TAKING THE PLUNGE!
How does it feel when you take your first jump into the blue? Adman Prahlad Kakar is here to tell how his first ever dive ended up with him opening up his own diving school!
Adman Prahlad Kakar has had many adventures in his lifetime, but there’s one that stands out—discovering the marine treasures of Lakshadweep and making them accessible to the world with his dive school, Lacadives.
My introduction to scuba diving was purely accidental. It happened on a cold windy day in Mauritius. I had gone there on a business trip with a friend. Since we were doing nothing on a Sunday morning, we decided to accompany some friends to a local diving school. We convinced the instructor to let us tag along with the divers to a nearby dive site at Trou-aux-Biches. Once there, all the divers kitted up, rolled off the side of the boat and disappeared, leaving the two of us and the boatman rocking on a rough sea. I get seasick in a bathtub, and I definitely had not found my sea legs by then. Looking slightly green behind the gills, I urged the boatman to drop us back to the shore. But he could not leave the divers behind. As I was about to upchuck my breakfast into the heaving ocean, the boatman took pity on me and gave me a mask (which I had never worn before) and a snorkel, and told me to jump off the side with the reassuring final words, “I promise, you’ll feel better.”
With a prayer, I scrambled off the boat into a very cold sea. The shock of the chilly water cured half my nausea, the other half disappeared when I put my head under the water. I could suddenly see everything below the surface—the divers, the reef, the fish. It was an introduction to a whole new world. After the brief swim, we convinced the very French instructor Hugh Vitry (we nicknamed him His Royal Baldness, for obvious reasons) to take us for a beginner’s dive. He had never seen Indians dive before, so his reluctance wasn’t unwarranted, but our persistent pleas paid off. The next day we found ourselves clad in a neoprine wetsuit.
Then came the moment of truth — my friend, a very nervous Pradeep Upoor, asked me to inform the instructor that he couldn’t swim. I blurted it out to Vitry mid-sea, “My friend can’t swim in the middle of the ocean.” Vitry looked at us both, shook his head in despair and told Upoor, “No problem. You come with me. I take you first.” Before Upoor
could protest, the Frenchman inflated his BCD (Buoyancy Control Device) and bundled him off the boat. After a bit of splashing around, the two disappeared into the blue, leaving me peering into the depths. Around 20 minutes later, they both surfaced with a whoosh, and to my great relief, Upoor was alive and smiling in a slightly insane manner.
“So how was it?”
“Brilliant!” he replied in his slightly dismissive, laconic manner.
I knew I couldn’t chicken out now. Guarding my goolies, I jumped off the boat clutching my breathing apparatus as if my life depended on it (it did!). As Vitry deflated my BCD and took me under, I stopped breathing, thinking I should conserve my air. The Frenchman waved a teacher-like finger at me and signalled that I should keep breathing. I let go of a lungful and replaced it with another, overcompensating in panic mode, and started floating up. Vitry looked at my panic-stricken eyes and gestured that I should relax.
As I descended, I saw something fluttering on the reef. Somehow, I swam towards the object, a book in Urdu. As I ran out of air, with most of it depleted in my surface-level anxiety, we both came up to the surface with the book pressed against my chest. It was a Quran. Thus started my unlikely journey towards setting up the first Indian dive school in the union territory of Lakshadweep—on Kadmat Island, which boasted a commanding Muslim majority. Prophetic event or just a coincidence? Nobody knows. Of course, it would take us nearly four years and certifications as dive masters with His Royal Baldness to get there. This is the story of our first exploration.
When the 10 of us, including my wife, were done with Vitry’s commando-like dive master training, we acquired a bunch of marine charts to look at the possibility of diving in the Indian Ocean. This is when we stumbled upon the coral islands of Lakshadweep on a merchant marine chart; most people hadn’t heard of the islands and no one really knew how to get there.
In those days, the only tours to the restricted islands were heavily supervised and totally government-run. After a year of red tape, we managed to get the permits required to go to the islands as an independent group of divers gauging the possibility of commercial diving. We set off by train to Kochi, loaded with diving equipment, then hopped on the rusty ‘Tipu Sultan,’ an old cross-channel car ferry converted into a passenger ship. As we sailed into the sun, the muddy waters gave way to an aquamarine sea. Our first stop was Kavaratti Island, the capital of the union territory. Eagerly leaning off the boat, we couldn’t believe how clear the sea was; we could spot the fish up to 10 metres deep. Once we had offloaded our heavy equipment into small boats that ferried us to the island, we met the two people who would be critical to the future of our dive school. Shaukat Ali was a national-level wind surfer and Mr Kasali headed the recreational watersports department. Shaukat managed to convince his one-eyed friend, Liaquat Ali (whom we called Arjun)—legendary sailor, fisherman and adventurer—to take us on our first dive off the Kavaratti wall.
I still remember every single detail of that dive. The visibility was over 35 metres; the wall went down 400 metres off the continental shelf and disappeared into the inky blue abyss. At 20 metres was a cascading wall of soft corals of all hues. Huge turtles with wise eyes shot off the crevasses on the wall at the rate of three per minute. There were hundreds of jewel-like reef fish glinting in the sunlight and gazing at us curiously. Nearly 20 metres below us, a couple of white-tip sharks patrolled the reefs with an eye each locked on us. I had never before seen a shark in the deep, and it was the most exhilarating experience ever. These elusive creatures have not changed much in the last million years and are the top predators of the seas. That first dive changed our lives. It had such a lasting impact on all of us that we realised Lakshadweep was the place to start our diving school. Shaukat helped us hire two Pablo fishing boats, about 10-metre-long, with really noisy engines, but rough and ready, with no compass or other navigational equipment. On a wing and a prayer, dependent totally on a foul-tempered captain, we headed off into the blue. We traversed five islands in 12 days, travelling at night, navigating by the stars and diving during the day at a new site every day. We called this the ‘Kon-Tiki Expedition’, inspired by the 1947 journey of the same name led by Norwegian explorer-writer Thor Heyerdahl.
We also came up with whimsical names for the dive sites we discovered. So the first one at Kavaratti became ‘The Wall of Wonders’; at Kadmat Island, where we stayed for two days, there came to be ‘Sting Ray City’, ‘Garden of Eden’, ‘East of Eden’,
We traversed five islands in 12 days, travelling at night, navigating by the stars and diving during the day at a new site every day.
‘Classroom’, ‘Double Reef’ and ‘North Cave’, where a large stingray slept in the depths of a gloomy cave full of mollusc and fish swimming upside down. Off the east side, we found ‘Lenny’s Cave’, named after a huge spotted leopard moray eel who befriended us. A couple of years later, Shaukat (after being trained by us as a diver) discovered a ledge at 36 metres at the southern tip of the island. It was full of resting sharks—white tips, black tips, grey reef sharks and nurse sharks. We named it ‘Shark-At Alley’ after him. Another dive site with a colony of moray eels was promptly declared ‘The Moray Eel Cooperative Society’.
Those 12 days were the most magical days of my life—high on adventure, adrenalin and amazing blue seas teeming with underwater life. The fishing boats we used had no shade, and by the end of the trip, we were all burnt a crisp walnut-brown and took to native clothing for whatever protection we could get. Back at the Bangaram Island Resort, our friends failed to recognise us.
It took us four years of solid lobbying to get the requisite permission to start the dive school, Lacadives, at Kadmat Island, but it finally happened in 1995. And we did, in a way, become local islanders, bringing up three sons on that magical archipelago.