April 20b 2010

Tuesday, the 20th of April marked my last diving adventure (in Cuba : ( ). Our driver (a friend of the previous one) seemed a bit nervous, and when asked, admitted he hadn’t slept much the night before because he was preoccupied with the idea of crabs crossing the road and of flat tires. In any case, we got off to a much earlier start and arrived about two hours earlier than the previous time, taking far fewer crab lives in the process. The visitors from Presbyterian College brought me an underwater camera p’ my request and I couldn’t wait to go. The first dive, honestly, was a bit of a disaster. Everything had gone so swimmingly (sorry! Pun intended) the dive the week before that I wasn’t expecting such setbacks. First I had a hard time equalizing and had to slow my descent considerably. Then, though I didn’t realize it until I surfaced later, I got a bloody nose during the middle of the dive. My underwater camera wasn’t working for me, and I just couldn’t get into the feeling.
An hour later, after a pick me up of some wheat thins I brought from home which I shared with my diving buddies (they thought they were very strangely colored for crackers,’ but… yeah, I’ll take some more…’) I was feeling a bit more optimistic. Coco told me not to worry- we would take a slow descent and the bloody nose was nothing to be concerned about even if it came back during the second dive. At first my ear killed. I was worried I wasn’t going to be able to dive at all to be honest. But with some patience and time, we managed to go down quite a few meters and eventually made it to the terrace edge. This last dive felt really, really solid. I feel like I can control myself and navigate in and around the reef beds. When we were in a patch reef Coco directed our attention to a large barracuda not too far in the distance. We swam slowly up to it, and it watched us with a wide toothy grin. We got about two meters away and I snapped a picture. Then we decided to move on… I was feeling uneasy because I had the inkling that my bloody nose had come back and I could only imagine the starter course a whiff of that might provide this meat loving fish. After we had swum a bit we turned around to see the barracuda had followed us a short ways. The next scene was pretty hilarious. Simultaneously and as if on cue, Katie, Orlando and Coco all pointed at each other. “Take them, not me!”, they signaled to the fish. It left us alone when we couldn’t reach a sacrificial consensus.
The dives were amazing. I hope my pictures came out and I’m so grateful to have had the camera. When I was younger I would dream of having the ability to fly and to my surprise, diving has given me that sensation. I predict I will thrist for flying…or rather, diving this summer. I am going to look into doing it in Portland. We grabbed a sandwich and some ice cream for lunch on the way home and joked with each other on the ride. I am going to miss a lot of Cubans when I leave this place, but my diving team is definitely high on that list.