the ears, but on a good day when the ears are equalizing as you dive, you can go as deep as your air supply will allow. The ability to clear the ears comes in handy when driving over mountains or flying in an airplane.
Recently I saw Tom eat some poison ivy, and he offered a leaf to me. He said eating the poison leaf would not hurt a person and said it would make one immune to poison ivy rashes. I ate the leaf and the next day my lips and the roof of my mouth had a rash. A month later, I was in poison ivy and didn't break out. So, I guess I was immune thanks to Tom.
Tom Berg was nineteen in 1955, and he owned a small outboard motor. We rented a fifteen foot open boat and headed out through the Newport Harbor breakwater. We wore bathing suits and carried face plates, swim fins, and spear guns in the boat. Two miles off Corona Del Mar the water was crystal clear, and we saw a forty pound halibut sunning himself on top of the water. We had never heard of a halibut sunning itself like that. I stretched the rubber tubing to load my spear gun and shot the spear through the fish. The string on the spear broke, and the large fish dove for the bottom. This was to be an unusually memorable day for us.
We headed out toward San Clemente Island almost out of sight of land, speared a sunning seven foot blue shark, and I laid it on the deck facing the back of the boat. Tom sat barefooted in the back seat steering the boat with the outboard motor handle. When we started going again, the front of the boat tilted up, and the jaw snapping shark slid head first under Tom's bare feet. He moved his feet just in time. He had me turn the shark around by grabbing its tail making it face toward the front. The shark was bleeding and there was an inch of pink water sloshing in the bottom of the boat.
About ten miles from shore we saw hundreds of giant black and white porpoises swimming toward Alaska. They were all over the place in small groups of three or four, and they stretched as far as we could see. We wanted to see them better, so Tom sped up in front of one and then slowed down to force the fifteen to twenty foot long mammal to swim under our boat. Sometimes Tom drove the boat the same speed and right next to a giant. I tried to reach out to touch one with an oar but couldn't quite reach him. Tom said they might be killer whales. I had never heard of killer whales, so I still figured they were giant porpoises and had no great fear of them. I saw a whale behind us coming up through the clear water. He was swimming fast and was about to crash into the propeller. I shouted for Tom to, "Hit it!" and Tom twisted the throttle causing the boat to jump forward out of the way.
After playing with the big animals half an hour, a large black boat fifty yards long with a deck twenty feet high spotted us, and the captain shouted, "Get away from the whales!"
Tom shouted back, "We're not hurting them."
The skipper ordered us through a megaphone, "Get the hell away from those whales before you get your boat tipped over! Those killer whales will tip you over, and if you don't get eaten, you will drown anyway."
We reluctantly left the area and went home. I know now that if the killer whales had wanted us for lunch, they would have had us. But they didn’t eat us because either they didn’t know we were good to eat or because we really were not good food for them. Anyway, we were not molested, thank God. But I feel it was a close call. I went to the library and scared myself to death reading horror tales about seal eating, polar bear eating, man eating killer whales. I read stories of a killer whale jumping out of the water onto a bridge to kill a man, others jumping on ice to knock polar bears into the water, then flipping into the water to eat the bears. I read of whales herding and slaughtering porpoises just for the fun of it like men did to the buffalo. I left the library with a fear in my bones.
Irwin North and Dominick Hoffman from Anaheim were skin diving pioneers of the forties. They invented tools like spear guns, ab irons and special face masks that were attached by hoses to your ears. The idea was to be able to equalize pressure in the ears. They were experts riding long surfboards. They were early skin divers even before Denny Dickenson or Tom Berg. I asked Dominick Hoffman at Anaheim High School about killer whales, and Dominick said he witnessed a killer whale attack a sea lion perched on a reef that stood fifteen feet above the water near Laguna Beach. The whale jumped out of the water and knocked the sea lion off the reef stranding himself there. The killer whale was able to flip back into the waves and join his partners to eat the sea lion.
As a student at Orange County General Hospital, I was often able to drive to the beach and spear a few fish before it got dark. One afternoon I swam out past the kelp bed at a private beach cove north of Laguna Beach. I wore a black wet suit, had my spear gun and an inner-tube with a gunny-sack stretched over it. On top, the gunny-sack was slit, so I could put fish or abalone inside. I swam out past the kelp because the water was a little cloudy, and visibility was only ten feet near the kelp. For some reason the cloudy water made me worry about whales. A quarter mile out from shore, I saw a single strand of kelp waving on the surface, and I expected it was attached on the bottom to an underwater reef.
I looped the kelp over the inner-tube to keep the tube from floating away. I cocked my spear and dove. The top of the reef was about fifteen feet down, and the reef sloped down another twenty feet to the sand. Here the water was clear, and every place I looked, I saw several kinds of rock fish. There were lots of golden orange Garibaldi who are protected by law. I saw a few opal-eye perch big enough for a meal. Twenty feet to my left resting close to a reef, I spotted a big six pound calico bass. He was so old he was turning yellow. I was out of breath, so I surfaced and rested. I hyperventilated and dove again, but this time the fish were gone. I heard the popping sounds fish make underwater to warn each other of danger. I immediately expected to be attacked by a shark or a sea lion. Something must have scared the fish into hiding in the rocks and crevices. As I swam up I spun to look all around me and saw nothing unusual. I rested with my head under water breathing through my snorkel. Then I saw a school of croaker fish swimming up toward me. I ducked down five feet and speared a twelve incher, put it in the sack and reloaded the spear gun. I was in no hurry so I rested looking down in the water.
Then I heard a sound that caused me to pray "God save me!". It was the whoosh sound of a killer whale blowing. I looked out to sea and saw that a killer whale was swimming up the coast. I foolishly pulled the tube sack with the bloody fish toward shore. When I reached the kelp bed, I climbed on the tube and pulled myself over the kelp toward the breakers. I felt safer when I was on top of the kelp because I couldn't see down into the water, and if a whale was down there, he might not see me. I was like an ostrich sticking his head in the sand to hide. I tried to stay low not to be seen, and I swam without splashing to be quiet. Then I remembered reading that killer whales are always in pods of at least three when hunting. I looked south and saw two more whales swimming just outside the kelp coming toward me. They were about two blocks away.
I pulled myself over the kelp faster, reached open water, and kicked hard to catch a wave. My muscles knotted and almost cramped in my legs.
I was grateful when a breaker carried me all the way in to shore. I turned around sitting on the wet sand looking at the ocean. Suddenly, all hell broke loose out there. The three killer whales had come to the kelp where I had been hiding. They must have smelled the blood from my fish. They used their tails to tear up and throw the kelp thirty feet in the air. They kept it up for about a minute before heading north. I was relieved to be alive, and I felt warm inside the wet suit. I had wet my pants.
When you hold your breath and dive deep, you can’t hold your breath long enough to get the air compressed in your lungs and in your blood. While swimming deep and breathing compressed air from an aqua lung, the compressed air goes throughout your blood stream and stays compressed because of the water pressure. As you surface, it is necessary to gradually rise to the surface giving the compressed air in your body time to expand slowly.
Tom Berg and I shared many adventures over many years, and most of the time we were skin diving. We both prefer skin diving to scuba diving. The bubbles of air and the noise made by the aqua lung seems to scare the fish. Also, diving too deep and then coming up too fast gives you the bends. We are lucky we never seriously injured ourselves by coming up too fast from deep water.
Tom Berg is a great person who taught me a lot of things about diving. Through the years we have visited remote areas of shoreline in Baja California, the north and south coasts of Mexico, and several islands of the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. Tom Berg taught me things like, how to wash my hands without splashing soap and water all over the place. He taught me to keep my car cleaned up and to try to be neat. He is a surveyor and careful to be exact in doing things. He is a bold and brave man and has remained one of my best friends.