Tobermory

I had to explain to my travel agent there was more to life than scuba diving. I wanted to experience more of the world than just an isolated panoramic view of the ocean. It’s not that I didn’t like dive vacations. I did. What I liked most about them was the new friends made, the guaranteed camaraderie. There’s just so much more to see and do in the world, and I wanted to see and do some of it.

I didn’t stop diving. Henri and I still dove. But there was precious little variety in diving Northern Ontario kettle lakes. They’re cold, they’re deep, they’re black. We even went so far as to do a few road trips to Tobermory to dive Fathom Five National Park.

The first year we went, we did so without making any plans. That was stupid of us, but we were young and hadn’t really travelled about Ontario much then. We had no idea that Tobermory was a popular tourist destination.

We drove right round Georgian Bay, coasting through Wasaga, Collingwood and the Blue Mountains in the dead of night, booking into the Pinecrest Motel in Owen Sound around midnight. It wasn’t much to look at, but at that hour we weren’t much concerned with ambiance. We ought to have been. It was in need of restoration. It was in need of beds without sheets of plywood under its mattresses. I survived. This is not to say that I slept. I was so tired when we rose that Henri drove the final leg up the Bruce Peninsula.

We rolled into Tobermory without a reservation, without even a clue as to its layout. We drove straight through town, finally pulling into the Bruce Anchor Motel, right on Lake Huron. We were lucky to have found a room. We registered, threw our bags into our room, and drove back to the harbour, finding ourselves in front of GS Watersports, reading their plank of upcoming dives, finally inquiring within. We were in luck. There was a boat available. We could go right then if we liked. We signed up for a two-wreck cruise, the first dive deep, rated advanced, the second shallow and easy. We took advanced to mean requiring our having taken the advanced diver’s certification. We were wrong.

The first dive was way too difficult, considering the state I was in. Firstly, the conditions were not ideal. It was windy out on the lake, the water choppy. Secondly, the dive was way too difficult for my experience at the time (I hadn’t dove the Great Barrier Reef as of yet). The first wreck was deep, sunk in a narrow channel ripping with current. And we had no idea how cold the Great Lakes were.

We dropped over the gunnel, fought our way to the anchor line. As I said, the current was strong. We dropped below the surface, following the line. We should have gripped the line and repelled down it, but we wanted to impress ourselves with our skill, so we didn’t. We followed it. Or tried to. I never saw the line, not once. Sediment flowed past my mask, dimming the already darkened, overcast depths. Already exhausted from lack of sleep, I grew even more so fighting the current. I was cooking in my wetsuit, despite the water’s icy embrace.

I nudged Henri. I shrugged. Where the hell are we, I was asking. I gestured that I was heading for surface. Just as I was ascending, Henri spotted the silhouette of the wreck. He kicked hard, harder than he originally thought necessary to gain the wreck, and barely laid fingers on it before being torn off it. Then he too ascended.

I looked for Henri when I broke surface. I grew anxious when I didn’t see him right away.
Where the hell was he? I wondered. Did the current carry him off? I ducked my head below the surface and still couldn’t see him, but by that time, I really didn’t know where the wreck was anymore, or where to look. When he did surface, he asked me what happened.

“I lost all strength,” I said. “I couldn’t do it anymore.

I still had to fight my way back along the hull of the boat to the ladder. Henri climbed aboard first. Then me.

I was so wiped out I puked over the side of the boat. I told Henri I couldn’t do the second dive. Then I told the Captain. We spent the rest of the day getting the lay of the land, finally settling into the Crow’s Nest Pub.

I fared better the next day. It was sunny. The wind had died down. We asked about and booked dives that had a far lesser difficulty rating. There were more divers. It turns out that most divers stayed away the day before, owing to the conditions. We also noted that most wore dry suits. Thankfully it was the last weekend of August, when the water is “warmer” than usual; had it not been, our “arctic” wetsuits would have been unequal to the task and we’d have locked up with the cold down there. As it was, we came off alright, looked cool, gained some much-needed experience. We considered investing in dry suits. We never did, but we considered it.

The lake had calmed to glass after our second dive on our second cruise. Our voices echoed off the high rocky escarpment. We felt great. It was the first moment I thought Lake Huron looked beautiful.
We vowed to return, and we did.

We were better prepared for our second trip. We returned in September when the water was “warmer” still. We were there even longer, that time, granting us the time to explore the town a little more, the luxury of leisure. We stayed up the peninsula at the Tobermory Inn and Suites, actually booking ahead that time. It looked alright when we booked it. It looked a little worse for wear when he booked in. Every nook and cranny grew spider webs. It was a little damp. But once we aired it out, it was fine. It also reminded us of residence: someone pulled the fire alarm on our first night there. I woke to its fire bell clamber, having fully travelled back in time: it was the weekend; Res; someone got drunk and pulled the alarm for shits and giggles again.

“Who the hell pulled the alarm this time?” I wondered before realizing where and when I was.
When I mentioned that to Henri, waiting out the fire department in the parking lot, he laughed. “Me too!” he said. Funny, we thought aloud, nobody looked drunk.

We took the time to relax on terraces, soaking up the sun, soaking up a beer of two with baskets of fish and chips. We marvelled at the yachts moored in the marina, some declaring as far as Florida as their port of registry. Some were sailed, some even sorting a couple masts. Once or twice we spied yachts that dwarfed our houses, big enough to sport crew and security, Mrs. Evinrude’s, for instance. We weren’t allowed anywhere near those.

We finished up our second trip in Tubby’s Lounge, playing pool with a local dude. He was a sight to see, cowboy hat, starched white shirt and jeans, trim beard, hair cascading over his shoulders. He had a foot-long Bowie knife and a carnation sticking out of his back pocket. He claimed to have been born on Flowerpot Island, as though that made any difference to us.

Flowerpot treated us with contempt at first, tourists having invaded his homeland. Which we were. He kicked our asses at pool, kicking us off the table. But despite his obvious contempt, he hung around. And around. And around. He warmed up to us over time, even asking Henri to partner up with him on the pool table against all-comers.

I lost interest in him and in playing pool after a few beers, preferring to hang out with the other divers who shuffled in shortly after us

But Flowerpot wanted to play pool. With everyone. Henri finally threw a game, hammering an easy 8-ball so hard it flew off the table. “Enough pool,” he told Flowerpot after that, “I’m too drunk to play anymore.”

Henri’s having hung out with Flowerpot panned out, though.

Flowerpot manned the ticket booth for the MS Chi-Cheemaun, and he only billed us the minimum allowable. For one crossing we were two seniors in a compact.

The Relay Race

I was hooked on adventure holidays. Shake and bake on a beach was boring by comparison, so I had no desire to repeat the experience. I did some research and decided on the Philippines, booking with the same scuba dive vacations travel agency as I had for Australia.

Everything looked fantastic. The Nautica was at least as posh as the catamaran had been. The Tubbataha Reef, at the very centre of the Sulu Sea, looked as rich as the Great Barrier Reef. They spoke English there, too. Definitely a plus.

I departed for Toronto on the appointed date, and began my first wait. My connecting flight to San Francisco was in five hours. International transfers are always long, I would discover. I had supper, a drink, a few hours with a novel, and boarded for San Francisco when summoned. I napped on the flight. Everything was going as planned.

I discovered there was a problem upon arriving in San Francisco. There was a delay. Passengers were summoned to the PAL (Philippines Airlines) desk for an update. There were a lot of Asians and Filipinos pressing into the PAL counter, each expressing their displeasure at the same time. I leaned against a pillar, expecting I’d have to wait until their anger to be vented before I’d get a chance to enquire what the issue was. It was, and I did. It turns out the plane had not arrived from Manila.
“How long of a delay,” I asked them once my name was called.

Twenty hours, they said.

Twenty hours? Why twenty hours? Because the plane was broken. It had not yet left Manila. I couldn’t believe my ears. I’d never make the rest of my connections! The dive boat would leave without me! I saw my itinerary crumbling before my eyes.

There were options, they said. I could continue on with Aeroflot. I perked up. Where was hope; I’d make it after all. Would my luggage be accompanying me? No, it wouldn’t. It would have to wait for the next flight. I decided to wait and travel with my gear. A dive vacation without dive gear or clothing seemed a silly proposition at best.

“David?” I heard behind me.

I ignored it. I thought it vain to believe that someone could possibly be calling out my name in the San Francisco airport. It had to be some other David. Obviously some other David.

I received a voucher for a hotel. Two more for a cab to get there and back.

I backed away from the counter and leaned against my pillar again to gather myself before facing the upcoming twenty hours of uncertainty. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, releasing it slowly.
“David?” I heard again. I opened my eyes to the only other Caucasian within sight. A woman. Attractive, too. I was confused.

“Are you David?” the brunette asked again.

“I am a David,” I said.

“I’m Jenny,” she said, “from San Raphael Diving.” My tour company. I blinked back my surprise. Here before me was my saviour, and at the moment I needed her most. Glory be!

She explained that she was accompanying my dive vacation as an observer, and that she too was stranded, albeit less so than I; she at least could go home for the ensuing hours of uncertainty.
She explained that she’d called her boss, that her boss was aware of the problem, and that other arrangements were being made as we spoke, that my vacation was delayed, but still on, and that everything would be fine.

I breathed a sigh of relief.

I still had eleven hours to hang out in San Fran when I woke. I looked at the phone, then the phone book, wondering if I should contact my cousin David, a resident of San Fran. I wondered if he’d be happy to hear from me, un-looked for, and in the middle of the workweek. There were way too many D. Tishlers in the white pages, so I abandoned that half-baked plan.

I made arrangements with the hotel for a day tour.

A minibus arrived to pick me up, and I was off to see some sights. I retraced Steve McQueen’s route in BULLITT, hung out in Haight Ashbury, and finished up on Fisherman’s Warf, overlooking Alcatraz. There wasn’t nearly enough time left to me to go there, so I settled for some snaps, bought some souvenirs for my parents, and returned to the hotel and the airport with time to spare to catch my plane.
I met up with Jenny and discovered that I had even more time to spare than I’d anticipated. The plane had finally made it to North America, but it was being looked at again. There would be another four-hour delay.

“They definitely didn’t say twenty before four, did they,” I joked.

They hadn’t.

We finally boarded. I took my seat, only to discover that I was seated beside a young mother and her yearling. The baby was already fussing and we hadn’t even left the ground, yet. I despaired. I was in for a long flight.

Jenny came to my seat.

“Holy shit,” she said. “That kid isn’t even two, yet! When we take off,” she continued, “beat it for the back of the plane as soon as the seatbelt sign is turned off.”

I didn’t ask why. I presumed there were seats lacking babies back there. I grabbed my stuff just as instructed, and found the back of the plane nearly empty.

Jenny was already there.

“Take a 4-seater in the middle,” she instructed. She had, so I did too. More people rushed to the back just as we did, they too taking what was left to stretch out.

That sounds selfish, but the flight was over eighteen hours long, and it would have been intolerable beside a screaming baby. And it’s not like the Filipinos weren’t doing the same thing. And I could smoke back there, I realized. PAL was one of the few airlines that still allowed it.

We landed in Manila in the middle of the night. Even at that hour, it was stifling. The air was as thick as soup, so humid that I was stepping in pools of perspiration in my sandals by the gangway’s end.
My gear had arrived with me! Praise be!

There would be yet another delay, I discovered. There was only one flight to Puerto Princesa on Palawan each day, and that was in the late morning, so we were booked into yet another hotel.
It looked colonial, as far as I could tell. I was dog tired. Lights illuminated palm trees, stucco and wrought iron. I was grateful to see a working air conditioning unit in the room, less happy about the bed that drooped much like a hammock from front to back and left to right.

I can’t say that bothered me too much. I undressed fully and collapsed into it and woke sprawled atop the covers the next morning.

Not bothering to dress, I threw the French doors open, pleased at the prospect of the balcony that stretched out before me, less pleased with my view. Rooftops stepped out from the balcony, each as varied in height as the steps of the Giant’s Causeway, fading from view into the brown haze of heat that still hung low and heavy all about me.

I stretched and stepped out onto it, and leaned out over the banister and took it all in.

It was my first good view of the third world.

 

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.”

Black Water Diving

I’d always wanted to try scuba diving, having grown up watching Jacques Cousteau specials on TV. I finally had an opportunity while on holiday in Jamaica at the Hedonism resort. I was hooked straight off and wanted more but was unsure how to be fully and permanently certified. I was under no illusion that the one hour training I’d received at the resort was of any use, regardless how difficult it was. One of the things I had to do was to tread water while holding two five-pound weights above water for a full minute, otherwise it was a no-go. I passed. It wasn’t easy, and I was a strong swimmer. FYI: that treading water was a totally useless exercise.

I was pleased to discover “Blue Water Diving,” a PADI (Professional Association of Diving Instructors) certified company, had returned to town that summer to further train all comers, and there were a lot of us, about 20 all told who signed up for the week-long course, the last of two sessions offered. I had to take a week’s vacation to do it, in the summer. I was lucky to get it, too. I was unable to sign up for the first session (the one Henri had signed up for), two others on my crew had booked it off, the max allowed off at any given time. So, if I were to fail, I’d have to wait until the next year to try again.

The first few days of instruction were held at the Sportsplex, fairly basic stuff, mainly classroom material and tests and a few introductory dives to get used to breathing through our regulators, clearing one’s mask, use of buoyance compensators and weights, regulator care and such. Once were had the basic theory down, and once we proved that we wouldn’t panic when underwater and could use our gear reasonably well, we moved on to the Lake, the Aunor Lake, specifically. It had a lot to recommend it. It was close to town. There was a road alongside it. It had an easy grade to begin with, and it was deep enough, yet still within 33 feet. Anything beyond that depth was reserved for the “advanced” class the next weekend at Greenwater Provincial Park in Cochrane.

Long story short, I passed the PADI diver and Open Water certifications and enrolled in the advanced course. If I were to dive in the Caribbean again I’d have to have my advanced or I’d have to take their course or not dive. And their courses were a joke. They took time otherwise spent diving, and were just a cash grab as far as I was concerned.

Advanced consisted of learning navigation skills, deep water decompression times, night diving, boat diving and rudimentary rescue. It was a packed weekend. I didn’t own a camper so I booked into a room at the Westway Motel. A lot of us did. There was a bar next door, so a few of us ended up there, none of us drinking much, none of us wanting to risk a hangover. Alcohol and diving don’t mix, unless you like narcosis and the bends.

What I recall most vividly of that weekend was the deep dive. There was a particularly deep hole in Blue Lake. It was over 100 feet deep and icy cold past the thermocline. I was waiting my turn to descend into the depths, floating on the surface above it, breathing through my snorkel to conserve my tank, gazing at the weighted line plunging into the black depth. Spotters hung suspended along its length in case we got in trouble.

Once the diver before me broke the surface I was given my cue. I approached the buoy, bled my BC dry and dropped like a stone down the line, my fingers lightly tracing its length. At first the water shimmered about me, the light still strong and dancing across my mask, my jet-black neoprene glove and the bright yellow of the nylon rope, but once I broke through the thermocline the light all but failed, the depths now a rusty tea, easily twenty degrees colder than the comparably tepid shallows. My face stung as I continued to the bottom.

I had a simple task to perform when I reached the bottom. I was to inflate my BC to correct my buoyancy and float weightless above the bottom, fish out the three stones I’d tucked up my thigh between my top and trousers, display the certain dexterity required to place them in a neat triangle, proof that I wasn’t narcing out. Once my task was complete, I was to give the thumbs up and repel back up the line at a rate slower than my exhaled bubbles could rise.

I dropped one of my stones. It’s not easy doing precision work with neoprene gloves on. Not able to complete my triangle of stones, I placed two, and then pointed three times at where the third ought to have been. The instructor nodded twice and gave me the thumbs up. I returned it, and inflated my BC a little to begin my accent. I wasn’t rising fast enough to my taste, so I added another burp of air, one that proved too much. I struggled to control my assent for a few moments, finally coming to a stop opposite one of the spotters.

Cold water invaded my suit, its ice invading one of my ear canals.

Vertigo took hold and spun me like a top. I felt like I was sitting on the edge of a propeller, going round and round. I reached out and held fast to the line, fighting the black out rushing down on me. I kept a steady eye on the spotter, telling myself that the world was not spinning. The spotter was stable, in one place, and so that meant that I too was upright and stable. The blackness closed in, I focused on my hands that were clamped on the yellow line. The black circle at the edge of my eyesight slowly backed off as the spotter inched forward to check me out.

He shrugged and made a made a circle of index and thumb, pointing at me. Are you okay, he was asking.

By then, the spinning propeller had come to a stop and I was. I gave him the okay signal back, then the thumbs up. Thumbs up does not mean okay, it means ascending to the surface.

My final ascent was slow and measured.

Vertigo and narcosis kept its distance.

I broke the surface, never so happy to see the glitter of sunlight dancing on the water’s surface.

Expectations

That first trip to Jamaica awakened the wanderlust that had always lurked just below the surface, one predicted long-ago by a self-described psychic girl on the northbound Northlander bus. “You love to travel,” she said, “or you will. I can always see these things. I’m psychic, that way.” I don’t believe she actually saw anything. Her prediction wasn’t much of a stretch. Most people like or want to travel. I think she was just flirting and making small-talk. More likely, she was just speaking her own heartfelt wish aloud; but she did unwittingly predict my future. I would never feel as free as when I had a backpack strapped across my shoulders, map in hand, dive bag at my feet.

I’d never really been anywhere on vacation until then. Sure, I’d been to Sudbury, and I’d been on that ball trip to Detroit (Windsor, actually) and Toronto, but I’d been to Sudbury and Toronto before, so that was like retracing my steps. Negril was uncharted territory. And I was going it alone. Did I enjoy it? You be the judge.

I basked in the sunshine. I drank Red Cap and Tequila Sunshine. I met people, most notably a couple guys from Michigan (one a gravedigger, the other a nuclear power plant engineer), and a couple girls from Sacramento, California, one who professed to have fallen in love with me by week’s end. It’s easy to fall in “love” while on vacation, I imagine, and I’m all for love at first sight, but I have my doubts whether Becky ever really saw the real me, rather seeing what she’d projected onto me. I was flattered, but I didn’t believe it for a minute. Infatuation and lust were far more likely than love. She even went so far as to ask me to move to California, which surprised me. Tolerating one another in the real world would prove more challenging were I to have chased down that temptation, considering how little we knew one another in so short a time. Hedonism could never be a proper testing ground for what might be.

To begin at the beginning, I met those four on the first night while we were being inducted with 100 proof rum drinks that could ignite nose hairs. There were games played, Simon says for one, and others like dancing and freezing in place when the music stopped, sort of like musical chairs, but in this case, if you moved when you were supposed to be frozen (no easy feat when saturated with rum), you were eliminated. I was eliminated. Other games were far more Hedonistic. All males were to face the walls in a circle, the girls to critique our buns. The girls were instructed to test us in any way they saw fit. Before I knew it, I was all but disrobed, a succession of hands kneading me front and back. Oh, you’ve never heard of Hedonism? Neither had I. That fun and games night was a surprising introduction. All I can say is that, drenched in rum, I stood it in stride. Did I win? No. I was a little surprised to make the top five, though. I think Becky might have had something to do with that.

Once I dried out, I was adamant that I’d try scuba diving. I enrolled in their one-day course, a far more inclusive one than others I’d heard tales of, and was fitted for gear. It was serviceable, but it had seen some wear. The days were grey, both to train and to dive. But even so, once I hit the water and learned how to glide effortlessly, seemingly weightless, embraced by the sea, shrouded by fish, I was hooked. I also required medical attention. Nothing serious: softened wax impacted my ear drum while diving, leaving me deaf on my right. My equilibrium was lost. I could barely walk, so Becky was thrilled when I asked her to guide me. She stayed close, she fetched my drinks. What can I say? I luxuriated in the largesse while it lasted. It ended all too soon. The resort doctor flushed both my ears for good measure and I was right as rain again.

The week with Becky passed quickly. We marvelled at the audacity of the Turtles, a swingers club sharing our time on the resort, a little surprised when another couple succumbed to the temptation of the open air and the stars in the late-night hot tub mere feet from us. We took in the sunset each evening, took catamaran cruises to sunset cafes, browsed craft markets where she tried and failed to teach me to haggle, we went on bike rides. I forgot my SPF and paid the price. I burned a little. A nurse, she revelled in the opportunity to care for me, applying aloe and SPF and clucking at my foolishness. She shared my cigarettes, and stole more than a few of my lit ones, giggling at the sideways glances I gave her when she did.

I’ve no doubt she saw something in me that moved her, but California was a long way off, and at the time, Sacramento seemed a desperate gamble. What would I do there? I looked into it, but abandoned the idea when I realized that Sacramento was a government town with mining well buried in its past. I was too pragmatic to travel a road where a person was the only destination.

When she’d gone, I was a little out of sorts. My constant companion had left a void in her wake. Then the Michigan guys left the very next day and I found myself alone. I brushed up against other people, but it wasn’t quite the same. None clicked as well as those first four had, she foremost.

But it was also exactly the same. I discovered that there was a weekly cycle. Mondays had the same dance troupe, Tuesdays the same jugglers, Wednesdays the same trapeze artists, and so on. I grew bored. I drank too much. Drifted. And before long, I was done and wanted to go home.

It was as eventful as any resort vacation might be, maybe more so. I had nothing to compare it to at the time, and little to compare it to afterwards.

I went on only one other resort vacation after that, one that would transform me far more than this one had.