Random Thoughts

 I’m not exactly sure what to write about today.  I have a day off and I’m doing laundry and hanging out in my apartment this morning.  I start tomorrow on my Search and Recovery course and I have 1 more night dive tomorrow night to complete my Night Diver Specialty.  Other than a 3 minute 100-meter Tired Diver Tow and my dive site map, I’m done with my DM Certification course.  My body is the only thing that is telling me that I have been here for 2 months.  Every thing aches or is stiff.  I have too many cuts and bruises to count, and we won’t even talk about the bug bites.  The time seems to have gone really quickly.  There have been times when I thought it would never end, but those moments were fleeting.

I have some more observations about taxis;  Horns as a form of communication.  In the states a car horn has two purposes, a short beep is a greeting, a long honk is not.  Here in Roatan the horn is used to convey many different things.  Each one of these is preceded by the suggested number of toots.  For example, 1 beep means Hi, or 1 beep means Move over, Or...etc.  
Here is my list:

1 beep

Hi.

Move over.

Move over, you are driving to slow.

Move over, you are parked half way into the lane.

Move over or I’ll bump the back of your freaken’ scooter with my 1 ton cab.

Oh yea? Well, right back at ya’.

2 beeps

Hi.

Do you need a cab?

Are you sure you don’t need a cab?

No really, I’m a cab, and I’m available for you right now.

See?  I’m passing you while you are walking and obviously not needing a cab. But, I’m right here, so what do you think?  Wanna’ ride????

3 beeps

Hi.

I’m passing you.

I’m passing you on the left.

Hey, let me back in, there’s a dump truck coming.

I’m passing you on the right.

Oh yea? Well, right back at ya’.

My next observation is that there seems to be some kind of contest among all drivers, not just taxis; Who can get the closest to the person walking on the side of the road without smacking your mirror into their elbow (or their head, for trucks).  This goes for passing a scooter too.  If they could just nick the handlebar and send the scooter careening off the side of the road, I think they get extra points.

Last observation is that rain soaked roads are not a deciding factor in how fast one should drive.  And for two-wheeled drivers, it seems to just spur them on.  I think there is some theory that if you drive faster, you get there less wet.

Oh and I have a thought about the rain here and how people deal with it.  Rain seems to act as an acid to the folks here. They try not to get any on them.  I don’t understand this coming from the cold pacific-northwest.  It’s 80 to 90 degrees here.  The rain temperature is in the 70s.  In 5 minutes the rain will stop and you will instantly dry. Plus, it’s fresh, clean water.  Just makes me go “Hmmm”.

Wait, I have a couple of thoughts about two wheeled drivers.  Did someone outlaw eye protection on the island?  Not even sunglasses? Really?  And I think there is some kind of helmet law.  It has to say that you must have a helmet somewhere on your person or attached to your motor vehicle.  And wearing your full-face helmet on your head like a Yarmulke is cool.  Having your helmet hanging from your elbow will protect you from those car mirrors I wrote about earlier.  Oh, and there also must be some circus training here too.  They all have trained in how to get a whole family on one scooter.  And the really good ones can pile on groceries and pets too.

 Here's Saturday''s sunset.  We have been diving the other side of the island all week and we are back on this side tomorrow.  Whew!  Here are some shots from this week:

 And then yesterday's stormset:

More pics and pains...

Some random thoughts and photos

This moth was sitting on the ceiling.  And yes, those are 6 inch boards.

Why is it that I am not afraid of any of the millions of creatures I encounter while diving, but the creepy crawlies on land bother the hell out of me?

Taxi thoughts:

All the taxis have their "check engine" lights on and less than 1/10 of a tank of gas.

Every driver says they speak English when I ask, but they don't when we talk.

Most taxis look like they've been in demolition derbies on the outside, and just off the showroom floor on the inside.

All the drivers are my friends and they are giving me the best price.

Very cool people and neat stuff in the store.  Very helpful and informative and have a very hard job.  I have sponsored a dive site and it's called "The Garden of Hedon".

Peak Performance Buoyancy - Hovering with weights challenge.  This dive was like playing in the sand on the beach for an hour without the worry of getting sunburned.

These are definitely better in the video.

 Glider, the shop cat

I have 30 days left on the island.  I have met people that I hope will be my friends for life.  I have challenged my mind, body, and spirit beyond what I ever thought possible.  I have seen the beauty of the earth, and the ugliness of man.  I have learned new things and opened doors to a future of unlimited possibilities.  I know more now about what is important and what does not deserve my energy. 

I have seen sunsets that I will remember for the rest of my life.

An ill wind blows...

...and rain, and nasty seaweed, and a whole bunch of flotsam and jetsam.

Here's how it ended last night;  We knew the weather was coming so we sent a boat around to the other side of the island.  And we waited.

Normally the winds come from the east and we, being on the west side of the island, get a nice off shore breeze and the water is calm and the currents are easy to deal with.  Well the predictions were that starting this morning heavy rains, and high winds were coming from the west.  On shore.  The plan for days such as these is to load up all the gear, the tanks, and the divers, in trucks and vans and head to the east side where the water will be calm and the winds less strong.  So that's what we did.

Three days, nine dives, and a lot of time going back and forth across the west end of this beautiful island, and we are back home.  The weather has calmed to just rain and mild seas.  I have a day off and time to do laundry and blog.

When the wind and weather shifts they bring with them sargassum, a seaweed that grows on the surface.  There is a bunch of life growing and living in the seaweed.  Unfortunately when it washes ashore it brings with it all of the human garbage that has been caught up in it.  When it all hits the beach the sargassum and all the biologics die.  The combination of dead and dying sealife and human waste products is a fairly odorous and ugly event.

During the dives on the other side of the island I had an opportunity to practice-lead a dive.  I was joined by my instructor and two other divemasters and they were all going Lionfish hunting.  The Other side has a very different reef structure.  It is mainly a 170 foot wall, topped by a 15 to 20 foot deep plateau.  There is a slight current along the wall so most dives drift along at a predetermined bottom depth and then slowly rise throughout the dive.  Our computers calculate the amount of time our bodies can stay at certain depths and give us second by second updates as we dive.  This is called our NO DECO limits, for no decompression.  If you allow your dive to go beyond your NO DECO limit a mandatory safety stop is required.  Usually a safety stop is three minutes at 15 feet.  After a missed NO DECO, the time is stretched to 8 minutes or perhaps longer.  

I put myself into DECO while leading the dive.  I was not persistent with my divers to get them to follow my lead.  And allowed them to dictate my profile even though I was direct about my goals during the dive briefing.  This was my second dive of the day and I had already gone deep on the first dive.  Also, when we did our safety stop I only stayed for the standard 3 minutes.  Of course my computer wasn't pleased and let me know it by locking me out for 24 hours.  My instructor and the shop owner weren't pleased either and also "locked me out" for 24 hours.  The next day we were back at our shop and had scheduled 4 dives, three day and one night.  I was scheduled to do all four.  With the lockout, I was hopefully going to be able to only get on the night dive.  Night Dive is one of my specialty courses so I was hoping not to miss that one, because we do them so rarely.  This "punishment" taught me a very valuable lesson about leading a dive and NO DECO time limits.  Every day I learn something new and my confidence builds.

As it turned out the lockout ended up giving me an opportunity to learn a very valuable shop skill.  Filling and dealing with the tanks and the compressor.  When you have lemons...  I spent all day learning how to log, fill, and prepare the tanks that our shop produced throughout a very busy day.  And at around 3 o'clock my computer kicked back in and I was allowed to join the night dive at 6:00.

Night diving is a unique experience and requires a completely different skill set.  You only see what your flash light illuminates.  So it can be very claustrophobic and disorienting.  But it is also very exciting.  Many creatures only come out at night, like octopus, urchins, lobsters and many of the predator fish.  My job on this dive was to navigate us all back to the boat after my instructor lead us out for 40 minutes.  I failed but not miserably.  I got us heading in the right direction but not quite back to the boat.  I was not familiar with the dive site so I wasn't able to work from memory with the natural topography.  I was using the moonlight, shore lights glow and my compass.  Unfortunately there was a fairly decent cross current that pushed me off course.  At the end, my instructor took the lead over a wall to our right, and there was the boat. I was off by about 100 feet, but at night, that can be huge.

A highlight of the days across the island was finally a dive with my spear.  I killed 4 lionfish.  Here is my first kill.  We saved all the fish we killed that morning and gave them to our boat captain who lives on that side of the island.  By the time we returned from the second dive someone in his family had cooked them for him and delivered them back to the dock.  It doesn't get much fresher than that.

And the end of a very long day at the Reef Gliders shop. (My apologies for the blurry picture.  It was the camera not the tequila)

As the storm receded it left behind it cool weather and calm seas.  

And the last minute of a great day...

Pics and Pains

Greetings dear readers,  I forgot to add in my last blog, Going Deep, that I had my camera with me also.  Although Carey takes better photos than I do, I still enjoy taking a few snaps if I can.  Here are the ones I took while at 129 feet.  We stopped next to a turtle to do our skills work and he stayed with us throughout.  Carey is the one in the cat ears.

 If you notice in the pic to the right Carey is upside down.  This is her standard photo op. position.  It puts her head and the camera right over the subject with out disturbing the surrounding area and allows her bubbles to go up, away from her camera and her eyes.

Just for the record, I haven't taken my spear out on a dive since the first day we got our licenses.  I do plan to use it when I finish the course at the end of the month.  I believe Haller J. still has the record for us novices at 6.  The rest of these photos are just me fooling around with my camera.  The Go Deeper dock houses a personal submarine that takes two extra people with the driver down to 1000 feet. I heard its dark & cold and a bit cramped.  To say the least.

These photos are of the Garbage bloom that I spoke about in an earlier blog.  Hard to believe this sign is on the beach here and is written in spanish.  Basically it says, " Please don't throw your garbage on our beach.  It's our heritage."

The pic below is the one our dive master took as we surfaced from a dive.  This is what we ascended into.  The pic below that is the huge garbage drift off of Utila, our sister island.

These past few days have seen little activity at the shop.  It is the slow month and its also raining quite a bit.  But idle hands...So the shop owner has us cleaning gear.  Yesterday we scrubbed and bleached all the BCDs and took apart all the masks and disinfected and cleaned them.  Today Francois and I did a confined water dive in the bay outside the shop, and finished our underwater equipment exchange then we all cleaned every regulator in the shop.  Many of the restaurants and a few of the dive shops have closed for the rest of the month.  This is the time of year that people are doing their annual cleaning and maintenance, or just taking some well deserved time off.  November is supposed to pick up again and then the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays should start to bring back the tourists.  Our boat does not go out without paying customers so if the DMTs need to do course work we wait for people to come in to dive and we and our instructors tag along.  Otherwise, like today, we have to do our book work or shallow water work. 

I have 2 more specialties to complete.  Night Diver and Search and Recovery Diver.  I also only have 5 or 6 skills and practical applications to complete to finish my Dive Master certification.  The most daunting will probably be done tomorrow.  I will lead certified divers on a typical dive.  Unfortunately all the divers are instructors, dive masters or other DMTs.  They will try their hardest to do everything wrong, to make "fatal" errors, and to reek havoc on me and the dive whenever possible.  My job is to watch out, fix, help, and complete the dive too.  The whole time I'm also supposed to be pointing out the cool stuff and also navigate us back to the boat after an hour of diving.