My Home in the Sea: The Diving Memoirs of Norine Rouse (eBook)

Introduction

Aside from her diving career itself, the most astonishing thing Norine Rouse did was record her experiences on paper. When I first contacted her friends and colleagues for information and/or insight about something she referenced, most didn’t know the logbooks existed at all. I can’t be sure what may be missing, but I was provided with a series of bound ‘daily diary’ books spanning the years from 1979–1995. In addition, there was a folder containing a typewritten set of notes from June of 1970, non-bound handwritten notes from March through May of 1974, and spiral-bound notebooks that partially covered 1976–77. These early entries were often long (multi-page) and very descriptive, I assume mostly because she wasn’t limited by page space. When she switched to diary-style notebooks with limited room to write each day, by necessity she had to keep her entries a bit more brief. Now and then, however, she still managed to squeeze in some pretty lengthy entries, sometimes finishing on an otherwise empty page.

Outside of a few entries in 1970, Norine rarely spoke of her responsibilities as a dive guide and/or instructor. From reading her logbooks, it could easily be missed that Norine’s formal job was to safely lead divers of all skill levels through an often harsh and unpredictable environment. The Gulf Stream is largely responsible for driving the prevailing nearshore currents in Palm Beach County, forcing scuba divers to practice a form of diving known as ‘drift diving,’ whereby they are dropped in at one end of a reef and picked up at the other. The boat captain knows where the divers are by following a ‘float line’ buoy that is held at the other end by one of the divers in the group. Throughout her logs, she often uses the terms ‘drift’ or ‘float’ near the beginning of the entries to reflect this kind of diving. As she later describes, early on, Norine and her group would also attempt to anchor dive, which leverages a ‘down line’ tied to the boat to provide divers with a reference point for their descent and ascent (thus, the dive site she referred to as “Anchor Spot.”) However, they realized the danger of this method should someone get swept away in a strong current, and largely ended the practice.

Each of Norine’s entries began with the particular location she and her group visited. Sometimes for their physical features, sometimes for the person who ‘discovered’ the area, or perhaps for the position in relation to a landmark, the dive sites of Palm Beach County are named somewhat arbitrarily, and over time, interchangeably. Nonetheless, the idea is to provide an easily referenced underwater location for a boat captain to take his divers. Prior to on-board GPS systems, boat captains would match the water’s depth with visually triangulated landmarks, such as smokestacks and columns of hotel windows to find the dive initiation site itself. No matter how they manage to get there, the challenge for a drift-boat captain is to accurately estimate the current’s speed so, upon descent, the divers arrive at the appropriate place on the reef. Given highly variable current speeds and diver skill-levels, this isn’t always easy, especially when seeking a relatively small target area like a shipwreck.

Due to their convenient location, nearly all of Norine’s local dives were confined to a fairly small area just east of the Lake Worth (a.k.a. Palm Beach) Inlet, but she occasionally dove as far north as the reefs offshore of the Towns of Juno Beach and Jupiter in northern Palm Beach County, and as far south as the Town of Lake Worth in central Palm Beach County. Totaling about two dozen, the majority of her regular dive sites ranged from 45–70 feet in depth, but others were considerably deeper, and sometimes named as such: for example, the “110’ Spot” was a favorite place to see sharks, and “Computer Frames” was located in 130 feet of water. Without going into great detail, the predominant reef system divers visit in Palm Beach runs parallel to the shoreline, about a mile from the beach. Upon departing the Inlet, a short boat ride to the Southeast takes divers to the aforementioned “Anchor Spot,” an area on a 60-foot reef ledge that served as her original starting point for nearly all her early dives. She and her dive buddies returned so regularly she later referred to the site simply as “reg. spot,” which was centrally located to a number of frequently referred-to sites such as “Double Ledges” a short distance to the south, and the “Hill,” “Boulders,” and “Gullies” a short distance to the north. A few miles to the south was the less visited but highly acclaimed “Breakers Reef,” so named for its offshore proximity to Palm Beach’s famous Breakers Hotel. Derived from different geological origin than the sites closer to the Inlet, the long, ridge-like configuration of Breakers reef is the very northern tip of a reef system that extends all the way to Key West. Breakers Reef, on a good day, was (and to some degree still is) one of the most beautiful and diverse reefs anywhere in Florida, and as some argue, well beyond. About the same distance to the north are the steeper and more dramatic ledges of Juno Beach and Jupiter that are well-known for their assemblages of everything big: super-sized green eels, turtles, sharks, game fish, and much more.

Since the 1960s, Palm Beach County’s Department of Environmental Resources Management has intentionally scuttled a number of ships, barges, concrete and limestone debris piles, and even cars to create artificial reefs that please both marine life and scuba divers. Norine’s frequent mention of diving the “Wrecks” referred to a series of ships and barges that were scuttled about a half-mile northeast of the Palm Beach Inlet. Now commonly known as the “Corridor,” the site consists of some of Palm Beach County’s oldest artificial reefs that include the 160-foot Mizpah, a similarly sized patrol craft known as the PC1170, and the 450-foot deckless, canoe-like Amaryllis. About three-quarters of a mile east of the Corridor at a site known as “Midreef,” we find one of Norine’s favorite sites known as “Spearman’s Barge,” a 150-foot box-shaped deck barge whose story is strangely connected to a 1980s-era Florida murder-mystery. Regardless of their origins, the artificial reefs of Palm Beach County have been a great addition to the area, and have become underwater meccas for a diverse assembly of marine life and scuba divers alike.

Norine was diving in the days prior to the advent of today’s now-standard dive computers, but she did have a technological precursor known as a Decompression Meter that mechanically (not electronically) calculated nitrogen absorption based on time and depth. Today, most local dive charters take groups out for ‘two-tank’ dive trips before returning to the dock, which require a break between two consecutive dives long enough for the divers to sufficiently reduce their nitrogen saturation to safe levels. At the time, Norine’s regular dive schedule was one dive trip in the morning and one in the afternoon, so she had plenty of ‘deco’ time between dives each day. With occasional exceptions that included vacations (which often involved diving somewhere else), prohibitive weather, her own personal days, and/or days the dive shop itself was closed, Norine went diving all year-round, and in virtually all conditions the local dive environment had to offer. She was famous for her bright “Yum Yum Yellow” wetsuit, which made her unmistakably identifiable underwater, and she continued wearing the old ‘horse-collar’-style buoyancy vest for most of her diving career. Her petite, athletic build along with plenty of practice minimized her air consumption, allowing her to enviably extend her dives well beyond the capabilities of most of her students and dive buddies. Matched with her curious, almost fearless attitude, Norine’s patience, attention to diving safety, and respect for the environment earned her tremendous respect among her students, peers, and admirers, many of whose names, transcribed as she originally wrote them, are sprinkled throughout her entries. Though not for everyone, her old saying “take only pictures, leave only bubbles, kill only time” isn’t a bad way for divers to get started.

The few times Norine did provide details of what it was like for her to be a scuba instructor at the time provide a robust and vivid description of her underwater experiences at the very beginning of her tenure in Palm Beach.

June 8, 1970: “What a dive!! Leslie went with me and we took three new divers and the rest were the regular group that goes every Sunday. L.D. dove today! It is his boat so he usually runs it and gets in very little diving himself. I think this was his first dive since last Thanksgiving. He and Bob went to 150 feet after spiny oysters but the rest of us figured we would have more time in the water so we would stay shallower. The day was calm and the ocean was like glass for a change. We have had a lot of wind lately and when it switches to the West we really have to take advantage of it. We were disagreeably surprised for the water was not what it had seemed—it was probably one of the worst dives we have had in this area. There was an upwelling that is the only explanation for the bitterly cold water. The water was full of sediment and typical shark water. The current was very strong. My new divers handled themselves very well. On the first dive, one of my students had trouble equalizing the pressure in his ears so I stayed with him while he slowly worked his way to the bottom. When we got to the bottom Leslie and the other...