Fact to Fiction Story:

My tank was on. I checked my regulator. Everything was working. I turned my flashlight on and entered the water. It was colder than in the day, but not by much. The island I was on only had two seasons: summer, and hurricane season.

I signaled ok to the instructor and put my head under the water. I couldn’t see much, as the only light was the other divers flashlights. Tureen, the instructor said that we could start our descent. One meter, two meters, three meters… 12 meters.

The bottom. Now we could see a lot more. It is almost like there are two different ecosystems that have shifted. The first shift is the things that you expect to see, and the second shift is more sea urchins, sharks, sting ray, sea turtles, squid and more. It’s crazy to see the change. We swam around for a bit before Tureen motioned for everybody to turn off their lights and be still. The uncountable amounts of plankton started to light up. They were like stars in the sky. It was beautiful. After, I quickly pointed my flashlight at a rock. Anybody who was just glancing at it would not have noticed it. It was the fin of a fish, just part of it. The first thought that registered through my head was barracuda, as you commonly see them off the coast of St. Barth. It probably was. They eat other fish. But the marks on the fin were farther apart. I had a nagging suspicion in the back of my head. Shark. Not a nurse shark or something small, a great white. They are extremely rare in St. Barth, but Tureen has bumped into them before. A few seconds later, I saw a trail of blood. I knew I was right. You can’t talk when you are diving, so I would have to signal that it was there. If I gave the symbol that means you see a shark, which is always a nurse shark or a blue shark, he would think it was one of those. I needed to figure out a way to signal great white shark. I swam over to Tureen and tapped his shoulder. I put my hand on my head like it was a fin, (the symbol for the sharks I commonly see) and then took my arms and made them look like giant jaws. He got the point. He got everybody together, which took about 10 minutes. Just then some of our lights were blocked out. I looked up. There it was. Not five feet above me. A 12 foot long great white shark. I pointed up and gradually everybody turned their heads. Even in the dim light, I could still barely make out the looks on people’s faces. Scared. Horrified. They probably think that they are going to die. I think that I might too, but we are underwater and in a group so the shark probably won’t approach us. Probably.

Just in case the shark attacks, it’s better to get back on the boat. But that will take some time as your body needs to decompress. I can see the gears in Tureens mind working overtime. I glance at somebody’s pressure gauge, the way you can tell how much air you have. It is already in the reserve air. That’s true for probably everybody except Tureen. I look at mine. It’s in reserve too. He puts us into groups of three. My group has Tureen, so we go up last. We go three by three, the shark circling around us. Each time it comes around its laps got shorter. And shorter, and shorter. I start to go up. So does the rest of my group. We stop to decompress and start our rise to the surface again. We do this a few times. My dad is the first to break the surface in my group. Then me. Then Tureen. I swim as fast as I can to the boat. I don’t even take my fins off. Everybody’s faces are a deathly white, and they are telling stories about what they saw and what they felt. I got a coke and walked to the bow. I was the only person there. We started moving. I was getting sprayed with spindrift as we started going faster. Tureen walked over to me and said a quick thank you.

THE END

This is the first piece we wrote this year, and it is my favorite. This is a bad thing because to me it says that I have not improved that much over the course of the year. That could be true, because I do not like creative writing and I don’t give it my all. I do really like this piece because scuba diving is one of my favorite things to do, and over spring break I got a better certification that is also international.