Christa's Version

Okay so I’m going to give you my version of yesterday and a not so exciting update of today…

So we begin the day like we do all of our dive days- a 5:30am wake-up call, 6:00 breakfast(but no one is there to cook it yet so your choices are pathetically limited), 7:00 pick-up followed by a 3 hour drive that if you are awake to watch, will take roughly about 3-5 years off your life. Once arriving (painstakingly) at our dive destination, we head off towards the island in a “speedboat”. I use quotations because we were told it was going to be a speedboat when in fact it was only slightly larger than our Mulu wooden long boat with a wooden roof and about the same size motor…no fiberglass or horsepower to be found. I should have taken that and the choppy trip out there as a sure sign that this was going to be a rough day. If I didn’t get the clue then, Lauren started to cry as soon as the wetsuits were presented. I don’t know what make her more upset, the thought that she might have to wear a neon yellow one or that the fashionable black one was too small and “cut her shoulders” I told her I would wear the ugly one…but the other one hurt her…and the tears kept coming…thank God there was another one on board and the first traumatic experience was overcome. So like mom said we jumped overboard into the waves and tried to “get our shit together” while either getting slammed in the face by waves or sandwiched by two “speedboats”. After you got all your equipment on, the dive master yells, “SWIM! SWIM!” , and you try to make it out to deeper water without your mask falling off your face due to waves or getting clotheslined by the many anchor lines all around you…(now I know you all think I am exaggerating for dramatic affect, I’m truly not, I promise). Now that we are good and relaxed, we dump air and begin to sink…to the most traumatic dive of my life. Once we begin our descent I realize I can’t see worth a darn, visibility is complete crap, I can barely see the hand in front of my face and my first thoughts are, “well, this is really going to suck”. So I try to keep an eye on the divemaster and try not lose him…not an easy task. Thank goodness (well thanks to Lauren) I was dressed like a giant highlighter so everyone could see me a lot better than I could see them…meaning they were a lot less worried about me, having ear pressure problems at 25feet, and could fully concentrate on Lauren plummeting to her death at the bottom of the sea, accelerating with every meter deeper…sinking like a darn rock. After the dive master drug me deeper, yes he grabbed my arm and dragged me down, the current became the bigger issue. So while I’m trying to deal with the immense pain in my ears, twirling around in what you can imagine to be a washing machine of doom, worrying about where my family is because I can’t see them, oh and trying not to get slammed into the wall we are supposed to be admiring, I just start thinking, “I can’t believe we drove 3 hours for this shit…” “This sucks so incredibly bad” “I’m never diving again” “Maybe I should just give up fighting the inevitable and just die down here” “I wonder if Lauren has sunk to over 100 ft yet?”. So when I started crying, there was nothing I could do to make the situation better, I found the divemaster, shook him and signaled I needed to go up…(the shaking wasn’t necessary, just for taking out my frustration). He ignored my demands until we all signaled and he realized we had drained our tanks trying helplessly to control our bodies in the spinning vortex they call a “slight current”. Once I finally surfaced and stopped hyperventilating, I calmed down enough to apologize to my dad for making obscene angry gestures to him underwater and to our divemaster for slapping his hand away every time he tried to help me. And I also realized that I didn’t see one darn fish. In summary, it was a very bad experience that I f e el no need to repeat. Like mom said, the snorkeling was amazing, Lauren enjoyed her first chance to contract skin cancer, and Dad was free to dive at his own pace.

Today was a relaxed day. We spent our first sunny day by the pool, sipping cocktails and catching rays. Dad went by to meet with the Triathlon people and got his goody bag, and somehow managing to convince me to run a 5k tomorrow morning…This will be very strenuous considering I literally haven’t run since our last high school soccer game…I might be crawling across the finish line. Lauren is just doing for the T-shirt and mom is undecided (well she is decided she is not running but we decided she is). We h ad dinner watching the sunset over the ocean and are ready to leave the hotel around 7am for our family physical beating! I am sure that blog will be very colorful, esp. if mom runs…