Deaf divers sign in the soundless depths

Alex Frew McMillan -

After sunset one evening in August, Wendy Dannels prepared for the first night dive of her life off Moalboal, a resort town on the Philippine island of Cebu. She was on a 10-day diving trip on a boat called the Philippine Siren.

Ms. Dannels was visibly anxious before her dive, fumbling with her gauges and checking and rechecking them. Soon, she disappeared into the murky depths for just under an hour.

But after emerging, she was all smiles. She said she enjoyed the dive in the dark immensely, citing close encounters with crab and shrimp.

“My favorite part is the sparkling lights at night, the phosphorescence,” she said later through an interpreter. When you turn off your light at night and move your hand in the dark, she explained, the water shimmers with small, glowing bits of plankton. “The diving is a bit of an adventure,” she added.

Like about half of her shipmates, Ms. Dannels, 42, is deaf. She lost her hearing at 14 months when she contracted spinal meningitis. The diving trip was on her “bucket list” of things to do before she dies, she said. She found the tour on the Siren, a live-aboard ship, by searching the Internet for the terms “deaf” and “sailing.”

Her day job is teaching engineering at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf at the Rochester Institute of Technology.

The company that runs the Siren, Worldwide Dive and Sail, has been organizing regular trips for deaf and hard of hearing divers since 2004; it’s one of a handful of dive companies that offer specialty trips catering to divers with disabilities. The company typically runs one such trip a year, to diving destinations in places like Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines. (Its next trip is scheduled for September 2011 in the Maldives.)

The company’s founder, Frank van der Linde, got the idea for the trips after working on the Thai island of Koh Tao with Naomi Hayim, a British dive instructor who is deaf. Both Mr. van der Linde and Ms. Hayim serve as instructors on the trips, on which they try to insure a balance between deaf customers and those with normal hearing.

Read more...

Photo Alex Frew McMillan

Posted via http://batavia08.posterous.com batavia08's posterous