No Dream Is Too High - Buzz Aldrin Page 0,27
submersible was spherical in shape, with thick, strong glass portholes on each side that allowed the two French operators and me to look out.
This was not a luxury liner like the Titanic. Quite the contrary, the sub was a claustrophobic person’s worst nightmare, with the pilot sitting so he could work the control board as the copilot and I lay flat on our stomachs on the floor. There was no restroom aboard.
The operators spoke only a bit of broken English, so communication was difficult. I had taken French in high school, and with a lot of pointing at the menu, I might have been able to order something to eat in a Parisian restaurant, but that was the extent of my foreign language knowledge. I did my best to understand the Frenchmens’ instructions and conversations.
It took an hour and a half for us to descend through the lonely darkness, until we finally caught sight of the sunken ship, eerily resting on the ocean floor. It was total blackness all around, the only illumination cast from the submersible’s lights. I grabbed a camera and started shooting pictures of the ship, festooned with rusting metal that looked like gingerbread, as I imagined passengers once standing on the bow, looking over the railing made famous by James Cameron’s movie, now covered with a surreal white algae and other organisms.
The French operators worked for nearly nine hours attempting to strategically place lift bags that they hoped would cause a portion of the Titanic’s hull to float. But as the pilot attempted to raise the hull, a cable snapped, and another would not release, dooming the mission. The Titanic yawned in resistance and settled back to sleep, as though it knew our efforts had been scrubbed as a failure. But it was not a failure for me. I had traveled to the ocean floor, to one of the sea’s most guarded secrets.
IN 2010, AT 80 YEARS OF AGE, I hitched a ride on a gigantic whale shark while scuba diving in the Galápagos Islands.
I’ve never really had a hobby, but when I am not working, scuba diving is one of my favorite things to do, and under the sea is my favorite place to be—on this planet. To this day, I enjoy scuba diving excursions at least four or five times each year, to various locations around the world.
Besides the gorgeous sights waiting to be discovered, I love the quietness and the solitude of being under the sea. It is a part of life that cannot be described by mere words and can only be truly experienced by going underwater. No cell phones are ringing; I have no emails to answer, although with wristwatches now boasting more computer power than Neil and I had in the lunar module when we landed on the Moon, I can see being online underwater as a possibility. For now, though, I love the natural peace that I find deep below the surface. To me, scuba diving is both relaxing and energizing at the same time—relaxing because it is so peaceful; energizing because the unparalleled sights inexorably call for exploration.
To help celebrate my 80th birthday, my son Andy took me on a special trip to the Galápagos Islands, located in the Pacific Ocean about 600 miles west of Ecuador. The waters off the Galápagos Islands, two uninhabitable islands known as Darwin and Wolf, feature some of the most picturesque and fascinating scuba diving opportunities in the world. It is also some of the most challenging diving in the world. The strong, cold currents do not make for easy diving, nor do the large numbers of dangerous sharks, but the waters around the islands are teeming with spectacular sea life. They are home to some of the largest whale sharks on the planet, some as large as 40 feet long, 18 feet high, and weighing in at more than 20 tons. To put that in perspective, imagine swimming up to a fish as large as a Greyhound bus.
Although whale sharks are enormous, they are relatively docile. They don’t normally attack humans, because their favorite food is plankton. A whale shark has a flat-looking head and blunt snout, with massive, oval-shaped jaws that the fish opens frequently as it moves rapidly through the water, filtering everything in its path, discarding anything that isn’t plankton.
Even though there is little danger of getting eaten by a whale shark, they are still dangerous to humans because their sleek bodies move so rapidly through the water,