THE BIG LAGOON

By Bill Moyer, 2009
Recently some men in the Aruba Spear Fishing Club have been sending stories over the Internet about diving from high places into shallow water. Their memories seem mostly to be about the “Caliche Pit” or quarry opposite Lago Heights, if I read their notes correctly, and from a pile driver in the Big Lagoon. The “Caliche Pit” was a curious phenomenon, in the midst of a grey field of dead coral adjoining the Sea Grape Groves, where Colony Service obtained caliche (a very fine dirt, almost like clay, and rust red in color) to use in road building. Caliche, sprayed with oil, made a fine base for all sorts of things. For example, the greens of our golf course were made from oiled caliche. They worked fine, providing you dragged a metal bar across them every now and then to remove traces of ball impacts or footprints. Oiling kept the caliche from blowing away.
I’ve read that calitche is mostly calcium carbonate, and forms slightly below the surface in arid climates when minerals are leached from upper levels of soil or rock. Given enough time, a caliche bed can become quite thick. There is also a theory that caliche can be deposited, like loess, from wind erosion of rock further upwind. Lago Colony’s Caliche Pit was perhaps half a mile downwind from Colorado Point, a huge promontory of volcanic origin that formed the eastern extremity of Aruba Island. Walking on Colorado Point, you could see by the color of its rock that it had a high iron content, and could tell from contours of its surface that the material had flowed at some point. It was entirely different from the dead, grey coral extending westward and downwind from there. We kids loved climbing around on Colorado Point, challenged by the steepness of its paths, and awed by the majesty of the waves pounding into it and throwing spray high into the air. There was at least one “natural bridge” on the Point where you could walk over incoming, surging water to reach a rough platform surrounded by surf--very dramatic and inspiring.
The “Caliche Pit” was something quite different: an entirely artificial hazard. The deposit of soft caliche had been dug into an open-pit mine about 100 yards to a side and perhaps 50 feet deep by excavators and trucks carrying caliche away. It lacked the drama of incoming surf or howling winds, but offered another sort of forbidden pleasure--a hole with big “Danger! Stay Away!” signs asserting we kids were not supposed to climb into it. So, naturally, we did! It wasn’t hard to do because of the ramp on one side used by Colony Service’s trucks, and if that wasn’t exciting enough, you could scramble and slide down slippery slopes amid clattering of rocks dislodged by your feet. After a heavy rain, the main attraction of getting to the bottom was that there was a pool of fresh water there, to wade or even swim in. We only got about 16” of rain a year in Aruba, seldom more than an inch at a time, so it wasn’t usually enough to fill deep holes. I don’t recall ever finding enough water at the bottom of the Caliche Pit to dive into, but evidently some other kids did.
All the diving I was exposed to was at the Big Dock at Rogers Beach, in the Big Lagoon. The Company had built two piers extending into the lagoon, one from a sandy beach and in a T-shape, handy for tying up boats. It was in relatively shallow water, not very good for diving. Once, during World War II, when I was perhaps eight years old, a group of U.S. soldiers (they were part of Coastal Artillery battalion, from Puerto Rico) were sitting on the dock, and I ran and dived off the dock to show off. It was the shallow, shore side of the dock, and I jammed right into the sandy bottom at a depth of about three feet! My neck hurt like the dickens and I couldn’t breathe for a minute or two, a terrible feeling made worse by the fact that the soldiers thought it was one of the funniest things they’d ever seen. They laughed, but one of them helped pull me up on the dock to recover.
Most of our diving, though, was from the “Big Dock” 100 yards west of the T-Dock, extending on a pier from a coral cliff out perhaps 100 feet into the water, where the depth became safe for diving. The Company even built a tower on the platform at the outer end of the dock, extending two stories higher than dock level, so you could dive off the dock itself, from a spring board facing east, or off the second story platform, to the south (with no board), or off the third story, also facing south but positioned away from the second story platform, with another spring board. I seldom dove off the top board, because you hit the water pretty hard from up there, getting a rap on the head. Many kids were good, skillful divers, though, and used all three levels at will. We played games of tag on that dock, which was a lot of fun. You could scramble from one story to the other to get away, then jump or dive when necessary, angling a dive to take you under water beneath the crossed pilings of the dock, providing other means of evading a tag.
Murray Jennings was a great diver. So was Tom Tucker. So was Walter Buckholz. I made the mistake once of swimming under water from beneath the dock and coming up on the south side, just as Walter was diving off the top board. He crashed into me, which was quite a shock, but strangely (as I look back on it now) not seriously hurting me. Maybe I was far enough beneath the surface to miss the full impact of his dive, or maybe Walter swerved in some way as he spotted me while he was on his way down.
There was a small, one story building at the base of the Big Dock’s platform extending out into the water, up a flight of stairs from the beginning of the dock. I think it had a non-refrigerated drinking fountain, and a small room in it where people could change clothes in private. It was at the bottom of a larger flight of stairs leading up to the parking lot (of oiled caliche, naturally) people could use if driving to the Big Dock. Bicycle racks were up there too, and a railing to keep people from falling off the cliff into cactus and coral on the way down to the little building. There was a wooden railing, three feet high, around the seaward side of the building, and an angled roof overhanging the railing by about two feet. There wasn’t a lot of room between the overhang of the roof and the top of the railing, but some one discovered the space was large enough that they could stand on the railing, dive out horizontally, missing the roof, and striking the water about six feet or so ahead of them and twenty feet below. It was a rather daring dive, because there were submerged rocks (of coral which had fallen from the eroding cliff years ago) only a foot or two beneath the surface of the water for the first four feet or so from the edge of the cliff, and even when they were replaced by sandy bottom, the water depth was only about four feet.
“Big kids”, though, soon proved the deed could be done. The first, I think, was Art Whitney, then probably Tom Tucker, but Ken Repath, Bill Morgan, Lenny Teagle, and others soon followed, gradually leading younger boys like Tinker Baggaley, Gleb Aulow, John O’Brien, and me, to demonstrate our fearlessness too. Some even made the dive more than once, to show what a cinch it was! I climbed up on the railing feeling pretty confident, after seeing so many others make the dive without doing any serious damage to themselves. The one thing I didn’t consider, though, in judging how far forward I would have to go in the air to reach a safe water depth, and how to keep my head down to avoid hitting the overhanging roof above, was that the railing was getting wet from having “repeat”, wet divers returning to repeat their triumphs! As I kicked off as hard as I could, one of my feet slipped! I immediately realized that I was rotating in the air, and not projecting far enough from the cliff to reach “safe” water and a sandy bottom. Instead, I saw my head was descending close to the area of the subsurface rocks. And fast! All I could do was extend hands and feet as flat as possible for “maximum smack” on the water surface, seeking a belly-whopper of all belly-whoppers, and hoping not to hit the rocks too hard.
In no time at all, I was smacking into the water, but the sting of the water didn’t matter at all because it wasn’t followed by a blow from rocks. I didn’t sink very far beneath the surface, at least where my head and shoulders were. I had survived! What a relief! I came up laughing, but it was hollow laughter, more from relief than from any other emotion. That was my last dive from the railing. It soon seemed to lose its fascination for the others too. I guess once you had proved you could do it, there wasn’t much point in doing it over. At least, that’s the way I felt. I could get my belly-whoppers anywhere.
My other main memory of the Big Docks is of the diving helmet I made, and tested from the first floor diving board. It was made from a five gallon metal container in the shape of a cube, that my Dad brought home from the refinery. I cut out the bottom, cut notches on each side fitted with pieces of rubber tire to put on my shoulders, and cut a hole in what was to be the front, to fit with a panel of glass. To the sides I attached lead weights, and to the top, a rope tied to the handle already on the can. My biggest technical problem was how to attach and seal the glass panel to the front opening. I fitted a couple of crude clamps, and packed putty around the edges of the glass to try to seal it. It was a pretty awkward looking thing, but I really wanted to be able to walk around on the bottom and see things from a new perspective. Gleb Aulow helped me rig the thing, and was good enough to lower it down from the diving board over my shoulders after I climbed into the water underneath.
It actually worked for a couple of minutes! Its weight was enough to sink me to the bottom (probably only about ten feet from the surface), and the five gallon supply of air gave me a few breaths as I went down. I was interested to see the water level rising inside the helmet as air was compressed and I breathed some, or possibly it was due to leaks. I could see very well out the front, but the only “scenery” near the diving board was the sandy bottom and some seaweed: no dazzlingly colorful fishes, but of course I didn’t expect any at that location. All of a sudden, though, the dive ended: off popped the glass face plate, and water came flooding in! It was easy enough to dip downward and get below the helmet, then swim to the surface. My big adventure was over. Gleb and I laughed, and decided we were done with the diving helmet business, at least for a while.
After World War II, when Mother, Dad, and I were in the ’States on vacation, I found a Momsen Lung in a war surplus store, and took it to Aruba. A man named Momsen had developed them as emergency escape devices for crews of sunken submarines. A man could pop one of the masks on, open a valve to get compressed air, and have as much as a five-minute breathing supply to work his way (as slowly as possible, to avoid the bends) to the surface. I don’t know whether they were actually used much by the Navy. However, mine worked just as it was supposed to. I dove in the east end of the Big Lagoon, and was able to stay down about five minutes. I was very sad when my air ran out. In those days, there were no SCUBA supplies on Aruba, and I had no way of going beyond what the Momsen Lung had made possible.
I think the French were the main experimenters, along with perhaps the Italians, in developing ways to swim underwater. Jacques Costeau was the most famous of the pioneers in this field, but I’m sure there were many others. Soon after World War II, some of the equipment they developed began to show up in civilian markets in Europe and the U.S.. The first people I saw in Aruba with swim fins, face masks fitted with snorkle tubes, and spear guns, were Europeans, I think, swimming near the Big Dock, and I believe the first brand names I saw were French. The earliest guns were hollow pipes or tubes fitted with powerful rubber bands. Soon afterward, fancier ones began to show up, with floating bodies (so the gun wouldn’t sink if you dropped it) and salt-water-resistant rubber bands in the form of cords. What a wonderful thing it was to have special equipment, especially to have swim fins to enhance your ability to move forward faster and more easily by kicking. It made all the difference in a place like Aruba, with currents, once you were outside the reef, that required constant kicking to remain in place or to move up current. They were also a tremendous help in accelerating to chase a fish, or to return to the surface faster.

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