The Underwater Halloween Pumpkin carving

During Halloween time, we’re used to buy a nice pumpkin and have fun by carving it and create strange, funny or very frightening faces. Often we make this in our kitchen or anywhere else, but did you ever try to do this by diving 6 meter deep? I’d like to share with you a very funny and unique halloween experience I had the chance to live…

When Halloween is coming, it´s often the sign that summer is definitively over, and that the traditional autumn and winter time is beginning. But that’s only true in the northern hemisphere, because it’s on the reversed way in the southern part of the world. In French Polynesia, Halloween is more the sign that summer is coming and the natural conditions aren’t of course the same as in the northern hemisphere…

The guys from our diving centre in Raiatea are organizing every year a very special Halloween diving session, and I saked myself what kind of diving it could be…
The day before Halloween we had a call from the diving center telling us to buy a pumpkin and bring it at the Marina at 8 o’clock in the morning with some tools to carve it… that’s all. Well, we didn’t know exactly what it would bewere very curious about it…

Next day, at 8 o’clock, we met all the “teams”, because it was a competition: 7 teams of 2 people, one pumpkin each, every kind of tools allowed. We were told that we all will dive by 6 -7 meter deep (because deeper than that the pumpkin could implode, due to the water pression…) and that we’ll have 1 hour to carve the best pumpkin ever!! The winners will be the team which created the best halloween pumpkin in the minimum of time… even if there was no special prize for it, just for fun… and some drinks in the coming Halloween party :))

So, here we were all on the boat holding our Pumpkins and ready to jump into the clear turquese water. The most difficult is to bring the pumpkin underwater because this kind of heavy vegetable is floating and don’t want to dive! So we attached a lead belt around the pumpkin to bring it to the ground of the lagoon. Then began the carving job… We could draw just before diving the form we wanted to give to our pumpkin, but following the drawings underwater isn’t so easy! And as the vegetable is still full of air, it always want to go to the surface! One of us was holding it, the other one cutting. And then, finally, we saw some big bubbles coming out and… flouch… the top came out a bit like the cork of a bottle of champaign! Carving the inside was very funny because all the parts were floating in the water and a lot of little fishes came to eat the pupmkin parts and soon all disapeared… the fishes had a nice breakfast!!

And finally came the carving of the face… we made a special choice by carving 2 faces on our pumpkin, one laughing and one scary face. We didn’t notice the time and were very concentrated on our work. Finally, after 40 minutes we finished it and came back to the surface and didn’t know the positions of the other teams:what a surprise, we were the 2nd team to finish!! :))

All teams finished in time and after that, all pumpkins were shown in the Marina and a journalist of the local newspaper even came to write alittle article about this very special diving session. This was all about fun, and we had a great time to do this of course! I never could imagine before to carve a pumpkin underwater but it’s truly a very cool thing to do!! :))

(All the underwater shots were taken with the Nikonos V camera, the other shots with Diana Mini)

written by vicuna on 2009-11-24 #news #fun #water #lagoon #underwater #halloween #face #diving #experience #pumpkin #carving #diana-mini #nikonons-v