I, in my youth, together with my stepfather, riddled with scuba diving practically the entire Crimean coast up and down. What we didn’t meet on our way - you can write a book, but I remember one incident most of all …
It happened in the Blue Bay. Mom stayed on the shore, and my stepfather and I, as always, sailed to explore the coast and look for rapans, crabs and fish. Of course, you cannot describe the underwater beauty in one word, we have seen everyone, but what I loved about Golubaya Bay, the fact that there is four hundred meters from the coast, after the usual bottom with stones and sandy "lawns", suddenly there is a deep and steep cliff. The sensation when you are standing on the edge of a steep cliff, multiply in two, because when there is a layer of water above you, and there is an abyss below, the bottom of which is not visible, it tickles your nerves much more.
And so we both, having swam up to this abyss, hovered on its edge, lay down belly on the sand and looked down, I looked at the rock and the inhabitants of the sea swarming on it. And suddenly my stepfather gave me a sign to look more attentively down - there flashed some kind of shadow. In those years, one could meet huge mullet (mullet) - they grew up to a meter, or even more, and weighed 6-7 kilograms each. We both froze in the hope that now this fish will rise closer to the edge and we will have decent catch today. But as it rose from the depths, the dark silhouette became larger and larger, and we already understood that this is something much larger than the striped mullet and, in general, much larger than all those fish that we once met during our swims. We both even stopped breathing so as not to frighten this miracle with our bubbles - it was so interesting to find out what was coming up to meet us there. Stepfather quietly took out, always tied to his leg, a large knife, just in case. And we with wildly beating hearts watched this slow rise of something dark from the abyss.
And when this mass reached the level where sunlight made its way, my stepfather and I saw a huge (even if the mask exaggerates) sturgeon. It was an old fish of incredible size, with a long mustache and an expression of the muzzle, I would say, wise in life. She swam almost next to me, and did it so slowly that I had time to see all her folds and scales. Looking ahead, I will say that after that we argued for a long time - how much height and weight it had and agreed that it was at least 5-6 meters and weighed about a cow.
I can't even find the words to describe this whole mise-en-scène - when something unknown rises from the abyss right at you, and then a huge head of a huge fish begins to appear in the rays of light, fins the size of an adult's hand, this smooth grace of a giant, I even I remember the movement of water that he created by his appearance. Like a vertically pop-up live torpedo. And now this huge, but slow "torpedo" sailed past us, hovered for a minute on the abyss, turned around and just as slowly, as if reluctantly, sailed towards the open sea. We woke up not less than a minute after her tail disappeared into the distance. Both barely tore off their fingers gripping the edges of the rock, so we held fast from delight and horror at the same time.
After that, my mother said that two wild people flew out of the water and, vying with each other, shouting and waving their arms, they began to talk about something so emotionally that until she began to listen to only one of us, she did not understand what it was about.
Many years have passed, but I will never forget that meeting - it was a slow motion shooting of the beauty and grandeur of nature and the emotions from what I saw are simply indescribable …
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