The Little Mermaid

I have for a long time had my suspicions that my mom is secretly a mermaid. The evidence is fairly startling really – she practically grew up in the ocean, she once body surfed a wave with a dolphin and she still looks flippen awesome in a costume. The piece de résistance, however, that pretty much brings my suspicion home, is that we have an album at home of pictures of when my mom was sixteen. In this album are pictures taken by documentary makers of my mom as a mermaid. Trues bob. This award winning couple (who were family friends) were doing a documentary on the relationship between man and the ocean and what better a symbol than a mermaid? So my gorgeous sixteen year old mom was given a practice tail which she learned to swim in at home and then they went up to St Lucia to film the documentary – this time with an epic dark blue tail with a silver shimmer. The pictures are amazing and I spent many an hour in my childhood staring in wonder at my mermaid mom.

It was this mythological link to the ocean which resulted in my list of top three movies of all time (at the age of ten) being ‘Splash’, ‘Splash 2’ and ‘The Little Mermaid’. I also think my first love was with Eric from ‘The Little Mermaid’. My obsession with the sea was huge and I have always been a pretty fearless sea creature. Apparently from the moment I could walk I would run down to the water which made family trips to the coast not entirely relaxing. I attribute most of my freckles to endless hours of wave riding when the thought of leaving the water to get kak sunblock in my eyes was just too hideous. I would also drag my mom’s (now moth eaten) practice mermaid tail down from the attic before a beach holiday and could be found half drowning myself in the paddling pool looking much like an epileptic earthworm trying desperately to perfect a mermaid swim so that I could graduate from the paddling pool to the real ocean. I never made it.  Later on when I got bigger and braver you would find me at backline with a pair of fins trying to show off for the surfers.

It has been with growing alarm that the older I get the less I feel like having sand in my crack and the after effects of debilitating sunstroke. The once fearless sea creature seems to have turned into someone who looks like a Vaalie on the beach. I now can only be in the sun for an hour at a time, I abhor sun tanning because I think it’s vain and a complete waste of time and worst of all I’m finding that sometimes the sea looks just a little bit too rough or a little bit too cold for my liking. I like to think that it’s my womanly self preservation instincts kicking in. Instead of exploring all the hidden rocky crevices of our beautiful South African coastline with snorkels and flippers now when I look under the water with a pair of goggles the ‘Jaws’ theme tune immediately starts playing somewhere in my head. This shift in attitude has perplexed both me and my family because it really is unusual.

When I was invited last week on a snorkelling trip out to an island off the coast I jumped at the opportunity. Maybe I would rekindle my long lost romance with the sea and prove to myself that I too am a mermaid like my mom. As Sarah and Justin (who invited me) were going to be scuba diving I recruited a new friend, Linda, to join me in the snorkelling. We were up bright and early and were all loaded onto the boat for our 40 minute boat ride out to the islands around which we would then snorkel. Let me state now for the record that I take back my initial aim of doing a diving course while I’m here. Between the unflattering wetsuits and equipment that looks like you have to have won a Nobel Prize in physics in order to operate it I don’t think I’ll be signing up for a scuba course too soon. Worst of all is the backward flip one was to do in order to exit the boat, now with my appalling vertigo I can’t even do a summersault in a swimming pool, can we imagine me trying to flip myself backwards off a boat while loaded with oxygen tanks, a parachute, a GPS, a sandwich and goodness knows what else? I didn’t think so.

So while the divers became one with the ocean Linda and I were dropped off at our first snorkelling spot. The spot was on a reef next to a beach so we felt fairly secure in the shallow waters. Let’s just say I wasn’t blown away. There is something very eerie about snorkelling off a wildlife sanctuary, 40 minutes from shore, and finding rubbish on the ocean floor. It felt like I was watching the cadavers of human neglect waving at me from the one place on earth that they should not be. More astounding to me is why the operators of these diving companies don’t clean reefs like these up? There was one amazing moment, however, and that was when a shoal of tiny silver fishes suddenly surrounded Linda and I and began darting and jumping all around us. They continued to swim with us for the rest of the snorkel. They were spectacular.

Now one can only snorkel the same spot of reef for so long – especially since jelly fish were making other parts of the bay unapproachable. So Linda and I decided to take a break and retire to the beach for a while. Now if you are unfamiliar with the terrain of beaches in this place please reread my entry on the other beach trip I took a few weeks ago. To recap in a sentence – no shade, lots of sun, melanoma central. Add to this equation the following scenario – lily white skin, no sunblock, no water, no clothes. So we were left on this beach for an hour with nothing except our flippers and a snorkel. By the time the boat arrived with the divers I felt like Tom Hanks in ‘Castaway’ (or whatever that movie was called). Add to this my own personal phobia of having to sit around in a wet costume and one will get the general idea.

We were then given rolls to eat (how amazing does a roll taste when you’ve been exercising in the sun?) and then we started making preparations for our next snorkel. It was at this point that we were put onto another boat with a different captain. Our captain...hmmm...ok... you know when you are teaching young children the difference between people they can trust and those who could possibly turn out to be serial kiddy fiddlers one can sometimes describe that uncomfortable ‘I wouldn’t trust you as far as I can throw you’ feeling to them as a ‘no no feeling’. Lets just say the captain of our new boat gave me the ‘hell no’ feeling. He had a shirt wrapped over his face and was wearing sunglasses and yet with his entire disguise he still made me feel like he was thinking very ugly thoughts. Added to that was his inability to speak any English which made things all the more pleasant.

The divers were dropped off first and then Linda and I were taken to our next spot. Now, as I’ve mentioned before our first spot was relatively safe, in a bay, next to a beach. Our next spot was pretty much in the middle of the ocean next to a big rock and it was deep. So we jumped into the deep blue, two novice snorkelers, and away drove captain shirt face. Now this snorkelling was amazing, the real deal. It was also terrifying. There is a certain vulnerability associated with becoming a part of a world that one is obviously so ill-equipped to be a part of. It’s like being born again (excuse my tacky Christian reference). Human beings like to think that without them the word would cease to work – clocks would stop ticking, grass would turn into jungle and animals would starve. I hate to break it to us – there is a large part of the world that would be rather happy if we stopped trying to learn and exploit its secrets.

It was my time during this stretch of our snorkel that I willed the spirit of the mermaid to re-emerge from my childhood. I tried to be one with the ocean – I even did that thing when you take a deep breath and swim down towards the fishes. This, however, resulted in a near fatal ear explosion and a mistimed intake of breath. Yes, I could appreciate the beauty of being alone in the vastness of the ocean but I also couldn’t quite drown out the chilling ‘Jaws’ tune.

So when our creepy captain returned we asked him to lower the rickety metal stairs down so that we could climb up them to get onto the boat – remember that at this point we’re in the middle of the sea and so leverage out of the water is non existent, we’re also wearing flippers. He then gestured to us that this would be impossible and that he would help us out of the water. Having explained this country’s policy on flesh exposure you will no doubt be able to take in the full spectacle of the next scene – let’s just say that our disgusting boatman got to see more, no doubt, than his wife has ever shown him. We were hoicked out of the water like fat tunas while trying to get our flippered legs over the side of the boat in a dignified fashion and were left, spread-eagled, like floundering fish on the boat’s bottom. It was humiliating. So while we were doing some surreptitious bikini line damage control after our revolting boarding of the boat we went on to the next spot to pick up two MALE snorkelers. And yes, you guessed it, blow me down if the stairs are suddenly functional. A pure miracle!      

 The boat ride back to the mainland was less comfortable, mainly because I was already starting to feel the third degree burns on my legs and the hint of a dehydration headache. It was also quite disconcerting when the dive instructor had to point out to old shirt face captain the direction we were supposed to be headed in. By the time I got home I was completely exhausted and in agony – parts of my body got burnt for the first time that day.

So sadly I didn’t find my mermaid genes, I suspect that maybe they skip a generation or that we all ultimately grow out of our belief in magical worlds. I still have a tremendous respect for the ocean but it is now laced with trepidation rather than fearlessness. I do, however, hope that one day I will instil in my children the same love and respect of the ocean as my mom did in me. Children do, after all, need to believe that their parents are magical and that there is wonder to be found all over the beautiful world into which they are born.