Compass tries out … Underwater pumpkin carving

It was the ultimate mash-up (or is that carve-up?). Halloween ghosts, ghouls, haunted houses and jack o’lanterns faced off against krakens, pirate ships, octopuses, pufferfish and seahorses in West Bay Saturday at an underwater pumpkin carving competition.

Fifteen feet beneath the surface, the Cayman Compass joined about 20 other divers, armed with a neutrally buoyant pumpkin, carving equipment, extra weights and a slight sense of the surreal.

Let’s just say, it wasn’t your typical scuba dive.

Indepth Watersports hosted the pre-Halloween carving competition, with buckets of candy and vouchers up for grabs for the winning designs.

I’d gone with a large-eyed critter resembling the Marvel character Venom. It was only when looking around at the other creations being carved beneath the waves around me that I realised Venom wasn’t exactly the theme.

Among the stellar images emerging beneath the focused divers’ serrated pumpkin carving knives were sharks of many ilks and sizes, a giant squid, a pirate ship being pulled underwater by a mighty kraken (earning third place); a ghostly but friendly-looking octopus (second place) and a puffer fish, complete with spines (first place). There were also some more traditional, but also quite impressive Halloween-themed pumpkins.

The morning started with us seated at tables, on land, cutting the tops off our sturdy orange gourds and scooping out their guts. Then we sketched out our designs with pencils or markers on the pumpkin’s surface, added a soft dive weight inside and then reattached the lid, securing it with toothpicks to stop it floating away once we were underwater.

Word came from some divers who’d already ventured into the water – cut a few holes in the top to let the air out, otherwise it won’t sink. That turned out to be very solid advice, as, even with some holes poked out, it still took about five minutes for my pumpkin to release all its air and stop pretending to be a balloon.

Then the fun really began. Kneeling on the seabed, carving tool in hand, I start to cut out Venom’s eyes. It turned out to be a bit harder than I’d anticipated. After five minutes of sawing, my arm muscles are beginning to fatigue a bit. I wish I’d picked smaller eyes … With a bit of reposition, I realise it’s less work to carve with the pumpkin directly beneath me rather than coming at it from the sides, and the second eye takes much less time.

One of the rules of underwater pumpkin carving, and scuba in general, is don’t leave anything behind you in the sea, except bubbles; i.e., clean up your mess, which is pretty good advice on land as well, actually.

Thankfully, eagle-eyed Indepth instructor Dan Schofield is somehow, miraculously, always hovering just above me, mesh bag in hand, awaiting the detritus of my pumpkin carving. At one point, he indicates that I should just open my hand and let the pumpkin leftovers I’d been holding, from the zig-zag teeth I’d carved, float above me, and casually lets them meander into the mouth of the open bag.

I’d half expected our activities to attract curious and perhaps hungry fish, but they pretty much ignored us. Although, young Quinn Henderson, 11, who’d carved the aforementioned friendly octopus ghost pumpkin, and his parents Cheri-Ann and Duncan had a cool encounter with an actual octopus as they swam their creation back to shore.

My pumpkin, which fought me on the way down, was even more recalcitrant on the way up. Newsflash, a hollow object tends to fill with water, so when you lift it up, it’s pretty darn heavy. Note to self, drain the pumpkin before attempting to hand it up to whatever helpful soul is offering to carry it up the ladder for you.

I handed my pumpkin, water flowing out its jagged mouth like a weird orange waterfall, to Indepth’s Kelly Carpenter, who had helped organise the event.

She explained that the idea of the pumpkin carving event came about when during a conversation among the instructors, it emerged that a number of them had Underwater Pumpkin Carving certifications. Yes, that’s a real qualification, and one that participating divers on Saturday could obtain once they’d successfully carved their pumpkins.

Carpenter said, “We were just thinking, what could we do that’d be fun? Would people be interested? So, we sent a message to our regular divers and everyone said, ‘Yes, sign me up.'”

She added, “It was really fun to see how smoothly it went and how well it worked, so I think we’re going to keep doing it.”

In the end, 12 pumpkins were judged by the competitors themselves. In a nod to the tradition of handing out enormous amount of sweets and candy during Halloween, everyone was given three lollipops, equating to three votes each. The winner, Mabel McMillan and her puffer fish, complete with a kissy mouth made of a Tootsie Roll, earned an impressive 21 lollipops; in second place was young Quinn, with 18 lollipops; and Raquel Tobain’s kraken and pirate ship with 17.

Me? I got three lollipops. And no, I don’t think I was robbed!

This is the latest in a recurring “Compass tries out …” series.