Raja Ampat — Fluoro Dive

Feel complete, all-enveloping, suffocating darkness. Your eyes are open… but are they? Without light, your sense of balance and space changes. Left and right could be fractions of angles or all the way around. Spatial parameters don’t apply — there is no near and no far away. Floating mid-water without light adds another dimension — up might be down and down could be anywhere. Reality warps, blackens, fades, and you’re left alone with your imagination…

Fluoro diving on a dark night, in an inky sea, under a wooden jetty, strapped into heavy scuba gear, breathing air through a pipe, nose closed, mouth open, I’m mindful of sinking or rising too fast for fear of serious injury to ears, lungs and blood vessels. I sink slowly in the liquid shadows, allowing for the pain in my compressed sinuses to subside.

I flick on the torch in my hand, watching my breath in jelly bubbles, shimmer in front of my face. The fish have all gone — hidden in caverns, sleeping in drifting shoals; the reef is a ghost city of corals with no moon, and creatures that go bump in the dark. Most things don’t glow, but some do. The fluorescence isn’t fully explainable yet, but an ultraviolet light and a filter will find you strange otherworldly shapes in the dark of the ocean. I swivel the light toward the night-reef — it’s a laser probe from a passing UFO. On a pitch-black sloping sea-bed that runs away into nothingness, neon lights wink on, outlines glow, shapes materialize, strange creatures move and sway — aliens at a teenager’s first neon rave.

A flick of the torch, and I’d lose even this weird reality — sinking, rising, getting pulled into a deep current or crashing into something that cuts, scratches, stings or hurts. UFOs can get lost too.

Psychedelic purples, blues, greens, yellows, oranges, reds and pinks appear. The colours pop, the darkness is disorienting, the shapes are surreal. There are coral bushes of poky fingers glowing neon yellow in the dark rubble on the sea-bed. Nuclear green orbs with dull orange veins look like giant brains from old scifi shows. A chunk of rock, deep electric blue, glows with a heart of burning orange embers. Another coral branches out like some cosmic tree on a haunted savannah, radiant yellow, fringed with green. This spectrum of light seems to set everything on fire to burn in neon rainbow hues.

We spot a stonefish flat on the sandy ground; in the day it’s camouflaged a poky, patchy brown; parked like some alien spaceship on a strange planet, it glows fluoro pink and toxic purple. There are tiny shrimp under a coral, with magnesium white stripes on translucent bodies. Two huge crabs scuttle by camouflaged as glowing rocks and debris. A moray eel sticks its snake-like head out of a burrow — pollen yellow with black holes for eyes, mouth open. A tube anemone, dark circle in the middle, trailing spidery tentacles of orange, waves slowly in the gentle current; smaller anemone appear in the sand — round, glowing eyes, long-lashed and burning. What would Sauron say? We spot tiny striped nudibranch slugs — they look futuristic, electric, like they belong on a galactic highway, flying through the velvet dark of space.

Forty five minutes of alien-hunting later, the thrill hasn’t gone. I could do this for hours, but just being has reduced available air. I ascend slowly, upwards towards the stars, leaving all alien life below.