Banana Bending

My week on the catamaran complete, I disembarked back in Airlie Beach and the Club Crocodile Resort. That week cost me a veneer, a bit of pride, and the further understanding of and respect for the dangers of diving.

I flew up to Cairns, where I became far more distracted. Unlike the week before, there was a lot to do and see, with little planning done on my part as to what I might do. I was just banana bending (slang for having nothing better to do than laze around and bend bananas; don’t believe me, look it up).

My accommodations were great. The Cairns Colonial Club Resort was definitely posh, certainly far more opulent than a hostel. It has a central pool, swim up bars, small cafes and clubs tucked away throughout, everything that someone accustomed to resorts in the Caribbean would expect, but nestled in the centre of the city, close to the piers, the travel agencies, and the Esplanade and the Cairns Square. There were a number of fine restaurants, tiki torches, the rooms laid out like cabins in a maze. I got lost in there once, walking around and around for about 45 minutes trying to find my room. That only happened once. I made a point of memorizing its layout after that. All in all, it was a great place to hang my hat for a week. What more could anyone ask for?

A companion.

Travelling alone has its costs, loneliness being one of them. I’ve never had difficulty meeting people while on vacation, but all that probing for day pals can be tiring, especially after having spent a week on a 60-foot catamaran with the same six people, three of them crew. That week almost didn’t happen. The boat almost didn’t leave, citing a lack of paying passengers, but the travel agency in San Rafael, California I had dealt with, and would deal with again, had insisted they take us out, cajoling and ultimately threatening the boat owners with a future boycott were they not to do what they’d been contracted to do, full boat or not. It did. They honoured their bookings, despite having presumably done so at a loss. I guess you sometimes have to take a loss to maintain goodwill. So small a group made for an intimate group, with little to no separation between crew and customer. I missed that in Cairns.
Cairns was a blur of possibility. Trips to the outback. Day trips to the reef aboard high-speed catamarans, taking 30 minutes or so to reach the inner reef, compared with our sedate hours to reach the outer reef the week before. Four hours isn’t that long when one spends it unconscious, sleeping off sea sickness and jetlag.

I found myself shopping, browsing more accurately. I did buy some t-shirts and souvenirs, but not a lot as I’d have to cart it back with me. I looked into day trips, but found most trips out into the outback were for a week or more. You’d think it was a big place or something. I was paying top dollar to stay at the resort in Cairns, so sadly, the outback was out.

That left the sea. I looked into day trips to the reef. I couldn’t see how it could possibly top what I’d just experienced, but I didn’t just want to spend a week drinking in Australia. I could have done that at home.

I did club it for a time. I met a lot of backpackers. I also discovered that despite my having met Australians working in Timmins, and despite their reputation for being world travelers, many of whom end up in Whistler, working as ski bums to help finance their stay, most Australians prefer to travel almost exclusively in Australia. They certainly have the room for it. They have a temperate south, and vast metropolises thereabouts, but they also have a tropical coast to the north, a reef the world envies, replete with innumerable archipelagos. So, most backpackers I stumbled across were Australians.
With one notable exception. I found myself escaping the midday heat of the Esplanade with a Scot. I found his accent thick and indecipherable at first. Oddly, a couple beers cleared that right up.

We chatted. He showed me his TD bankbook, explaining how he hid his money in Canada for tax reasons. I grew tired of trying to suss out his words amid such a bray, so I suggested a game of pool. He accepted. We had the table to ourselves for a while. Then a group of Aussies arrived, and asked if they could play, too. We accepted. They employed some rather dodgy rules. The Scot and I conferred. We compared the rules I knew to the rules he knew and found them largely in step with one another. Not so the Aussies’ rules. We asked if there were bar rules posted, but there weren’t. And we were unwilling to get in a scrap for the sake of a pool table when we were clearly outnumbered.

We left. We hopped a few bars.

At least until I was told by an Aussie we met in one that I should lay off the beer, once he discovered that I had booked a dive the next day. I’d had too much already, he said. I disagreed, at first. It was likely only a shallow dive, not terribly technical. They took bookings off the street, after all. “Real” divers booked actual dive vacations with travel agencies who specialized in that sort of thing. I certainly did.

I found I’d had enough when the sun plunged down to the horizon, painting the unseen outback as red as it had the Cairns shallow skyline.

I cabbed back to my resort, ate a late supper, settling on water over wine.

The next morning, I rose. I was a little worse for wear from the night before, but I didn’t think that I was so hung-over as to be risking life and limb on the dive.

A shuttle picked me up, I boarded the high-speed catamaran, and found myself among clusters of happy little cliques with little interest in the fairly experienced diver among them. We flew from cap to cap, landing hard. I wrenched my shoulder, putting an end to more daytrips for the remainder of my time Down Under. There was little enough time to do much more by that point, anyways.

How was the dive. Not bad. Not great. The reef was as grey and as dead as that first one I’d ever dove in Jamaica. Innumerable touchy, feely tourists had left their mark over time. The divers were novice at best. They fought the current, gripped the coral to stabilize themselves, killing each polyp they brushed up against.

I was a good boy my last evening, I stayed within the confines of the resort, trying to gain what feeble tan I could muster in too short a time. I failed and became resigned to the fact that I’d return to Timmins almost as white as I’d left and destined to having to explain to seasoned sun worshippers how I could travel to the tropics and not come back with a tan.

My final evening at the resort, my eyes were drawn to a group of like aged young adults sitting across from me. They were a loud cluster of twenty-somethings, their faces as rosy as the sunset I’d just watched, laughing, smiling at one another, clearly enjoying each other’s company. I watched them, trying not to appear that creepy guy across the bar. What I hoped was that they would notice this solitary creature at the next table, one of like age amid so many middle-aged sun seekers, and take pity on me, bringing me into their fold.

They didn’t. I didn’t expect them to.

I asked the bartender who they were. She told me they were a Contiki tour. I had no idea what a Contiki tour was. She enlightened me. Contiki tours catered to tourists under 35. I filed that information away for later use.

The Bends

I spent a week on that 60-foot live-aboard dive-boat, 100 kilometres off the coast, hopping from reef to reef. This was not a tanning vacation. There is little Uv penetrating the ocean, certainly not 30 to 100 feet below the surface where everything takes on an eerie shade of dusky blue. One does not tan through neoprene, either. This was not a drinking vacation, either. Drinking and diving don’t mix, unless you’re a fan of the bends. I did indulge in a single beer every night after dinner, reclined on a couch, Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland nestled in my lap. Bed came early. It’s exceedingly black out there on the ocean, so far away from our garish neon and incandescence. It’s peaceful. Its therapeutic. It’s exhausting and dangerous.

We’d rise early, breakfast, and dive before weighing anchor. We’d then cruise to the next reef, where we’d dive midmorning, after lunch, and before dinner. There was usually a dive after dinner as the sun set, ideal for watching the changing of the guard. Day trippers scurried for cover and the night owls emerged from their dens, and the reef took on a new look. Colours were different at night, too, obviously. Our lamps led the way, displaying the true spectrum, unsullied by depth.

You’ve never dove? Colour bleeds out at depth. The colours you do see are altered by what spectrum penetrates to wherever you happen to be hanging. Lower energy waves are absorbed first, so, red disappears first at about 20 feet. Orange disappears next at around 50 feet. Then yellow at about 100. Green stays longer and blue the longest, which is why things look bluer the deeper you go. As long as the water is clear, that is. In murky water there is less light penetration and things tend to look greenish-yellow. That’s not hard and fast, either. Bioluminescence muddies the rules. So does fluorescence.
At 60 feet, red becomes black. Orange now looks drab and almost an olive-green. Yellow holds fairly true, but green is now looking closer to yellow. Blue and indigo are OK, but violet contrasts with black about as well as red. Everything shifts up in the spectrum the deeper you descend, until everything is blue, and then black.

I learned this from the photographers. Vast flashes were attached to their cameras. Even so, distance is the same as depth, so they’d swim up as close as possible, mindful of spooking their prey, mindful of angles, art, and perspective. They took great shots, but I realized that there was a trade-off; to be in the zone meant not being in the moment. Focus was gained at the cost of the panoramic. Clarity banished wonder.

How long was each dive? That depends. The answer is a slippery slope, at best. Depth cost dive time. The deeper one descended, the more volume was required to equalize. So, a dive at 30 feet could be as long as an hour, a dive at 100 feet could last as little as 10 minutes. Depends on your breathing. Gaspers don’t last as long as sippers. I was a sipper. I never inhaled while ascending. As one ascends, one needs to exhale, lest one explode. The pressure on the lungs decrease, the air within expands, and the unused air in one’s lungs remains rich in oxygen. Breathing in becomes unnecessary, exhaling on the other hand, essential. Too much depth, too many minutes dove, and one’s dive tables, one’s dive computer, limited one’s time, or extended one’s decompression stops. And if one ignored those tables and those decompression stops, one invited waivers and steel beach.

What’s steel beach? It’s a decompression day. One needs time to purge nitrogen from one’s blood and bones, lest one become intimate with the bends, not to be mistaken with Radiohead. I recommend Radiohead, not decompression sickness, unless you’re a fan of joint pain, paralysis, and death.
I was not. But I wasn’t a model diver, either.

A sipper, I spent a lot of time at depth. My deco stops tended to be longer. It’s dull just hanging there, watching the timer tick down.

One day, mid-week, I hit the water. I piked, and plunged like a stone, and when I reached bottom, my dive computer was already blinking, warning me that I required 30 minutes of decompression at 30 feet before surfacing. The longer I remained, the longer that deco stop was sure to be. But as I was deciding what to do, a reckless decision in itself, a school of barracuda rose up from the cliff wall that fell off into eternity. There had to be a hundred of them. Their silver flanks flashed in the intense sunlight that descended to that 80-foot depth I floated weightlessly on, the light undulating in their multitudes. I had to get closer. I had to see each of these wonders gliding past. So, I let the current carry me closer. I burped a little air, and I slipped down another 10 feet. Five minutes later, they faded into the distance.
I lifted my dive computer. I had about 8 minutes of air left at that depth, and about an hour and a half of deco stop. Not particularly good math.

I waved down my partner, pointed at my gauges, and indicated that I was rising. I inhaled deeply and began to rise. And as I rose I began to exhale. I spoke a light and slow “ahhhhh,” just enough to purge the ever-expanding air in my chest cavity. That slow “ahhhhh” would allow me to rise up the next 60 feet without ever needing to inhale again, saving air for my decompression.

But when I reached 60 feet, I realized that I didn’t have enough air for the two stops I needed. I continued rising, my exhaled bubbled rising marginally fast than me. At 30 feet, I had 30 minutes of air left, and a need of 60 minutes to decompress. I waited. With 5 minutes of air remaining, I rose to the surface, breaking the top with 1 minute remaining. My computer rebelled. It flashed. It told me that I was not done with decompression yet. And when I broke the surface, it froze, and would not release any information except a countdown, the time required to purge all the nitrogen from my system. I could not dive again until I was clean.

That would be in 24 hours. Until then, I was stuck on the boat, forbidden to dive for my own safety.
Steel Beach.

That evening, the sunlight waning to a rich golden hue, I settled in to supper. I bit down on whatever soft morsel I was eating. And my tooth exploded. Not my actual tooth. The veneer that covered it.
I heard a high pitch squeak of air, and a pop, and the porcelain cap was in pieces in my mouth.

A little pressurized air had made its way behind my tooth when I was diving. It was still trapped there when I broke surface. And it blew apart my veneer when a little pressure was applied.

Now imagine your joints were that tooth, the pressure trapped in there.

The Bends.

Down Under

I had every intention of continuing to travel in the Caribbean. It was close. It was affordable. But I’d also become a scuba diver and I wanted bragging rights. I wanted cool stamps for my dive log. Grand Cayman was supposed to be the crème of the crop of diving in the Caribbean, so I had my heart set on it. There was also Belize, Cozumel, and a whole host of other fantastic places to dive, but for whatever reason, I’d become fixated on Grand Cayman. Until I was informed how much it would cost me to go there. There was no single supplement in Grand Cayman. You know what single supplement is, don’t you? It’s where singles have to pay extra for a room that was intended for double occupancy. That might make sense in all-inclusive resorts, but not in a pay as you go resort. At that sort of resort, a room is just a room, so a single supplement is just a cash grab. And in Grand Cayman I was expected to fully pay double the cost for not being married or travelling with another.

“I could probably go to Australia for that,” I said at the travel agency, remembering how that New York backpacker had told me that I needed to get off the reservation.

“Let’s see,” she said.

She crunched some numbers. Long story short, I could go to Grand Cayman for one week for $10,000, or I could go to Australia for three weeks for $7,000, most of that being my flights. Sold! I opted for Australia. I was giddy with excitement. The Great Barrier Reef! I’d be the envy of everyone I knew.
The flights were long, longer than I’d ever had up till then. Ten and a half hours to Honolulu, landing there at about 1 am. I didn’t sleep. I tried to, but rest was illusive. I was far too excited by this adventure to relax. I read. I closed my eyes. I ate. But I didn’t sleep. I disembarked into a sweltering open air terminal. The Leafs were playing. That surprised me. Then I considered the time zones. Exhausted, but having to remain awake, I grabbed a beer and settled in until my next flight was called. Another ten hours to Sydney. I slept on that flight. I couldn’t stay awake. Four hours to Brisbane. One and a half hours to Proserpine. With layovers in each and every terminal.

Needless to say, I was a little jetlagged when I arrived in Proserpine. I booked into my hotel, a place called the Club Crocodile Resort in Arlie Beach, and was able to stay awake until about 9ish, before crashing for about ten hours. I barely remember it. There was a central pool, a cabana bar alongside it. I showered and shaved as soon as my door was closed and my case hit the bed. I needed it. I stunk to high heaven. I ate. I had two beers at the bar before an overwhelming fatigue swept over me.

I was picked up the next morning. It was hot by all reckoning by 8 am when the shuttle collected me. The driver talked my ears off, wanting to know all about tornados, like I knew anything about them. I tried to tell him that I’d never actually seen one, that I might have experienced one once, but I was hidden behind a building and had only seen the wind shear along the ground, but he persisted, so when he asked me how fast the wind was in one, I made up a number, saying the wind inside a tornado was 700 km/hr, a number that both awed him and satisfied him. I boarded the 60-foot catamaran, found my stateroom in the starboard nacelle, and settled into the common room for induction as we sailed out to the reef, an ordeal of about four hours. I watched the horizon pitch in and out of sight through the porthole, growing more nauseous by the minute. Induction complete, I stumbled out on deck to Captain Dave’s, “You must stop drinking!” It’s an old joke, common on dive boats. Land lubbers have heard it time and again. It’s all in good fun. I hadn’t touched a drop for over twelve hours.

It was too much. I was exhausted, growing sea sick with jetlag, so I begged forgiveness, saying I was going to bunk down for a few minutes.

I made it as far as my stateroom, opting to hug the head for a few minutes, deciding that my breakfast was not to my liking after all. Once I’d expelled by diaphragm into the bowl, I collapsed on my bunk, exhausted, in pain, my head awhirl. I was too sick to climb under the covers, so I fished out a towel and threw it over me. Darkness descended.

I came to about two hours later, weak, but thinking I could stand some fresh air. I rose from my bunk, climbed the gangway to the common room, and came face to face with a platter of prawns. They were a roasted red. Their beady little eyes stared me down. They smelled as you’d expect, like I was going to puke again. I made it back down the ladder and into my head again, without a moment to spare.

Two hours later, I was awakened again. We’d stopped. The boat rolled gently. Water lapped against my hull. I climbed to the deck again. I staggered back out into the sunshine. No one teased me this time. Seasickness is a serious thing when you’re about to spend the next week away from sight of land.
The crew were fussing with gear. The dive master, a burly Aussie named Gordo, looked me up and down and said, “Hey Dave, up for a dive?”

“Fuck no,” I said, the prospect raising my gourd again.

“Seriously, mate,” Gordo said, “you’ll feel better when you hit the water.”

I shook my head, no.

So, Gordo picked me up and threw me into the sea, shorts, shirt and all.

I hit the water flailing, and almost managed to keep the brine from my mouth.

But you know, Gordo was right. Once I was in the water, I felt perfectly fine. The crew fed me ginger pills for the next few days to calm my innards, but I gained my sea legs in no time.

“C’mon up,” Gordo called down to me, gesturing for me to swim back once I righted myself and was trading water. “Hurry up,” he said, “we got to get you suited up and weighted down. We dive in 5 minutes.”