Blue Hole -- by Kai

Sploosh!

I watched as the anchor descended into the crystal clear depths.
Throwing my tank on as quickly as possible, I jumped in.

The water was amazing and warm and clear and there must have been over one hundred feet of visibility.
Schools of small, colored fish came to greet me as I kicked down the anchor line.

My parents and I swam along the bottom with our other dive companions.
Two people from another boat joined us that day, we were looking for a spot known as the 'Blue Hole".

Gaston, our friend that lives on this atoll, had described it as a bottomless cave, about seventy feet down.
No one had the exact GPS co-ordinates for the spot, so Gaston had gone out in his fishing boat earlier to drop a float and mark where it was.

We had anchored our dinghies near the float but now we had to swim around and look for the actual "cave".

We got to the edge of the drop-off and we all stopped and stared into the darkness below us.
The reef slope stretched all the way to the abyssal plain.

We began our descent, jumping off the edge and free falling (it's diving but it feels like falling sometimes),
down, down, down,
until the light started to fade.

We landed on a ledge we had been aiming for and checking my dive computer I saw that we were at one hundred and ten feet.

Below us was only darkness.

Everyone looked around, wondering where the cave was but of course, no one can talk underwater so we all made hand signals and shrugged our shoulders and just hung out enjoying how weird and spooky it all was.

Looking into the darkness below me, It felt like if I let go of the slope, I would fall from reality itself.

I saw something shimmer in the distance and when I looked closer, I saw it was another another slope in front of us-
the other side of this canyon.

It dawned on me, then, that the "Blue Hole", wasn't a cave in the reef, it was a reef itself, formed in a giant circle...and the bottom just dropped away somewhere into oblivion.

We made a really slow ascent.

On the way up, I kept finding new creatures in the coral around me. The coolest was a bright yellow Nudibranch, with bright blue spots that were outlined in hot pink and it had big pink and orange tentacles.

The water got warmer and warmer as we made our way into the brighter, shallower water.

When we got to the lip of the canyon we were in, we saw two giant Bump Head wrasse cruise by.

There were tons of fish that I had not seen before,
two new species of Lion Fish and a really bizarre-looking scrolled File Fish.

My book says they are supposed to be like, 3 inches long but this one was more like 2 feet!

We swam back to the dinghies and did our decompression stop.
Everyone was really relaxed and happy, hanging onto the anchor chain and looking around at all of the incredible fish and staring down at the big black chasm beside us.

It's fun to think that we were perched on what once was the edge of an ancient volcano.

I wanted to see so much more down there and was bummed our adventure into the Blue Hole was over.

That's only bad thing about scuba diving -eventually I run out of air!