Week 10....and that´s a wrap.

Could I really be finished already? Time has a funny way of moving. The middle 6 weeks of the program really seemed to crawl at times, but the first and last two weeks positively zoomed by.

Currently I´m in an internet cafe in Playa Del Carmen. They packed us into a collectivo (bus-taxi) yesterday and sent us away from our home at Pez Maya. I´m seriously going to miss the beauty and isolation of that place. Relatively few cars on the ¨road¨, next to no tourists floating around--just the 25 of us, living on our own little stretch of mangrove beach. The lagoon to the left, the point to the right. The hammocks under the palm trees. (I´ve decided that hammocks need to be a permanent part of my life from now on.) The communal area, the kitting up area, the kitchen, the office, the volleyball court. The huts. These places were home to me. Tulum was the near by town that started to actually feel like a city to me by the end, with all it´s electricity and smattering of bars and clubs. (It´ll be interesting to return to Boston and recall what a real city is...)

All I can say is my return really is going to be a shock in so many ways. Friends and family tell me it´s 20 degrees F. at home, currently. That´s a solid 70 degrees lower than it is here, today. And public transportation! I´m terrified to return to the T. So many people, so squished! I suppose I may still hear Spanish spoken here and there in Boston, but certainly not like here. My comprehension has improved quite drastically! I´ll miss not hearing the quick cadence of the Spanish language every day. And diving... I have no idea when I will get the chance to dive again, and that makes me quite sad. Even the chance to swim! I was in the water every single day that I wasn´t sick or travelling, and to return north at the very start of winter will be rough. I´ll have to see if I can join a YMCA or something.

I suppose I should say a word or two about my actual last week at Pez Maya. It´s a little difficult, because I´m currently much more prone to musing about the trip as a whole, but I´ll do what I can!

I had a little case of Conjunctivitis at the end of week 9 that put a serious kink in my plans for divemaster. The number of possible dives left was rapidly decreasing as the days swept by, and I needed to have 60 before I went home in order to qualify for the certification, so it was going to be a tight fit if I was to make it. I also needed a certain number of training dives, such as assisting with an Open Water Advanced dive, assisting with O.W. students in confined water, leading certified divers on a dive, and demonstrating all 20 required O.W. skills. One of the last dives is a stress test, where they score you on your ability to stay calm under stressful dive situations. For us, that meant a complete equipment exchange, under water. While buddy breathing. For the layman, that means the BCD (tank, vest, and regulator) and fins and mask must be transferred between two people, while they are sharing only one regulator--one person takes two breaths, and gives it to the other diver, who takes two breaths, and so forth. It requires a high level of breath control, and coordination under water. It is certainly not easy, but I feel all five of us did rather well.

Divemaster certification also required timed, scored physical assessments, like an 800m snorkel swim, a 400m regular swim, a 100m tired diver tow, and 15 minutes of treading water, with hands out for the last 2 minutes. It also required demonstration quality rescue senarios involving unconscious, nonbreathing divers at the surface, and a mapping project, where we learn how to make an underwater map using a compass and a depth gauge.

All in all, it was more work than I was expecting, and thus, felt a lot more like an actual accomplishment when I finally finished it, with one dive to spare! I now have 61 logged dives, after 10 weeks in mexico starting from ground zero. It is strange to think I´m a divemaster when considering that. I would still like the experience of diving in a lot of other places and environments, though I certainly know what kind of environment I like the best--a warm one, with plenty of gorgeous coral and fish!

My diving certifications now include the following: Open Water, Open Water Advanced, Rescue Diver, O2 Provider Specialty, Coral Reef Researcher Specialty, and Divemaster. :-D

Now I just need to find a diveshop in Boston that is hiring...

Week 9 update....I SWAM WITH DOLPHINS I SWAM WITH DOLPHINS I SWAM WITH DOLPHINS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

In case you didn´t know....I SWAM WITH DOLPHINS!!! In the wild! Not in a pool, not at a park, not with trained dolphins...completely wild and free!

Deep breath.

Okay. So. On December 1st, we were headed out to a monitoring site called SMDR20, which was about 30 minutes away by boat, when our lovely captain, Tristan, decided it was actually too rough to make it there without crawling the whole way, so we radioed to base, and decided to have a fun dive instead, at a closer location. No sooner did that transmission come through when a fellow diver on the boat squealed, ¨LOOK!¨ Other divers chimed in, and I was left wondering what all the fuss was about.

¨There!¨ followed by more squealing.

¨What is it?¨ I finally asked.

¨Dolphins!!¨

I launched off of my bench to the side of the boat (not the smartest of ideas in rough seas...) desperate for a glimpse. I couldn´t see one anywhere! I frantically scanned the waves, but every time someone pointed, it was gone before I could look. And then I saw it--a shiny, slippery gray dorsal fin slicing up and out of the water and cresting downward again out of sight. !!!!!!!!!!!!!! A dolphin! But wait! Two dolphins! Three! Four! I´ve lost track!

As the boat was moving through the rough seas as fast as it could (ie, crawling by boat standards) the dolphins were circling us and generally putting our speed to shame. They swam under the boat, then leapt out of the water on the other side in a dramatic show of their superior maneuvering skills. We radioed the other boat which quickly made its way to our location. We now have two boats, speeding along with a large pod of dolphins swimming between. We begged to dive right then and there, but they had to drop us off in a location that was pre programmed into the gps they had, so we picked out the nearest location--Lagrimas Negras it was called, which was about 1.2 km away--and did our best to get there as quickly as we could.

We kitted up in record time, definitely performing the fastest buddy check in history, and then backwards rolled off the boat, into the sea. As soon as we were gathered together, we decended, and saw......nothing. Where did they go?? We scanned the water all around us as we slowly sank to 10....20.....30 feet. We listened. We waited. And we looked some more. Minutes passed, and our racing heartbeats began to slow down, and I stopped using up my air at 10 bar a minute. And I waited. I began to accept the fact that they probably just kept on swimming when the boats stopped. Oh well. At least we had seen them from the boats. That in itself was a once in a lifetime----WAIT! Someone yelled through their regulator and pointed, and my gaze followed...Ten dolphins! Swimming right for us! So graceful, so beautiful, so playful!

They circled us twice and swam off, and my heart sank, but they were back 2 minutes later, teasing us by swimming close and then scooting away. They did that about seven times, returning in different sized groups, sometimes swimming upside down, sometimes swimming fast and leaping out of the water.

Our dive profile was 22 meters for 30 minutes, so we eventually had to surface. As we were holding at 5 meters for our safety stop, they came around us again, quite close, and when we reached the surface, they really had some fun, swimming as close as 5 feet away from us, making noises and doing laps! As we passed our gear up to the captain to load back into the boats we kept our masks on, still stealing glances underwater at these magnificent creatures. Once we were all back on the boat, they still followed us until we were only a kilometer from base. We all definitely squealed the entire way home like 12 year old girls at a Jonas Brothers concert. Smiles and goofy grins were pasted on our faces for the remainder of the day...and most of the week for that matter. They played with us for over 45 minutes! Tristan said he´s never seen a pod stay that interested for so long....especially not a pod this large!

I SWAM WITH DOLPHINS!!!

Oh and guess what? No one had a camera.