Subaqua Sternal Rubs

Wednesday evening I had the unfortunate luck of seeing the owner of the dive shop that I use while picking up dinner from a local Italian/French restaurant. He let me know of a special dive trip that they were doing on Friday (today) — a 3-tank dive/day trip to Isle de Rhonde for advanced divers only. This is the trip I've been wanting to do for months, but since the boat ride is 1 1/2 hours each way, it doesn't get done too often (read: not ever since I started here in Jan. '04). Only problem was the trip was scheduled 8:30AM - 5:00PM, and I had classes from 8AM-10AM. Well, not really classes, but optional review sessions for our final exams (yes, again!) starting on Monday.

Anyone want to guess how I resolved this schedule conflict?

Yup, you guessed right. I went diving, and I convinced another diving friend to be delinquent with me. Note to parents/pseudo-parents: The lecture slides are available for download off the web, and we had someone audio-tape the lecture for us, so we wouldn't miss anything. I even brought lecture notes with me and used the lengthy boat ride to study.

The first dive was to a site called Pinnacle. The bottom was very rocky, and had some hard coral, but it looked like all the soft coral had been destroyed by Hurricane Ivan. A variety of fish-life, but a school of literally hundreds of Blue Tangs engulfing us is what sticks out in my mind. On this dive, I seemed to be under-weighted for some reason (even though I have been using the same amount of weight/same gear for years), and I could not keep myself down. The current was quite strong, and my rental fins were completely ineffective at providing any sort of propulsion, no matter how hard I kicked - they just were flapping in the breeze. Hence my workload increased significantly, ventilation rate went up, as well as my expiratory reserve volume. Hence, more air in lungs equals increased positive buoyancy. I made it back on the boat with all of 170psi. (I told you I was working hard)

The second dive was to Sister's Rock, and in my opinion, the best of the three. The dive started off by entering a small cavern in about 20 feet of water, and then surfacing inside. After exiting the cavern, we continued along a beautiful reef with many types of hard and soft coral, which seemed completely unaffected by Ivan. Fish life was very abundant and diverse: I saw two species that I have never seen before - a Spanish lobster (looks like a just a lobster tail with legs), and a snake eel.

After lunch, it was time for the third dive to Isle de Rhonde Reef (not too imaginative, but hey, what do you want?). After a couple of minutes swim (we were anchored for snorkelers), we found another nice reef with abundant hard/soft coral and fish life. I guess the instructors were enjoying it so much that they uncharacteristically went over the standard 50-minute dive time. (I had an hour and two minutes bottom time.)

The ride back brought gear disassembly and more Genetics studying. After diving, I was invited to go out to dinner with some friends, which I happily accepted, and my refrigerator doesn't contain anything interesting right now. We ended up at one of the nicer restaurants on the island, and I spent waaay too much for dinner, but you only live once, right?

All-in-all it was a great day, and definately worth it.

Now it's off to bed in preparation for two days straight of studying.

Email to Friend Print