Reef-hopping from a liveaboard through the Caribbean's oldest marine preserve

By Karen Karbo

SOMETHING'S WRONG with the sport of scuba diving. Recently, at the end of a weeklong trip on a liveaboard dive boat to Venezuela's archipelago of Los Roques, we spent a day and a half diving one perfect section of sloping reef, just off Cayo Sal, an uninhabited island blanketed by red mangroves. On the first dive the visibility was a scuba monster's dream; at a depth of 100 feet, I rolled over on my back and could see the white undersides of seagulls floating on the surface. But by dive number three, we were hankering for...something more. After each dive, we'd climb the aluminum ladder into the tender and compare notes.

"See any nurse sharks?"

"Nah."

"Any morays? Turtles?"

"There was that cool hermit crab."

"Whoa, be still my heart."

One guy, a software designer from Southern California who was testing an underwater CD player that would let him groove on Pink Floyd at depth, yawned. The sad truth is that a lot of divers have developed the If-It's-Tuesday-This-Must-Be-Belgium approach to diving, and before Los Roques, I was no exception. With this mindset you believe that if you've taken a 50-minute tour along a certain stretch of reef then you've "done it." It's as if you've got aquatic ADD. Your dive logs have come to resemble the giant, multipaged menu at one of those restaurants that pride themselves on serving everything: shore dive, wall dive, deep dive, drift dive. And on every dive there's gotta be a shark, or it's hardly worth getting wet.

Los Roques, 85 miles north of Caracas and 100 miles east of Bonaire, is the Caribbean as it was before cruise ships and frequent-flyer miles turned it into America's backyard. Because the hook-shaped, 42-island archipelago (at low tide there are about 350 islets, sandbars, and cays) is the oldest marine preserve in the Caribbean, these reefs have suffered almost no human impact, making them among the healthiest in the region.

Despite this, the first dive of the first day was less than promising. It was cloudy, and the trade winds that keep Los Roques mostly rain-free all year were fierce enough to blow over the plastic chairs arrayed on the top deck of the Antares Dancer. It was 8 a.m. and the twelve of us were gathered for a dive briefing atop the sturdy blue-and-white, 85-foot steel-hull trawler. The Antares has a shallow draft that allows it to navigate the swimming pool–deep waters around the reefs, and it possesses that good old boat smell—mildew, diesel, salt spray, decades of good cooking—and a jovial crew to go with it. Franco, the dive master, a native of nearby Margarita Island, he of the long auburn hair, scorpion tattoo, and little English (although he does know an impressive number of Pat Benatar lyrics), briefed us on La Guasa, a submerged granite knuckle that rises from the sea floor and ends at a point about 25 feet below the surface.

"No way!" I said. The goal of my diving life is to have an encounter with the gentle, school bus–size whale shark.

"On my daughter's eyes!" he swore. At least I think that's what he was doing. At any rate, I took it to mean that he wasn't kidding.

We all piled into the small tender that would take us from where we were docked, in the relative shelter of Gran Roque's tiny harbor, to La Guasa, in the open ocean. I should have known when Franco waggled his eyebrows and said, "Get ready to rock and roll" that it was going to be rough. He meant get all your gear on now, because at the dive site you'll be bouncing around so much your feet won't even be able to find your fins.

Not 30 seconds after we rounded the point, four of us puked. The recommended cure for seasickness is to get into the water—quick. Even down at 70 feet the surge was still throwing us around. La Guasa looked like something by Gaudí, quilted with orange coral and green tube sponges. As promised, there were lotsa fish (all also bobbing madly, as if someone were running down the street with their fishbowl). There were gangs of the snooty-looking, white-lipped French angels, delicately striped butterflies, and Las Vegas–bright parrots—all as big as basset hounds—and huge schools of the kind of game fish most people know only when they see them on a plate with a wedge of lemon: mackerel, snapper, grouper, and big-eyed jacks. Six-foot barracudas sussed us out and never changed their frowning expressions.

The low point of the week quickly followed: As I was hanging on the anchor line for my safety stop, getting yanked around like the littlest kid in an underwater game of crack the whip, the CD inventor—the most green-around-the-gills among us—grabbed onto the anchor line for his safety stop and promptly vomited into his reg. Bits of cachapa—Venezuelan corn pancake—swirled around his head, attracting the interest of a lot of fish, who were tired of eating plankton.

God in His Infinite Mercy saw that there was no more seasickness the rest of the week. Everyone either got his sea legs or got hip to the true power of Drama-mine. The next morning we cruised across the Ensenada de los Corrales, a surreal aqua lagoon, which separates one end of the hook from the other. The other divers—a dentist from Indiana, a doctor from Colorado, a newly retired 40-year-old from Florida who had invented a tool to make heart surgery safer—had dived all over the world: Palau, New Guinea, Sipadan. They'd come to Los Roques because it was off the beaten aquatic track. But after three days on the Gran Talud Arrecifal del Sur, the southern reef, with its thick coral gardens and predictable sand flat at 120 feet, they were getting antsy. Every morning Dave, who had a laugh like a jackhammer and a fondness for Venezuelan rum, kept claiming he was going to go down to 200 feet.

"How?" asked Pat, the bespectacled doctor from Colorado, "With a shovel?"

It began to seem ridiculous to me, our need for bigger, better fish, varied underwater topography, a sunken pirate's galleon filled with gold doubloons. On that third dive at Cayo Sal I chugged along, trying not to have an agenda but kicking with great purpose nonetheless. Why was I in such a hurry? I was zipping past a huge tower of boulder star coral when I realized that what I was looking at was the marine equivalent of an old-growth forest. Coral—which is an animal colony, not a plant, and one of the most ancient life forms on earth—grows very slowly. This guy was probably a thousand years old. Some blue tangs cruised around, and black-and-white damselfish no bigger than eggs poked out from their nests, trying to chase me off. I suddenly thought, Why am I on this forced underwater march to see things that are big? I'm going to see something little, something I've never seen before. So I floated above a coral head and after a bit saw a tiny, green-headed, big-eyed, wormlike creature, no larger than the tine of a serving fork, popping in and out of equally tiny holes. He had a spiky white stripe running between his eyes. There were in fact hundreds of them, but you had to look carefully to see them.

Afterward, I hauled myself aboard and said to Franco, who was handing out bottles of water to other divers, "I saw the coolest things. Little serpents that poked in and out of their holes. With a white stripe on their heads that looked like Velcro."

"Spiny-head blenny."

"How did you know?" I asked. Stupid question. He looked at me over his sunglasses.

"My water," he said.