Today was insane. There’s been a storm brewing since early yesterday and last night the deluge finally started. We went to bed and woke up to plus 30 knot winds and buckets of water falling out of the sky. The thundering of the frogs this morning (and right now) sounds more like a motorcycle race. It’s super late and I’ve no idea 1. how Ryan is sleeping next to me, and 2. how I’m going to fall asleep to this Indy 500.
Incidentally – here I go, off on my first tangent - all the creatures that give me the creeper jeepers inhabit this tropical paradise we’ve moved to. Besides the abundance of skeeters who don’t give me the willies, but do feast lavishly and nightly upon my naked flesh, there is an insane number of bats and frogs. And all these creatures come out to lurk in the dark when I can’t see them. Bats are blood-sucking chupa cabras and they flit and flap around and I’m scared shitless one of them is going to land on me.
I feel the same way about the frogs, they’re slimy and hoppy and unpredictable and you never know where they’re going to land and I’m scared shitless one of them is going to land on me.
I was walking home in the rain the other night and I got to the pathway to our room and my steps startled them and it was an avalanche of frogs. Tonight I walked home with Ryan and I made him walk ahead of me, open the door and turn on the porch light so I could see where I was going and make sure that I wasn’t going to step on one of those slimy bastards. I’m going to start taking a dive light with me for when I walk home alone at night.
I never thought of myself as a city girl – I’ve spent enough time in the country, on farms and around wild animals most people wouldn’t find particularly agreeable, and I have no issues diving with sharks and sea snakes, but maybe the bats and the frogs give away my true nature. You can take the girl out of the Louvre, but you can’t take the Louvre out of the girl apparently. Thank God there’s no frogs in the ocean - I think I’d go mad.
Ryan thinks I’m insane, of course.
So back to this morning…
We were at the shop bright and early amidst the buckets of rain pouring out of the sky to meet our students and divers. Ryan had three open water students that we’d taken to confined yesterday and I had two fun divers.
And now I’ll go off on my second tangent - I should go back a bit since I haven’t made any entries since we actually started work post-visa run. For the most part it’s been slow. We dove the first day more as a fun dive than anything – we followed Marcus, the manager of the shop as he took two rock-star DSDs (Discover Scuba Diving).
A few days later, after many many many hours of sitting at the shop surfing the web and me playing tons of backgammon, we finally both got out one day – Ryan with another two rock-star DSDs and me with an atrocious Scuba Refresher. The guy hadn’t been diving in 10 years and as it turned out, the only diving he’d done 10 years ago was his open water AND he was COMPLETELY spacially unaware. This led to the Facebook entry that some people really ought not dive.
I had a DMC (divemaster candidate) with me and she led the second dive and I rode his tank the whole dive and essentially navigated him and controlled the buoyancy for both of us. I was bumming ‘cause they were great dives – best viz EVER, saw tons of turtles, but he didn’t even want to hang out and watch the turtles for a while, just kept going.
In a 30 minute dive we covered more ground than I would cover in three dives with normal divers diving 60 minutes each dive. If it were just Ryan and I diving, it would easily take us four dives to cover that much ground doing 70 minute dives. Yes, he sucked through his air in 30 minutes.
And that had been it for the diving until today.
Of today, I will start by quoting Kirk who likes to say the following when conditions in Monterey are total crap: “you either have to pay someone or be getting paid to dive in conditions like these.” If you look at a map of Phi Phi, you’ll see that there’s two Phi Phi Islands, Phi Phi Don and Phi Phi Leh and south of Phi Leh, there’s two tiny islands, Bida Nai and Bida Nok (I think that I’ve previously described this). Normally we do the first dive on one of the Bidas and the second dive on Phi Leh after a surface interval in either Maya Bay (scene of “The Beach”) on the western side or Phileh Bay on the eastern side.
Today we were headed for Phileh as the forecast was predicting 3 meter swells (yes, that’s about 10 feet). We knew there was no way we’d make it to the Bidas. We made it about one wavelength out of Tonsai Bay and the boat turned around and headed right back into the bay. For all our California readers – that’s like getting on the Escapade and diving Outer MacAbee. Though our first dive might’ve been more like diving Outer DelMonte.
So Ryan was off with the three open water students, two of which opted out of dive one because of a narrowly averted hurlfest over the side of the boat. And I was off with my two fun divers – one fairly new diver – had just done his open water and advanced on Koh Tao and one young Brazilian fellow who hadn’t been diving in a couple years. Both fairly good – just all the usual that you’d expect from newer divers – one was a bit handsy. But they were decent on their air and I was able to get 2 fifty minute dives out of them.
The first dive I felt awful – it was a wall dive but because of where we dropped and the currents I ended up doing the length of the wall three times. There was just nowhere else to go. On most walls, I wouldn’t feel bad about doing that – you can do a nice multilevel dive and have lots of stuff to see. But I did feel bad because the wall just wasn’t that interesting. Thank goodness for the couple lionfish and boxfish I found and warty slugs (or whatever they’re called). And damn it, you go diving with me you WILL like nudibranchs – if you didn’t before, you will after!
The second dive, we dropped in the middle of the Tsunami Memorial where somewhere there’s a plaque buried to commemorate all those who perished. To keep things interesting, I said I’d buy a beer to anyone who found it. Noone did and we were off onto a very very very pretty reef, but again, other than the fact that the dive was “fishtastic” we didn’t see any of the really interesting critters that wow the tourists.
I’m critical, but my divers just loved it. And that’s what matters. I always forget that for newer divers, stuff that we take for granted is still really new and exciting for them.
Unfortunately one of my divers is leaving tomorrow, but I told the other one to commit to doing one more day of diving before he left. I told him to check in with me every day and we’d pick him a good day to go – he really wants to see the sharks and for that we have to go down to the Bidas.
Ryan had a much more challenging day than I did as he was doing students at sites he wasn’t familiar with, in conditions that were more challenging than normal and with at least one student who has her own set of challenges. And yes, doing a full open water with three students in 3 days is also challenging, especially when the conditions are challenging and the students have challenges. Have I said challenging enough in this paragraph?
With a bit of luck and Neptune getting a good night’s sleep and not waking up on the grumpy side of the ocean, Ryan might have better luck tomorrow.
I will not be on the boat tomorrow. I will be getting a nice sleep in AND I don’t have to be at the shop until 11 – very luxurious. I do have two students for EFR in the afternoon. They’ll also be doing rescue with us. It’ll be a bit more leisurely though as they’re in no rush to leave the island and seem perfectly content to let me tell them where to be and when.
I mentioned earlier that I’ve been playing a lot of backgammon. I used to play tons in college. When Ryan and I first started dating, I’d gone to Toys R Us and bought a backgammon set thinking that I’d get back into it and we could play. What I didn’t know at the time and subsequently found out is that Ryan has absolutely no interest in backgammon. So I don’t think that my backgammon set’s ever been cracked open. But the divemistress at the shop is crazy into it and we wheedle away the afternoon hours playing game upon game upon game to much stricter rules than normal. Checkers is also a big pastime at the shops, but I tend to think that checkers is boring – and there’s not necessarily a winner at the end – you can just keep going around and around the board avoiding the other guy’s checkers until somebody gets bored of looking at the board. Haha I made a funny, kinda, you think?
Something I’ve noticed is that Ryan and I are of a rare breed that actually dove at home and were dive professionals at home. Most people didn’t do any diving at home, left their homes and jobs on a whim (that part much like us) to come do all of their diving training here. One of my divers pointed it out to me today – told me I was the first person he’d met in Thailand who actually dove where I came from.
Paige, a divemistress at another shop, who’s frequently on our boat is from L.A. and is going home in November. She’s toying with diving Catalina when she’s home, but is put off a bit by the water temperature. I’m trying to convince her to have a go at it. She might – she’s dying to see otters, especially after I showed her a picture of Mr. Whiskers. I don’t have the heart to tell her that she probably won’t see otters off of Catalina, but she’ll see other really great stuff.
Same thing with my diver today. He’s from England. I told him there was great diving in England – told him I wanted to go dive there for the basking sharks. Of course, his ears perked right up when I mentioned sharks. When you consider how few people dive, it’s a shame. When you consider how few people dive places other than the tropics, it’s an even bigger shame. It makes me really grateful that I did give California diving a try and that now, there’s pretty much no place that I wouldn’t consider diving.
I’m off to bed now. It’s pushing midnight. And those slimy frogs are louder than ever. Frick!
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