I can´t believe I went scuba diving on Thanksgiving. Talk about a surreal experience. The weather was absolutely gorgeous, warmer even, than it has been recently. The sun was shining, the breeze was perfect, the water was turquoise, and I had my very first successful monitor dive! It took me eight weeks, but I´ve finally contributed to the body of scientific data that we´ve been gathering here in Sian Ka´an!
How a monitor dive works: I´m a Point Intercept monitor, which means that at a particular given monitor site, I will decend with a weighted measuring tape, and lay a straight line of 30 meters down on the reef. My buddy behind me is a Coral Communities monitor. He swims behind me, making sure that the tape lays flat on the reef. We both swim back to the beginning of the line, and then I record on a slate the start time and depth, as well as the compass bearing of the line. Then I begin recording what lays beneath the tape every 25 cm. That´s a total of 120 items along 30 meters. Behind me, my buddy records on his slate every coral beneath the line that is 10 cm or larger, and it what condition (ie, diseased, bleached, healthy) it is in, plus a lot of other data like the dimentions and color and such. We can only be one arms length apart, so we need to work without bashing each other with our fins and such. We´re upside down for most of the time! Once we get to the end of the 30 meters, we record the end time and depth of the line, and reel the tape back up. By then, it´s just about 40 minutes, which is the limit of our dive, and we slowly head back to the surface, with a 3 minute decompression stop at 5 meters, just for safety´s sake.
Just after that dive completed however, I took the fastest bucket shower possible, and raced to the kitchen. Why? Because the Americans were cooking Thanksgiving dinner, that´s why! The British didn´t really understand what the fuss was all about, but they were certainly okay with allowing us to take over the kitchen (no one really loves kitchen duty). So we planned a menu, and slaved in the kitchen all day between dives, and VOILA! A magnificent feast was prepared! With 25 people on base, it was left to four of the Americans to prepare the meal....we had a fantastic spinach and cheddar dip for an appetizer. Then, there was a salad with gorgonzola cheese and avocados with a sesame ginger dressing. Mexico doesn´t have too many turkeys so we had to subsitute with roast chickens. I made the stuffing! Thanks Mom for the amazing recipe! People positively salivated when hearing there was bacon in it! We also had sweet potato mash with marshmallows and a green bean casserole. Finally, we had an apple-pear pie, and a pumpkin pie made from roasting an actual pumpkin...no canned pumpkin for us! The rest of the EMs were blown away by the effort we put in, (and we were also a bit amazed at how well it turned out!) and were very very Thankful! We arranged the tables into one very long table, and I asked that we go around the table and say one or two things for which each of us are thankful. Most mentioned the food, but also the amazing friends and experiences we´ve had, due to this expedition. We definitely all felt fairly blessed.
That was the end of the week, but the beginning definitely didn´t start off that well. For one, I was stung by either a bee or a scorpion on Monday. Yep. Monday was rather like one of those terrible horrible no good very bad days, except that I was in Mexico, so how can you really complain? I nearly got hit by the boat twice when getting in and out of it, I was absolutely exhausted from still having a bit of lingering illness, and on top of it all, when I came back to dive, I headed straight to the kitchen to help with dinner. I grabbed my tshirt, which was laying on the vegetable bin cabinet, and in the process of putting it on, got stung right over my heart by....something. I yelped, and struggled to untangle myself from the shirt, while trying not to rip my bathing suit top off as well. It HURT! Imagine a large booster shot-sized needle jabbing into your chest and being swished around a bit...that´s a little like what it felt like to me. Then it started to burn in growing ring around the sting, which eventually spread into the shoulder joint, making it difficult to lift my left arm without a fair bit of soreness. But we never saw what stung me! No one saw anything fly away, but they searched my shirt and didn´t find a scorpion either. It was a single sting, so it wasn´t a spider, but considering how much it hurt, and what the spot where I was stung looked like, (one of the staff is familiar with scorpion stings, and agrees with me) I´m considering it a scorpion sting (plus, it´s much cooler to say I got stung by a scorpion than a stupid little bee). I immediately informed the staff, who provided me with some cream for immediate pain relief, as well as hydrocortisone to help with the reaction. I also took a antihystamine pill to counteract anything that might affect me internally, and stayed in the company of others for at least an hour afterwards, to make sure it wasn´t the poisonous kind of scorpion. Success! No poison for me, just a world of pain for a short time. The real pain subsided within 20 minutes. After that, it was just really really sore, and after 3 hours, it was nearly gone, aside from a bit of stiffness in my shoulder. A lovely way to start the week!
Tuesday was windy, and they cancelled the diving after one rather unsuccessful morning dive. Wednesday brought a few mini monsoons, though we did our best to dive around them. This is why the amazing weather of Thursday was so magnificent! A very crappy week finally turned amazing, just in time for the most delicious holiday of the year.
Friday was super windy again, but they let one set of dives go out in the morning just to see how the conditions were. Visibility was about 2 to 3 meters...we were essentially diving in an underwater sandstorm. But the other divemaster candidates and I needed to rack up our dives, so they let a few of us have a second dive, and cancelled the rest, starting the weekend early. We don´t get an extra long weekend like all of you do, though. After half of Friday and all of Saturday off, we go back to work on Sunday! Hopefully I´ll finally get my Rescue Diver certification finished tomorrow, and then it´s on to Divemaster training! By the way, have I mentioned how much I´m in way over my head with this?? There are timed swims, with fins and without, along with timed tired diver tows, and physics and physiology tests, and a bunch more! Eek! But it´ll be fine. I hope.
See you all next week!
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