Blind Scuba Diver Listens to Ocean’s ‘Orchestra’ to Navigate the Underwater World: ‘It’s Insane’

As a child, her parents used to call her “fish.” She was always tooling around in the pool, swimming throughout her junior school years. But when she turned 11, doctors diagnosed her with a rare “brain tumor” that stole away her sense of vision, leaving her “legally blind.” Her world turned completely black except for the pinpricks of light that looked like stars. But despite the disability and hopelessness, Jessica Pita rose to the challenge, and today she’s PADI’s (Professional Association of Diving Instructors) first South African blind scuba diver and a motivational speaker. Instead of seeing the ocean, she “listens” to the ocean. And when she does, it sounds like an “orchestra,” she wrote in The Guardian.

Hailing from her hometown in Benoni, Gauteng, Pita utilizes her heightened senses of hearing and muscle memory to fearlessly live her dream. Instead of focusing her attention on the colors and visuals, which she cannot do, she focuses on listening to the sounds of the deep waters. Everything, from corals to octopuses, from fish to seagrasses, is a unique musical instrument. And after almost a decade of experience in plunging into the waters, she now knows what these instruments sound like, including a shark. “Once, my buddy saw a shark swim underneath us and started humming the theme tune to Jaws to alert me to it. I couldn’t stop laughing,” she described to the outlet.

But this wasn’t what she expected the first time she dived underwater. The underwater world, she had thought, would be starkly quiet. If there was anything that she expected, at most, it was the sound of regular bubbles. But when she descended for real, the dive was “absolutely insane,” as she described in a footage shared by PADI. The dive, she said, didn’t actually register in her brain, and when she “heard” all the coral down there, she was “absolutely amazed.” At first, there were bubbling sounds indeed, but as they faded, a new sound emerged and clapped against her ears.

It was a strange “crackling” that made her feel as if she was “in the middle of a stadium.” “It was the weirdest sensation ever,” she said in the video. Over the next few years, she picked up other remarkable sounds from the watery soundscape, like the crunching sound of a parrot fish eating a hard coral and the popping sounds fish made nearby. She could hear the subtle sound the fish made with their fins as they glided through the waters.

Scuba diving, she said, has given her a lot of independence and confidence after her eye condition, dubbed “optic atrophy,” left her in a dark, depressing zone. She would often fall down staircases and bump into lamp-posts, hurting herself, sometimes to the point of needing stitches. It wasn’t just the defect in her vision that triggered her hopelessness. It was also the negative commentaries she got bombarded with, by people who said that her disability at such a young age was a weakness. She proved them wrong.

And after she got out of the depressive zone, she set forth to launch a mission to spread awareness among people to be kind and empowering to people with disabilities. She inspires these people with the message that anyone can dive and make a success of themselves, no matter what others tell them. “The ability to prove myself, I suppose, would be one of the things that motivates me.”