"Bermuda is a big pile of poop,” Greg Hartley exclaims as we skim across Listerine-blue waters in his dive boat Rainbow Runner, rounding One Tree Island before threading the needle between Middle Kings Point and The Quintons toward Halfway Flat.
“After the volcano’s caldera emerged from the Atlantic, corals dissolved calcium out of the water, parrotfish bit and crushed the fins of the coral, and sand sprinkled out of their backends onto the ocean floor as detritus. During the ice ages, the water level went down anywhere from 100 to 300 feet, and the wind blew the sand up into dunes on the southern rim of this sawed-off shotgun. So, that’s how Bermuda was formed. It’s a bunch of parrotfish poop – a crappy place.” He laughs. It obviously isn’t; not in the figurative sense, at least. The Bermuda volcanic seamount is now powdered with pretty pastel-painted houses, sun-trap beaches and chocolate-coloured rocks, which shrink incrementally as we navigate the two-mile commute toward Halfway Flat.
The beach at Jobson's Cove, Bermuda
Gavin Howarth | Howarth Photography Ltd.
Greg’s father Bronson founded Hartley’s Helmet Diving in 1948 and became the first person worldwide to offer shallow-water helmet-diving tours to the public. As a protégé of Dr William Beebe – the American naturalist and biologist who famously set a world record for depth achieved in a bathysphere – Hartley made his own helmet and pumps and took tourists on Sea Treks, where he acted as a ‘fish-whisperer’. Hartley had spent so much time undersea around the coral reefs of Bermuda and The Bahamas that he was able to habituate the fish to his presence; baiting, luring and training them with food. The family business was then passed on to his son.
“Red sponge is like crack to parrotfish,” announces Greg Hartley with an elfin smile. He’s in his sixties, tall and slim with a big, unruly grey ‘fro and beard, kitted out in black swim shorts and a white short-sleeved pilot’s shirt with barred epaulettes. It’s all very The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. I get the sense that he’s the kind of kooky guy who’s most in his element when he’s literally out of his element; a suspicion that’s confirmed when we head underwater.
It’s all very The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou
After slipping into a wetsuit, I’m directed over to the stern of the Rainbow Runner, where weights are girdled around my waist. Hartley hands me a copper-coloured helmet. It’s open at the bottom, like a glass held upside down underwater, with a tube connected to a pump which directs air into the chamber so that you can breathe normally, and a leaden ring circling its bottom, holding it fast to the shoulders.
I waddle to the diving platform and lower myself down a steel ladder, experiencing that usual frisson of excitement that happens when you leave terra firma. The amygdala lets you know that humans haven’t evolved to be underwater, and even though this activity requires no previous diving experience or even the knowledge of how to swim, the mammalian brain activates an outflux of adrenaline. Hartley describes fun as being ‘perceived danger willingly approached’. This rings true as seawater envelops the diving bell.
The sound of the air syphoned into the helmet is unbelievably loud, its incessant bubbling reminiscent of an aquarium pump. The helmet has three glass panes through which to view the coral reef, and since flat glass has a magnifying effect, it enhances the trippiness of the experience. Barefoot, clutching an eight-foot-long, one-inch PVC pipe, I’m led around by Hartley as he identifies fish, corals and other invertebrates with a wooden message stick, their names penned on its sides. Halfway Flat is a sandy-bottomed reef flat that lies between the shore and the reef’s edge, the type of spot which fish tend to favour.
Two helmet divers with a red mullet
There’s something almost suburban about the setting – everyone seems to know each other. Greg Hartley has been on first-name terms with many of these fish for decades.
As I kneel on the ground, hands outstretched as if in prayer, a procession of pelagic creatures allows me to fondle them. I’m introduced to Gollum the squirrelfish, a spiky, sinister-presenting animal with poor daytime vision and enormous black eyes. It nips my fingers every so often, due to shoddy eyesight rather than personal aversion, I prefer to think. There have been many reincarnations of George. Originally a blue-striped grunt trained by Bronson, every grunt since him has inherited the same handle.
I’m mostly molested by Leroy the red snapper, who circles for food like a hungry, er, shark (there aren’t any here I’m told – the only sharks in Bermuda are oceanic, not reef sharks). Named for Bad, Bad Leroy Brown, the namesake of the 1973 Jim Croce radio hit, he lives up to the lyrics as ‘the baddest man in the whole damn town’. But the star of the show is without question a coy, perhaps coquettish, spotted green moray eel. It’s reticent as it emerges from a cavity under brain coral, reversing as swiftly as it moves forward. However, enticed by Hartley’s bag of snacks, it greedily slithers into my hands and then backs out of them with a flick of its single continuous dorsal fin. I’m entranced. Is this real life or a SpongeBob SquarePants fever dream?
Is this real life or a SpongeBob SquarePants fever dream?
Before I head back up to the Rainbow Runner and a mug of hot cocoa, Greg Hartley makes a request. From the sandy seabed, he crouches, then launches upwards to perform a fluid karate kick, beckoning for me to do the same. One can leap much higher in a diving helmet than anticipated. I reckon I make it seven feet up, doing my best Chuck Norris impression, overcommitting, then nearly stacking it arse-over-elbows when I fail to stick the landing. Though below sea level, it’s a new height of ridiculousness.
Interested to find out more about the island, I visit the Bermuda Underwater Exploration Institute in Hamilton. Spread over two floors, it covers everything from the island’s origin story as the Isle of Devils, when Bermuda was infamous among sailors and explorers for its treacherous reefs, sea monsters and hellish storms, to recent conservation efforts. Bermuda has a gripping history of marine exploration, dating back to 1700 when scientist Edmund Halley visited the island on board the Paramour on a scientific journey to research magnetic compass variability. In 1872, the HUMS Challenger Expedition came to Bermuda to take soundings and collect specimens, providing the foundations for modern oceanography.
William Beebe’s dive helmet – the man who taught Bronson Hartley – looks a bit like something that Sauron would wear in The Lord of the Rings. In 1934, he made ocean exploration history by clambering into a 5,000-pound steel sphere and descending to a depth of a half-mile off the shores of Bermuda – a record that wouldn’t be outdone for 15 years. Writing about the depths of the ocean, Beebe stated, “The only other place comparable to these marvellous nether regions must surely be naked space itself, out far beyond the atmosphere, between the stars.”
Following in Beebe’s wake, Teddy Tucker co-founded the Beebe Project with Emory Kristoff and Eugenie Clark in 1984, which aimed to catch, photograph and investigate deep-sea sharks and other marine life living near Bermuda’s platform. Tucker is a legend in archaeological and scientific circles. Having dived and sailed the island’s waters since he was a young boy, he discovered new species and unearthed treasures from the 300 shipwrecks spread around the island – most of them sunk by its abundant coral reefs. He also helped to pioneer techniques in underwater science and mentor generations of other researchers and writers, enough so to inspire a film…
Shipwreck diving in Bermuda
“The first scene of the 1970s thriller The Deep was shot here at South West Breaker. It was written by Peter Benchley, the guy who wrote Jaws, and then made into a movie. Teddy Tucker inspired the main character. For some reason they made Jacqueline Bisset shoot it in a white T-shirt,” dive instructor Will Howorth laughs as we spray eye masks, shoulder oxygen tanks and don flippers while the dive boat wafts in the swell. Howorth originally hails from Worthing, near Brighton, and has lived in Bermuda for seven years, instructing diving lessons at Dive Bermuda alongside native Bermudian Captain Aaron and Boatmaster Aayush Prakash, who was born in Bengaluru, India and brought up in Dubai.
Bermuda is home to some of the world’s northernmost coral reef systems, Howorth explains. Nutrients drift southwards from the coast of Labrador and the Gulf Stream, a powerful ocean current, sweeps up warm water from the Gulf of Mexico, creating reefs that are healthy and teeming with a diverse range of marine life, in spite of being located at such a high latitude. However, being north means that they aren’t subject to the coral bleaching that reefs at more equatorial locations often are, where high water temperatures and other stressors make coral expel the colourful zooxanthellae algae living symbiotically inside them.
These same corals are responsible for the massive number of shipwrecks that dot Bermuda’s coastline; particularly in the south, where we are. The reefs were known as breakers both because they break the surface of the ocean but also for the many vessels they’ve dashed to pieces; there are nearly 30 in the vicinity.
30 feet underwater, Will Howorth and I float weightlessly above the sand, drifting between near-vertical walls of algal vermetid cup reef, made of the prehistoric fossils of worms. Spiny lobsters scuttle beneath boulders of brain coral while 300-pound black groupers circle and skirt the enormous chevrons of gorgonian sea fans like patrolling submarines.
Black groupers circle and skirt the enormous chevrons of gorgonian sea fans like patrolling submarines
The next day we cruise to North Rock, located circa seven miles from the east end of Bermuda. Aayush Prakash – who has plied his trade as a professional diver since his teens, working as an instructor across the planet and assisting scientists with data collection – provides the briefing. North Rock is a navigational beacon sat atop an old ship boiler. Bermudians used to play cricket on the surface of the small island, now submerged due to rising ocean levels. According to Prakash, there was a lighthouse built here that Americans exploded to thwart Nazis from commandeering it during World War 2 (however, the event is officially listed as torpedo practice / a test launch). There’s something forlorn about the beacon, which stands 70 feet above the waves. It puts one in mind of the many shipwrecks nearby and the utter devastation one must feel watching one’s home and transport disintegrate into the deep.
I’ve opted to snorkel today as I wanted to try my hand at freediving. It’s not the genuine article as I’m sans big flippers and solo while the captain of the boat watches from his perch – freediving requires that you go in pairs in case of a hypoxia blackout – but I wear weights to assist me in staying underwater and follow Howorth’s instructions to pump my lungs to build up oxygen in the bloodstream, swim a couple kicks along the surface for speed, and then duck dive downwards. I don’t make it very far, 20 feet at a push, but there’s something peaceful about being alone underwater without an aqualung.
The Crystal Caves
On the final day, I drive through verdant gardens and parks past pastel-painted colonial mansions, parallel to the emerald-coloured depths of Harrington Sound, to reach the Crystal Caves, which were discovered in 1905 by Carl Gibbons and Edgar Hollis, two 12-year-old boys searching for a lost cricket ball. Formed over millions of years, limpid cobalt waters lap around an immense drapery of stalactites in a display that can only be described as otherworldly. The 1913 silent film Neptune’s Daughter was shot here, Jim Henson’s children’s show Fraggle Rock was inspired by the setting, and the caves have attracted luminaries as miscellaneous as Mark Twain and Beyoncé (the latter shot a fashion campaign in them when she visited in 2009).
Afterwards, we motor beyond what was formerly Kindley Air Force Base, an American station which was access-restricted until 1995, to Cooper’s Island Nature Reserve, where I discover an underground bunker when poking around a lesser visited promontory; leap over a beached Portuguese man o’ war’s tentacles while jogging barefoot on a talc-textured beach; and scan the horizon for whales from an observation deck that was formerly the base of a NASA Tracking Station radar tower.
While Bermuda may have humble, scatological origins as Greg Hartley observed – parrotfish poop, to be exact – if you get beneath the skin of the archipelago, you come to realise that there’s a fine line between the sublunary and the sublime, between absurdity and awe.
In many ways, it chimes with how I visualised a desert island as a youth, in line with the stories of Robert Louis Stevenson and Enid Blyton. There’s a meme drifting around the internet that observes ‘As a child I thought I’d have to deal with the Bermuda Triangle a lot more than I have in my adult life’. Bermuda has all of the ingredients for childhood daydreams – a rich history of shipwrecks, exploration, caves and mystery – and while it may not have had as much of an impact on my adulthood as I expected it would growing up, my inner child is gratified that I took the time to investigate.
