The Hour Before the Boats

In Belize City the fishermen are already unloading when I reach the dock, and the water is still the colour of the sky before sunrise. I load tanks in the dark, twelve of them, and check every valve twice. A valve I forget to open is a conversation I never want to have at eighteen metres, in sign language, with a stranger.

By seven the guests arrive with towels and questions and too much sunscreen. I give the briefing I have given a thousand times: nothing gets touched, nothing gets stood on, stay behind me, keep your buddy where you can see him. People nod. People always nod. Half of them forget the whole speech the second their face goes under.

First light on the reef

The reef at six is a different place from the reef at ten. Parrotfish are still half asleep in the crevices. A green moray leans out of its hole like someone checking the weather. The grunts hang in a wall and then, for no reason I have ever been able to learn, all turn at once. I stopped trying to explain that to guests; it never survives translation.

The reef is loudest in the hour before anyone comes to listen to it.

Then the boats come. Last month a man held a branch of staghorn coral in his bare hand for a photograph, and when I took his wrist he looked genuinely hurt, as though I had spoiled a holiday. That branch took years to grow. He took it in a second and a half. I still think about it on the ride home.

By two the sun has done its work on the back of my neck, no matter how much zinc I put there. I keep a bottle of aloe in the console next to a spare mask strap and a screwdriver. The guests go back to their hotels; I rinse the gear, hang the wetsuits, write the log. The quiet after a good day is the best part of this job.

The same hundred metres

Guides who burn out do it by chasing new sites. I take almost everyone to the same stretch north of the cut, because I know it the way I know my own kitchen. I know which coral head holds the cleaner shrimp, which ledge the nurse sharks use, where the current turns. Familiarity is not boredom. It is how you notice that something has changed.

I have swum the same hundred metres more times than I can count, and it has never once been the same.

I am not a talker. Underwater that is an advantage; above it, people sometimes read it as rudeness. But I would rather say ten useful things on a boat than a hundred forgettable ones. The sea does not require conversation. It requires that you pay attention and keep your hands to yourself. Most of my job is teaching that.