Sand. Endless, undulating waves of sand. Alone with nothing to keep me company but a thirst powerful enough to drop a camel.
Escaping Chicago as the first storm of winter prepared to shut down airports, I had looked forward to sunny beaches, bikini clad lasses and underwater delights advertised on colorful websites as like nothing you have ever seen before! Ive seen sand before.
How did I end up in this desert? More importantly, how was I going to get out?
Chaos, they say, starts with the flapping of a butterflys wings. With me, chaos usually starts with a broken synapse. One little electrical misfire in my cranium and somewhere down the line I find myself in an adventure that might me of my own making but seldom of my own choosing.
Last January I came up with the bright idea of escaping Chicagos chilly embrace with a weeklong sail as working crew aboard the wooden schooner S.V. Denis Sullivan, home port Milwaukee, winter port Miami. Nothing like hard, physical labor in the humid heat of South Florida and the Bahamas to whip myself into shape and beat the winter doldrums. The thrill of standing night watches in chilly, wind whipped rain soon wore off. With little else to do aboard as we sailed pointless circles, I contracted pneumonia to add variety and entertainment.
However, pre-pneumonia and still dreaming of tropical loveliness, I had recalled that my list of lifelong dreams included becoming certified in SCUBA diving. As I tick items off this dream list I cannot shake the feeling that I have somehow swapped my list for someone elses. Somewhere out there is a fit, active, strong young man who is wondering why his lifelong dream list consists solely of finding a comfortable easy chair in front of a widescreen TV.
A I researched SCUBA all right, lets stop this nonsense right here. Yes, SCUBA is an acronym for Self Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus and yes, acronyms should be capitalized but capitalizing SCUBA all over the place seems pretentious and unnecessary. Besides, I cant type that well so SCUBA will hereafter be referred to as the unpretentious, everyman sport known as scuba. Ahhhh, that feels much better.
As I researched scuba, I discovered that dive shop owners long ago determined that diving without certification is an extremely unsafe activity. Imagine the lawsuits that could endanger the livelihood of scuba professionals if they gave air and gear to untrained vacationers. You could have more lawyers than bodies popping up on tropical beaches. To mitigate this risk, the professionals created a whole slew of certification agencies to provide a buffer between the recreational diver and the dive boat/shop/tank professional. If, along the way, some new divers actually learned a few things, well so much the better.
Seriously, the training regimen could be quite good but it tends to be customer driven and customers want results NOW so what used to be slow, step by step, experiential learning is now as easy as a quick weekend book and swim session. As I have the attention span of a gnat, I signed up for a weekend quickie course. While that sounds easy, it was actually difficult to find a local shop that would let me pick up the pre-course material on a Thursday night with the promise that I would be all read up and ready to go Saturday morning. Most shops thought that was pushing things a little too far but I finally found one with a more relaxed attitude. I read the book Friday night, attended class on Saturday, bought some basic gear and headed to the pool on Sunday for a five hour training session.
Five hours in a pool is a long time. Especially when you cant swim. I cant swim. How DID I end up with the wrong dream list?
Somehow I passed the various in-water tests (I backstroked through the swim test and floated on my back for the treading water test) and, with my handy dandy referral card in hand, I headed to Florida where I would complete my four Open Water Certification dives in the Keys after my schooner folly.
Diving with a cold is unwise. Diving with sinus congestion can be dangerous. Diving with pneumonia is what I wanted to do. Even after the schooner captain discussed medevacing me off the ship at one point, I was still determined to dive when I got back to Miami. One throaty call to the dive boat captain nixed that. I believe his words were I really hate doing body recoveries.
So scuba faded into the background, where it belonged, until the end of summer. Having nothing else to do one weekend, I decided that strapping on 80 pounds of gear and wading into a murky, cold, flooded quarry sounded like fun. I called the dive shop to set up my certification dives but they told me they were full for the weekend. Scuba certification drifted away again and common sense looked like it might actually win a round for once.
Unfortunately, on a simple drive through the countryside one fine autumn day, I happened to pass the scuba shop. I stopped in to ask how long my pre-certification training was good for and they told me that I had to complete the open water dives within 12 months of passing my written and pool tests. I hung out for awhile and looked at all the cool equipment. Ignoring the fact that most of this equipment was designed to try and keep you alive in a decidedly hostile environment IF you used it correctly I thought it all looked cool. I also thought that I never wanted to go through those pool sessions again because they were so tiring for a non-swimmer such as myself. What I did NOT think was Why do you, one who is so uncomfortable in the water, even CONSIDER diving? Do you really need another dangerous, expensive sport? No, I didnt think that.
So I signed up for a refresher course in the pool (no swim test!) and planned my diving getaway. I dreamt of all sorts of lush, tropical islands. I could see myself relaxing poolside after my cert dives, regaling the lasses with stories of shark battles and sunken treasures.
I ended up in Ft. Lauderdale instead. A city consisting entirely of equal parts concrete and mildew. Fortunately, there were many bikini clad lasses. Unfortunately, they were forty years my senior and Im no young pup myself.
This trip was all business. Mostly business for the dive shop that outfitted me with an absolutely amazing amount of gear. Given my newbie scubie status, I did not have the experience to separate the hype from the helpful. I bought a lot of hype. Pretty good gear too. At least thats what the brochures and dive magazines said and if you cant trust them then who can you trust? Besides, I needed the best. I was planning to actually go under the water on the open ocean. Why? I have no idea.
On one of the last flights to leave Chicago before a storm shut everything down, I paged through several dive magazines and discovered that I could become a professional diver. Of course the good jobs were in industrial diving. Low pay, high risk thats the life for me. With a lot of hard work, I could actually trade the stress of sitting comfortably behind a desk all day for the pressure of 200 feet of water on my body. Maybe not.
As we flew over the Everglades, I marveled that some people actually claim to enjoy exploring that fetid wasteland. Upon arriving in Ft. Lauderdale, I could understand the attraction. Give me gators and bat sized mosquitoes any day over the concrete and noise of one of Americas favorite retirement destinations. Scratch that. After a day wandering around Pompano Beach, I am convinced that people do not go there to retire. They go there to die. Slowly.
The rest of my party of divers had arrived a day early so they could get in some deep dives without a newbie slowing them down. I met them early that evening after they returned from their dive. Walking into a reeking hotel room littered with spent bodies and wet gear, I met my new buddies. After listening to their tales of zero visibility and 8 foot surface swells, I returned to my room to see if I had receipts so I could return all my gear. This did not look, smell or sound like the glossy brochures.
Escaping Chicago as the first storm of winter prepared to shut down airports, I had looked forward to sunny beaches, bikini clad lasses and underwater delights advertised on colorful websites as like nothing you have ever seen before! Ive seen sand before.
How did I end up in this desert? More importantly, how was I going to get out?
Chaos, they say, starts with the flapping of a butterflys wings. With me, chaos usually starts with a broken synapse. One little electrical misfire in my cranium and somewhere down the line I find myself in an adventure that might me of my own making but seldom of my own choosing.
Last January I came up with the bright idea of escaping Chicagos chilly embrace with a weeklong sail as working crew aboard the wooden schooner S.V. Denis Sullivan, home port Milwaukee, winter port Miami. Nothing like hard, physical labor in the humid heat of South Florida and the Bahamas to whip myself into shape and beat the winter doldrums. The thrill of standing night watches in chilly, wind whipped rain soon wore off. With little else to do aboard as we sailed pointless circles, I contracted pneumonia to add variety and entertainment.
However, pre-pneumonia and still dreaming of tropical loveliness, I had recalled that my list of lifelong dreams included becoming certified in SCUBA diving. As I tick items off this dream list I cannot shake the feeling that I have somehow swapped my list for someone elses. Somewhere out there is a fit, active, strong young man who is wondering why his lifelong dream list consists solely of finding a comfortable easy chair in front of a widescreen TV.
A I researched SCUBA all right, lets stop this nonsense right here. Yes, SCUBA is an acronym for Self Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus and yes, acronyms should be capitalized but capitalizing SCUBA all over the place seems pretentious and unnecessary. Besides, I cant type that well so SCUBA will hereafter be referred to as the unpretentious, everyman sport known as scuba. Ahhhh, that feels much better.
As I researched scuba, I discovered that dive shop owners long ago determined that diving without certification is an extremely unsafe activity. Imagine the lawsuits that could endanger the livelihood of scuba professionals if they gave air and gear to untrained vacationers. You could have more lawyers than bodies popping up on tropical beaches. To mitigate this risk, the professionals created a whole slew of certification agencies to provide a buffer between the recreational diver and the dive boat/shop/tank professional. If, along the way, some new divers actually learned a few things, well so much the better.
Seriously, the training regimen could be quite good but it tends to be customer driven and customers want results NOW so what used to be slow, step by step, experiential learning is now as easy as a quick weekend book and swim session. As I have the attention span of a gnat, I signed up for a weekend quickie course. While that sounds easy, it was actually difficult to find a local shop that would let me pick up the pre-course material on a Thursday night with the promise that I would be all read up and ready to go Saturday morning. Most shops thought that was pushing things a little too far but I finally found one with a more relaxed attitude. I read the book Friday night, attended class on Saturday, bought some basic gear and headed to the pool on Sunday for a five hour training session.
Five hours in a pool is a long time. Especially when you cant swim. I cant swim. How DID I end up with the wrong dream list?
Somehow I passed the various in-water tests (I backstroked through the swim test and floated on my back for the treading water test) and, with my handy dandy referral card in hand, I headed to Florida where I would complete my four Open Water Certification dives in the Keys after my schooner folly.
Diving with a cold is unwise. Diving with sinus congestion can be dangerous. Diving with pneumonia is what I wanted to do. Even after the schooner captain discussed medevacing me off the ship at one point, I was still determined to dive when I got back to Miami. One throaty call to the dive boat captain nixed that. I believe his words were I really hate doing body recoveries.
So scuba faded into the background, where it belonged, until the end of summer. Having nothing else to do one weekend, I decided that strapping on 80 pounds of gear and wading into a murky, cold, flooded quarry sounded like fun. I called the dive shop to set up my certification dives but they told me they were full for the weekend. Scuba certification drifted away again and common sense looked like it might actually win a round for once.
Unfortunately, on a simple drive through the countryside one fine autumn day, I happened to pass the scuba shop. I stopped in to ask how long my pre-certification training was good for and they told me that I had to complete the open water dives within 12 months of passing my written and pool tests. I hung out for awhile and looked at all the cool equipment. Ignoring the fact that most of this equipment was designed to try and keep you alive in a decidedly hostile environment IF you used it correctly I thought it all looked cool. I also thought that I never wanted to go through those pool sessions again because they were so tiring for a non-swimmer such as myself. What I did NOT think was Why do you, one who is so uncomfortable in the water, even CONSIDER diving? Do you really need another dangerous, expensive sport? No, I didnt think that.
So I signed up for a refresher course in the pool (no swim test!) and planned my diving getaway. I dreamt of all sorts of lush, tropical islands. I could see myself relaxing poolside after my cert dives, regaling the lasses with stories of shark battles and sunken treasures.
I ended up in Ft. Lauderdale instead. A city consisting entirely of equal parts concrete and mildew. Fortunately, there were many bikini clad lasses. Unfortunately, they were forty years my senior and Im no young pup myself.
This trip was all business. Mostly business for the dive shop that outfitted me with an absolutely amazing amount of gear. Given my newbie scubie status, I did not have the experience to separate the hype from the helpful. I bought a lot of hype. Pretty good gear too. At least thats what the brochures and dive magazines said and if you cant trust them then who can you trust? Besides, I needed the best. I was planning to actually go under the water on the open ocean. Why? I have no idea.
On one of the last flights to leave Chicago before a storm shut everything down, I paged through several dive magazines and discovered that I could become a professional diver. Of course the good jobs were in industrial diving. Low pay, high risk thats the life for me. With a lot of hard work, I could actually trade the stress of sitting comfortably behind a desk all day for the pressure of 200 feet of water on my body. Maybe not.
As we flew over the Everglades, I marveled that some people actually claim to enjoy exploring that fetid wasteland. Upon arriving in Ft. Lauderdale, I could understand the attraction. Give me gators and bat sized mosquitoes any day over the concrete and noise of one of Americas favorite retirement destinations. Scratch that. After a day wandering around Pompano Beach, I am convinced that people do not go there to retire. They go there to die. Slowly.
The rest of my party of divers had arrived a day early so they could get in some deep dives without a newbie slowing them down. I met them early that evening after they returned from their dive. Walking into a reeking hotel room littered with spent bodies and wet gear, I met my new buddies. After listening to their tales of zero visibility and 8 foot surface swells, I returned to my room to see if I had receipts so I could return all my gear. This did not look, smell or sound like the glossy brochures.
He insisted that I did not need that much weight and my instructor chimed in as well with his opinion that I was going to be ridiculously over ballasted.
