Week 4....already??! what?

So I´ve officially been here a month. It seems like half that, at most. It´s just around the amount of time it takes to start feeling the rhythm of daily life here--the rotation of duties, the fickleness of the weather, the consistancy of the scenery. It´s a pretty good life.

This week was another bad diving week, unfortunately. It was also a bit of a bad luck week. Monday we didn´t dive until the afternoon due to some misplaced keys over the weekend (no emergency transport vehicle=no diving). Tuesday we got one morning dive in before deciding that the seas were getting too rough. Wednesday one of the keys to the boats snapped off, and that took a while to fix. Once that was done, the weather had once again taken a turn for the worse, and diving was cancelled for the rest of the day. Thursday´s waves were just terrible. Friday, the staff tried to appease us by scheduling one dive for each of us, but only my boat got to dive, because the other boat ended up with a bit of engine trouble, and because it was so difficult to tow it back to shore due to the surf, the rest of the dives were cancelled for that day too. Saturday was a torrential downpour like we´ve not yet seen the likes of in the entire four weeks we´ve been here. Thunder, lightning, wind and buckets. It was actually quite a lot of fun running around soaked to the skin, trying to gather as much water runoff from the roof to fill the well (which isn´t used for drinking, no worries...) because the buckets would fill up just about as fast as we could empty them. A lot of us also took advantage of the rain to get an extra shower in this week. It´s an interesting experience to shampoo your hair in the rain...I would recommend it to anyone that has the chance.

So Saturday was a dive washout as well, which means I got a total of 3 dives in this week. However, the week wasn´t entirely a loss despite the terrible wind. We went kayaking in the nearby lagoons, and saw a few splashes that might have been crocodiles. We also started a volleyball tournament, which I didn´t do too badly in, if I say so myself. My team won the first game 15-3). I also asked our resident fixer upper, Greg, if he might install a pullup bar for the girls, since the one for the guys is ridiculously high up, which he nicely did. So, in addition to heaving around air tanks, hauling myself out of the water into the boats, pushing the boats in and out of the water, and carrying other random scuba and boat supplies all the time, I can now also pull myself up and down a piece of driftwood during my free time. :)

That´s about it for this past week. Most EM´s left for Playa Del Carmen yesterday to party it up for the weekend. I gladly stayed here, to enjoy the calm of a base with only 9 people. The staff cooked dinner for us last night, as they do every Saturday night, and they definitely made my weekend by grilling bacon cheeseburgers with curried potatoes, coleslaw and guacamole. I´m fairly certain I was in ecstasy during the whole meal. I popped open a cheap bottle of champagne near midnight, and celebrated with the two EM´s still awake, the culmination of my 26th year on this lovely planet. Today, in about an hour, I get to go cavern diving in a nearby pair of cenotes called Dos Ojos, which promises to be fairly spectacular. I´ll give you a rundown of how that goes next week!