I apologize to my frequent readers out there who have been checking the site waiting for updates on our diving adventures. The reason I haven’t posted any such stories lately is that there really haven’t been any amazing adventures to report. In a way, that’s a very good thing. Diving certainly has some risk involved, and being a scuba instructor means that you are responsible for people and their safety. Wild adventures can have disasterous results, and so a nice long stretch of uneventful dives certainly has a silver lining to it. Of course the other side of that coin is that adventure is fun and it does not necessarily mean danger, and having some good adventures is the spice of life.
One of the reasons I don’t have great diving stories to report is that I’ve been diving a bit less lately. We’ve been a bit short-handed at my shop, and we’ve made some new hires in the last month or so. Because they are new they can’t handle being left to watch the store alone. We have a very strange cash-register (or “till” as the British call it), and we have two currencies and a bunch of credit card machines to deal with, and it takes a while to learn the system. The new folks are picking it up, but are not at the level of being able to be left alone yet. So now I find myself watching the shop a bit more than I’d like.
Another reason for my lack of excitement comes from the location of my job. My shop (Eden Rock) does a good deal of shore-diving. Two fantastic dive sites (Eden Rock and Devil’s Grotto) are about 100 yards off the shore, so they are very easy to get to — you just climb down the ladder, swim out a bit, and you are there. As a result, about 95% of our diving is done off the shore at these dive sites. Most shops do not have the great location we have and therefore do not have shore-diving (or if they do have it, they have not built it as the focal point of their business as my shop has), and as a result they do much more boat-diving than we do. At my shop we do some boat-diving, but not nearly as much as most other dive shops. The result is that the vast majority of my dive are on Devil’s Grotto and Eden Rock, and I’ve done these dives literally hundreds of times. They are great dives (really!), and nine out of ten divers that go with me come up at the end of the dive raving that it was their best dive ever. But for me, as I surpass dive number 300 on these sites, the dives lack the same level of excitement that they once had for me (and that they still have for my divers).
Despite that, I have had some smaller happenings that are worth sharing. Today I did lead a group of divers on a boat trip, and that some minor problems. On the first dive of the day we went down to 100 feet, and one of the divers in my group was a total air-hog. After 9 minutes he had used half of the air in his tank, and after 14 minutes he was at the point where, according to my dive plan, he should have been starting his ascent. Unfortunately we were nowhere near the boat at that point, since he was breathing through his air more than twice as fast as every other diver in the group (most of the other divers still had plenty of air left at this point). I had to put him on my alternate air source and let him breathe off of my tank for the next 10 minutes until we got back to the boat. Of course, he burned through most of the air in my tank during that time, and I had to really slow my breathing to make sure the tank lasted. Luckily it all worked out fine, and I got him (and the group) back to the boat without incident, and everyone had a fun dive.
I also had an interesting dive on Sunday. I was doing a Discover Scuba course for two people off of a cruise ship. There’s a popular saying down here about cruise-shippers: There are three types of people who go on cruises — newly-wed, over-fed and nearly-dead. I’ve blogged before about stereotypes, and by and large this stereotype is true (no offense to my family and friends who are, of course, exceptions to this and don’t fall into any of these categories). Well, in addition to these three classifications, I can add a fourth group of cruise-ship frequenters: White-trash rednecks. Yes, rednecks are drawn to cruise-ships like moths to a flame. And on Sunday I had two of the white-trashiest rednecks that are out there. It was a guy and a girl, and they were a couple. The girl was actually pretty attractive, if you could look past her horrible make-up job and horrible tank-top-sort-of-thing that she was wearing that her mom probably gave her after she retired from working the topless bars. The guy was a different story. He was a total grease-ball. I guess the best way to describe him was that he looked as if he took the caps off of beer bottles with his teeth. And one can only guess as to when he last showered — I was afraid that the cloud of dirt that came from him when we entered the ocean would cause my scuba gear to malfunction. Despite that, the hot girl was still digging him, and they kept kissing during the course (and I kept fighting the urge to vomit). I couldn’t understand the attraction, and it became even more of a mystery to me when I looked at the information they had given when they had signed in — she was born in 1987, and he was born in 1962. I don’t think “gross” is a strong enough word to describe this situation. She is 21 and he is 46?!?! Something’s not kosher there, folks. But that’s cruise-shippers for ya. Ordinary folk like me can’t figure them out. Who knows, maybe he owns the only goat in their hick little town and is therefore viewed as a catch. Or maybe her Pa promised her to the guy in exchange for a can of magic beans. Or, more likely, perhaps she is attracted to total losers. I guess there are some mysteries that will never be solved.
You know, I wonder if people see Andrea and I and make snarky comments about how I ended up with a hottie like her? Wouldn’t surprise me. Oh well, I guess that’s one of the trade-offs to having a hot wife – people always wonder what kind of blackmail material you have on her.
So those have been my big happenings relating to diving lately. I hope that the uneventfulness continues as far as drama and safety goes (I don’t want to come on here and blog about people getting hurt) but I do hope that I get a little more diving in the coming weeks, combined with a little more variety and some cool sightings (read: sharks). Whatever happens, though, I’ll be sure to come online and share any adventures that are worth sharing!
