tyesai

A couple of weeks ago one of my brothers asked me "why do you dive? what do you like about it?" So for no particular reason I started writing and here is my confession.

Culmination. It sometimes starts two or three days in advance. I’ll plan an entire week around it. Being in the military not only do I have to work, I have work after work, aka physical training and then there is the shift work schedule to deal with, 1900-0700, P.T. at 0730-0830, that is 13 ½ hour day. Oh yeah did I mention I go to school full time and have a family. So I say to myself. O.K. if I hit P.T. on Monday and Tuesday morning I won’t have to go Wednesday or Thursday (my days off for this week). I can stay up till noon on Wednesday, sleep till 1600 or so, get back up, stay up till 0300'ish Thursday morning sleep till 0730, that will give me about 8 hours of sleep in a 24 hour period and I can get up drive an hour and half, dive till 1300, then drive back home and not fall asleep at the wheel and die. As Charlie Sheen once said "winning"….

So there I’ll be at 0730, waiting for the water to boil so as to be able to make an extremely strong cup of joe in the French press, (I’ll never go back to a traditional coffee maker and you can keep your $150 Kurig), gear bag packed and loaded in the trunk of the 06 Buick LeSabre that has a cracked headlight lens from a 2 foot steel pole strategically placed in the middle of a parking lot in Kizkalesi Turkey and a 6 foot scrape down the side from the extremely rare overzealous Spanish driver jamming my wife into a cobblestone roundabout. I stand by the stove, staring into the steel pot willing it to boil, with no real coherent thoughts passing my minds eye. I fill up the stainless steel double walled 12oz mug, take a sip of the scalding hot liquid, curse under my breath that it is hot, wait ten more minutes, pound the rest, hugs and kisses to all, and I’m off.

It is 0813. I impatiently wait till 0817 and call James. “I’m in the parking lot,” I tell him. James should know that when I say I’ll be there at 0815 there are only two possible outcomes. I will be there at 0815 or Satan and the four horsemen will ride and I will be there at 0815 anyway. Either way, I know not why I have to call to fetch him from his room but today is no different. Mildly annoyed I make the call to let him know I’m here. James saunters down, swimsuit in hand. James is a new diver as well; so new that he is working on his first set of open water dives for his PADI certification. I am a master diver comparatively, I’ve longed 20 dives since training but 6 of them have been this month including a Peak Performance Buoyancy course. Yep, I’ll be on my way to my IDC, (Instructor Development Course) in just a few more months.

The reality is that I know how bad I am at diving. I came into diving with the dream of rolling off the boat and dominating the under water world, making scuba Steve my bitch and fast tracking into being a dive instructor, making easy money on the weekends showing the deck bunnies in their bikinis how to buckle that top chest strap on their BCD. How sad I was to discover that diving in in of it self is fairly easy, but to do it well is a whole other ball game. Besides nobody is hot in a wetsuit with a snotty nose shivering on the back of a boat.

As James finishes his saunter to the vehicle as only a young, cocksure 20 something can, I impatiently listen to Dave Mathews roll into Rage Against the Machine from a C.D. I burned off of my I-Tunes. See a Buick LeSabre is an old mans car, and it lacks the aux jack so I’m not able to just plug in my I-Touch, much to the dismay of all my younger co-workers and friends, after they ask if they can plug in their I-Pod as my music apparently sucks. “What the hell is this?” they say, “what do you mean you don’t have an aux jack”. I then have to explain to them that when they were 15 not every car came standard with an aux jack, especially old men cars, and seven short years ago not everyone had an Apple I-Pod / I-Touch / I-Pad, including myself so it was a non-issue back in the day.

All I was concerned about was getting rid of the 2-door Honda Civic so as when we I drove down the road I wasn’t bunched behind the steering wheel as my 1 month old daughters baby carrier jammed into the drivers seat. As I often had the chore of driving, I frequently sat jammed into the steering wheel with a baby carrier poking through the back of the seat an aux jack as an option was the least of my concerns when purchasing the car.

So why not just move the baby carrier to passenger side you maybe asking yourself? Me too, I asked it quite frequently and the answer my lovely wife gave was that “I can’t check on her if she is behind me”. See this was our first-born child and my wife was constantly turning around fussing and cooing to her in a vain attempt to get her to be quiet, as she was quite demanding. This task would have been impossible if the car seat was directly behind her, so there I sat jammed into the wheel, crying baby, elbow in my side and the back of Michelle as the very non-helpful view in my rear mirror.

With James’s strut to the car finally complete, vamos, destination, Tarifa, the southern most tip of Spain, wind surfing capital of Europe. The winds, or the levante as the Spanish refer to it is an east, northeast wind that blows through the Straights of Gibraltar. The area will quite often have 20-knot winds, with 30 or 40 knots not a bit abnormal. But this morning the wind is absent. Not even a nary flutter from the many banners and windsocks that hang outside the kite surfing schools. The sky is a dark blue dominated by mostly white, cottony, cumulous clouds and the ocean is an equally impressive blue that unlike the clouds, is flush and only punctuated by the softest waves. It is going to be a good day.

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