week one recap

Hola a todos! 

Wow I can’t believe it has been over a week since we’ve been here!

I’ve got a little bit of time, so lets do a recap of the week, kay? 

Friday - you heard about Friday. We arrived and did a lot of divemastery things, got to dive with my family for two dives which was great! (and did my 90th dive!) Then for dinner we went to taco night at toby’s. Basically they let you choose chicken, fish, pork, steak, or shrimp tacos on flour or corn tortillas and then you get to go up to the front and dress them with all sorts of salsas and veggies. Yum. 

Saturday - I was a real DM(t) (sorry, that’s Divemaster (trainee))! I went with camilo (an instructor) with a group of german and spanish divers, doing all of their equipment stuffs and supervising the divers. I was buddied up with the only unmarried member of the group, and had to basically underwater babysit him as he constantly wandered off and floated up and ran low on air. But I got to be all divemastery and cool and...i made tips! With them chloe and I went out for pizza. Yum. 

It was really interesting being on the dive boat. All of the germans preferred spanish to english, except for the one I was buddied with who knew no spanish, but some english. The other two were spanish but spoke perfect english, even to each other. Our two colombian staff people (camilo and margarita) obviously speak spanish and I speak very little spanish. Haha but there was no real rhyme or reason to when which language would be spoken! Everyone mixed up spanish and english just willy nilly, even between sentences or with sentences mainly in spanish with english words thrown in or vice versa. Luckly, everyone was speaking slowly since it was a second language to most of us so I could understand most of what was going on and comment or respond to questions. At one point I was talking to one of the men and realized that he was speaking english and I was answering in spanish! Haha it was an odd, confusing multi-lingual time, but it was fun.  

Sunday (easter!) - I got to help out with a discover scuba diving course which was fun. I felt all cool and DMy. Then chloe and I had an excellent easter dinner of avocado, tomato, and cheese sandwiches with mango and milky way for desert which we ate in bed watching apocolypta. Haha we were just so tired and worn out that we had to just veg. Oh, this was also the day that my arms and back were so tired that I turned over a wheelbarrow full of gear on the dock and had to jump over and pick it all back up! Haha 

Monday - Our arms got a nice rest and our brains went to work - our first classroom day of our DM training. Nothing too heavy duty yet (physics and physiology come later!) just the basics, but it was fun learning all about how to be good divemasters. We watched one of PADI’s world class quality videos and learned that not only should divemasters be excellent divers and good role models, but they should always wear perfectly matching flourescent gear underwater and on land should also try to wear the brightest colors possible and have the biggest hair possible (although if you can’t have big hair, having a really high forehead is also acceptable). Monday night we moved into our new home! And went grocery shopping! 

The grocery store closest to us that we go to the most (we call it the orange store, because of the color) is kind of an old fashioned store - the kind where you stand behind a counter and tell the dependiente what you would like. Haha needless to say this gets a little difficult and funny. It usually ends with us being told to come back behind the counter and get what we would like ourselves. Lol. For some reason yogurt is a very hard word in spanish. Mainly because it is so much like “yogurt” and yet completely different so if you say “yogurt” they don’t know what you’re talking about…

Tuesday - a french guy (who’s basically mexican because he’s lived most of his life in mahahual and chetumal) came to do his advanced open water and rescue diver courses with us, but our spanish speaking instructors were gone so we took him on two fun dives. For the first one we were joined by edwardo, a local. I got to be a good DM and correct his bouyancy and point out interesting things to him. It was fun. We saw a spotted eagle ray!!! Wahoo! It was at a distance, but still. For the second dive edwardo left and John (who we stayed with the first three nights) came so I basically just got a fun dive! We did alejandro’s reef which has fun swim-throughs and there were two big green morays and a teeny arrow crab! 

Wednesday - This was supposed to be my office day since Jeanne and Jim were going to cancun to drop of their daughter. It ended up just being my office morning and my biggest dive day yet! In the morning I kitted up the boat and got the divers thier wrist bands and got them on thier way and took care of some snorklers, and that was about all the office work there was. So I read my DM manual and did some emailing and then around 11 camilo asked me to come on Jeremie (the french guy)’s advanced open water (AOW) dives. Yay! So we went on a peak performance buoyancy dive and a navigation dive and then….a NIGHT DIVE! Wahoo (although it was a bit ickly towards the end because as the dive progressed more and more worms came out and were attracted to our lights. They swarmed us at our safety stop! Eww! But we got to play with some fun bioluminescence and saw some nice lobsters and a DECORATOR CRAB! Hehe so cute. They select and shape sponge caps that they hold in place with two tiny hat-holding legs! No joke! Haha this one had a very fashionable orange cap. 

Wednesday night was also chicken night! 

We got back a bit late from our night dive, so we were the last three there (jeremie came along) but it was nice. Very good chicken and sides at a classic outdoor mexican “restaurant” which is only open on wednesdays and only ever serves chicken. Haha I guess if you do something well, why do anything else? 

Thursday - Very rough seas. This was predicted by our captain who said that if there are a lot of worms at night, it means rough seas the next day. They’re really creepily accurate with thier weather predictions. Maybe our meteorologists should spend less time looking at computers and more time looking at worms and pelicans…

Anyways, because of the rough water we didn’t have any clients except jeremie who we took for a deep dive. If was fun and reminded me a lot of a site in mahahual. After the dive we surfaced and...no boat! Haha so we whistled and waved etc until finally we saw the boat, and he saw us. Unfortunately the boat had engine problems and couldn’t come to pick us up! Haha so we floated on our bc’s and chatted for a bit (maybe 15 minutes?) until another boat could come rescue us. It was pretty funny. Then we went to  lunch at toby’s with jeremie and came back and did a drift dive at la poza which suddenly had the biggest current ever just for the occasion! Haha but we saw a nurse shark’s tail and tons of huge jacks and tarpon. Awesome. 

Friday - I stayed in the shop most of the day doing EFR training with jeremie and working on my DM manual. Then we went out and did his confined water skills in which I got to demonstrate how to rescue a tired diver at the surface and then got to be a panicking victim a few times. Fun!

Friday night John and Mary took us out to the Leaky Palapa - the gourmet restaurant in town which is said to be the best restaurant in the southern yucatan! It was a wonderful time. We started with pre-dinner drinks (mojito for me) around 6:15 and then went to our table around 6:45, opened a bottle of chilean wine, and had an amazing three course dinner. The whole affair lasted about 3 hours! Haha. But it was incredibly delicious. Chloe and I couldn’t decide between the mixed green salad and the carrot ginger soup for starters, so we each got one and shared. The soup was incredible. Ah, so nice. And it was so nice to eat a salad with fresh veggies and green mango. Yum. For the main course I had snapper with a tequila-lime sauce (amazing) and for desert an amazing mango lime sorbet. I went for the lightest desert of the menu because I was so full, but I tasted chloe’s chocolate torte and john’s carribean bread pudding and both were absolutely to die for. Mmm….

It was a good night. :)

Saturday - I got to go an a pretty amazing dive trip to two of our southern sites: La chiminea and Scott’s playground. La chiminea has an amazing cavern in the reef wall with a cool coral formation in the middle and a huge skylight (chimney) for which it is named. Scott’s playground is a reallly really cool place. So cool. Wow. It has an amazing reef wall and some really nice canyons between the fingers of corals, but the coolest thing is all of the tunnels underneath the corals! We did three short normal swim-throughs and then three long cool tunnels which were sometimes completely closed off overhead and sometimes had nice skylights, but were really really interesting. For the divemaster course we have to map a dive site and we have been assigned this site. Luckly they were all good divers and had cameras so they wanted to go nice and slowly, so I got to just follow behind slowly and draw a rough little map for myself so that when we actually do the mapping dive I will have some Idea of what the site looks like. It was a lot of fun! And for our surface interval we took a river trip through the mexico-belieze border and into chetumal bay. It was a really nice boat ride through the mangroves. Really interesting. And we saw a pelican stretching its wings into the wind, which told our captain that the wind was going to pick up. Sure enough, it was a nice windy night for sleeping. 

Sunday - I stayed at the shop in the morning and did some learning (trudging through the chapter on diving physics.) and then helped with the first confined water session and dive of an open water course which was fun. Also, a friend (helen) from Punta Gruesa randomly showed up with Luise (a friend we met at carnival) to say hi! They wanted to go diving, but they were a bit late. Hopefully they’ll be back and I can show them around underwater xcalak! :)

And that brings us up to date! 

Life is good here. I am sunny, salty and barefoot - just the way it should be.