Diving in Baja / Espiritu Santo

The trip to La Paz was arduous.  I drove 4 hours to Atlanta, flew to Dallas, Flew to Cabo San Lucas, rented a car and drove from Cabo to La Paz.  After running around in La Paz trying to figure out where I should be, I wound up on the ship Don Jose.  Valerie, the dive master, showed me around.  Her first language is French and I found that so are most of the divers.  So much for Spanish practice in Mexico.

My bunk mate is a Frenchman named Alain.  I was a bit worried at first that I would have the French experience where he knows 10 words of English but will only use 2.  He went to bed early without a word and I stumbled around in the dark trying to do my normal compulsive organization thing. 

However, in the morning he gave me the full story.  I suppose he is like me, he doesn’t come across as overly friendly just by looking at him, but is willing to share stories and opinions about anything and everything.  His English is certainly better than my French so he deserves credit for that as well.  I guess if we get papas fritas, I won’t refer to them as freedom fries.  It turns out this is his first recreational dive since retiring as a commercial diver.  He laid pipeline under freshwater and did underwater welding and repairs.  -Fascinating work. 

He gave that up and works for the water and sewage dept. near Paris now.  He repairs big 12’ pipelines that come into the water plant.  He says they won’t drain them for repairs to diverters and other equipment, but they do lower the level a few feet so there is air in the top.  I wasn’t sure if he was working on the inlet side pipes to the treatment plant or the outlet side or both.  I have to find a way of asking that won’t offend him.   The stereotype for for divers is that they are friendly with strangers.  The stereotype of the French is the opposite.  It feels like things are pulling in the friendly direction.

Oddly enough the other English speaker, who won’t get the dive briefings in French, is a Japanese woman my age named Naoko.  I hung out with a Japanese woman my age on my last solo dive trip to Mexico.  Murray definitely didn’t like that. I think fear of me meeting other women is a driver for Murray to go with me on trips, so there is an upside.    Too bad I couldn’t get her here to Baja, the weather is great and the scenery is amazing.  It reminds me of Colorado except the mountains are shorter and green with shrubbery.   

It is going to be odd being unplugged for a whole week!  My cell phone is now only good for taking pictures, I don’t need my wallet, and my computer is now an over glorified typewriter. 

Monday

We started the day by diving a large open wreck.  I love the 3D movement aspect of diving, but being somewhat uncoordinated in two dimensions, it does give you many more ways to bump into people.  This is especially true when you are all concentrated around one small boat wreck.  Looking up at the surface of the water is like being in a children’s book where everything is upside down.  As I spun around inside the wreck, I could look up and see a big puddle of air on the ceiling from the other divers who had been through.  It shimmered and flowed like Mercury.

On the second dive of the first day, I couldn’t get below 15 feet.  I skipped out on the third dive of the first day and the first dive the second day.  At least on a Scuba trip, even if you can’t dive you are still on a boat in a beautiful place and can watch the see the sea lions and hang out with people.  

I also have one other piece of common ground with the French.  We both prefer Speedos.  You don’t know much trouble I got in thinking I could wear my Speedo to swim at the beach in FL with Murray’s family.  I had to buy a pair of full length trunks at the expensive beach front shop.   I grew up on swim team.  As a swimmer, you wore speedos.  Of course Murray’s nieces wore dental floss, but apparently that is beside the point.  You could have cut bikini bottoms for both of them from the fabric used to make my speedo.  But the French know better than to let shame get in ones way.  I am here with 5 men and 7 women and over half the guys are in Speedos despite their having a gut that advertises “Hey I’m in my fifties”.

Tuesday

My ears bothered me today and it took me longer than the others to get down on the first dive.  On the second dive, I couldn’t get below 15 feet.  But the dive was shallow so I followed our group from above and watched the sea lions and the larger fish hunting the smaller. 

Towards the end of the dive we saw what appeared to be a river of fish.  It was perhaps ten meters in diameter and so dense that it appeared to be more fish than water.  The river extended below the water for as far as we could see in either direction.  It is fascinating enough to see a school of fish that all seem to move together, synchronized by something we can’t detect.  The reflective eyes and portions of the fins all turn at once creating giant semaphores beneath the water.  I detect no propagation delay as they flip left then right.   They truly seem to move as one.  Near us the river develops a branch and plumes of synchronized fish ebb and flow around us like smoke plumes.  I almost worry about getting lost, you can no longer see the other divers as a mass of fish changes course and blocks your view as a moving silver wall.  We are in the last ascent phase of the dive and watch the fish river below us as we slowly rise and decompress until they become a barely visible fog below us.

The food here reminds me of things I would cook were I Mexican.  We get lots of chopped vegetables and meats.  Everything is simple without too many spices.  The soup relies almost solely on cilantro to taste delicious.  At one point we had pressed chicken seared in olive oil.  Sometimes the onions are big enough to pick out and sometimes they are not.  It gives me something to do while listening to the others formulate their sentences in English.

In the evening I found that two of the French contingent, Jean Claude and Anne, had never met the rest prior to the dive.   The couple was happy to practice their English with Naoko and me.  They managed to not talk a word of work.  We talked about the US and Japanese propensity for talking about work.  We discussed the differences in nations at length.  We all conceded that we have trouble telling the ages, and sometimes the individual faces of other races apart.  It appears that it is true that all of us white people kind of look the same to the Japanese. 

There would be no mistaking the face of our captain.  He has long, wizened, white hair atop a weathered, broad face.  It is though someone gave him a script for the archetypical sea captain.  He is a mystery.  He doesn’t avoid the passengers completely, he engages enough with his few words of English to get you wondering, and then he disappears. 

Wednesday

I am sleeping amazingly well on this trip.  Perhaps the gentle rocking of the boat in the wind protected alcoves at night take me back to some infantile cradle experience.  Or perhaps the thin, high density foam over plywood bunks provides the kind of firmness I need in a bed.  Or, perhaps it takes being this far away and this unplugged from my regularly scheduled program to relax.

After the first dive, one of the Frenchman, Phillip I think, became visibly upset about how the dives were run.  Apparently we weren’t optimizing our air use or groups size.  He was one of the more gregarious in the dining room so perhaps he just wears his emotions on his sleeve more than others.  Everyone else was thrilled to see all the hammer head shark and it didn’t look like he could get anyone to take part in his anger.  Hopefully his venting is done.  I get emotionally drained before others do.  So, watching people vent is never my favorite pastime and I get even more uncomfortable when I don’t know what they are venting about.

I went on all four dives today.  We saw an amazing array of life, manta rays, sea lions and hammerhead sharks.  I think of all the times Murray wanted me to stop swimming at the beach for fear of sharks, and here I am with a group of people seeking them out at El Bajo.  When we took a short power boat tour around Los Islotes, the juvenile sea lions followed us like a pack of puppies.  We then went for a night dive.  The sea lions were still there under the waves and still very curious about us.  The mollusks and sea cucumbers were amorphous, slow moving animals that seem like they must belong to another universe.  Or perhaps they are what we will evolve into after a million generations of watching reality TV and eating McDonalds. 

At dinner I began to notice something that I think of as American about the French contingent.  Most of the guys seemed to have wives that were 10-20 years younger than themselves.  This was true for Jean Claude and Anne whom Naoko and I have been diving with as well as several of the other couples.  If you are diving in the sea of cortez you probably aren’t poor and I suppose this phenomena of trophy wives tends towards the affluent in both societies.  Only Phillip, the hothead, seemed to still have his original factory installed spouse.  I don’t think the age difference is a bad thing in and of itself, being a toy boy as I am.  But it makes me sad to ponder all the failed marriages not just in the states, but France and elsewhere.

Friday

If you want to know what is “in” when it comes to underwater fashion, you don’t have to look far.  From fifteen foot whale sharks to one inch juvenile puffers it seems like everyone is sporting polka dots these days.  Even the frumpy Moray Eel is putting on spots to rock the reef.

Sawanee reef is a great dive.  We have done it a few times now.  In fact we have done most of the better dives at least a couple of times now.  The divemaster says her preference is do re-dive the best dives rather than to head towards more mediocre dive sites.  On many of the dives the visibility has only been 30-50 feet or so.  As you descend and head towards the reef you hear it before you see it.  The coral look like underwater bushes but they don’t have the same flexibility as wood.  They are of more a ceramic consistency and they clink together in the currents and sound like a million pebbles raining down. 

I have noticed, here and in Cozumel, that the dive masters are as interested in the micro-life as they are in the big game.  Those of us that do this once or twice a year tend to be focused in on sea lions, sharks, or at the least a big eel.  But there are a fascinating collection of life forms smaller than your thumb to consider. 

My favorite so far would lend itself to a neat parlor trick, if anyone you know has a parlor on a reef.  There is a certain worm that lives in a hole.  It has a feeding a gill end that sticks out of the hole.  When you move your hand a few inches from it and snap your fingers, it disappears into the hole.  This is cool for at least two reasons.  The first is the movement is fast.  You don’t think about worms moving faster than you can see, but when you snap your fingers, they are gone.  You don’t even see them move, they just disappear.  Perhaps creatures that small exist on shorter time constants, but it looks like magic.  The second awesome thing about this is that I can’t hear me snap my fingers under water.  I feel that same friction and release feeling you get when you snap your fingers on land, but for me there is no sound.  Apparently for the worm it comes across like thunder. 

Murray would be jealous of our dive just outside the city of la paz.  The whale sharks were incredible.  They aren’t too intimidating as they don’t eat anything larger than plankton as do whales.  But, they must be 15 feet long and weigh a thousand pounds.  On our second trip out, we got an extra treat when the dolphins showed up.  There were three and they buzzed us a number of times coming tantalizingly close, almost to where you could touch one and then they would zip out of site.  If you gave chase, they would go slow enough to keep just ahead of you. 

The dolphins are truly players; they play you the whole way.  Somehow they know you are interested in touching them and they play that and stay just out of reach.  It reminds me of my complete teenage experience with girls.  For those who get frustrated enough by never quite being able to catch and touch a dolphin, you can pay to go get in the tank with the ones in captivity.  I suppose that is kind of like the topless bar of the dolphin world.  A paid outlet for those who are frustrated that they can’t get close.

They weren’t quite topless, but a third variety of oceanic wildlife showed up: Mexican twenty-somethings in bikinis.  In this part of the water there is no scuba so we were just skin diving.  The bikini girls were fun to look at for a while as well.  They both had cameras and lots of tats.  After a little while they got annoying as well, they seemed very willing to muscle in between you and the whale sharks and to get close enough to risk spooking the whale sharks into diving.  It made me wonder if there is a correlation between amount of tats and poor manners.  It would be interesting to see if anyone has done a study on that.

I found out today that Anne and Jean Claude are both Rheumatologists.  So even though she is attractive and younger than Jean Claude, perhaps she doesn’t qualify as a trophy wife.

Saturday

I am back at my hotel and after an hour of staring into my email client, I had the sensation that the room was gently rocking.  I need the horizon in my peripheral vision as an anchor after a week on the boat.  Funny how a computer screen has provided an anchor all my life and only after a week away does my head require a piece of the real world to keep my bearings and balance.  There is a metaphor in there somewhere but I refuse to torture it further.

Sunday

My flight was 2 hours behind and I was not going to make my connection so the airline put me up in a hotel.  The place is actually exceptionally nice.  It is right on the beach and has the largest pool I have ever been in.  And yes- I wore my speedo to do laps as newlywed Mexican couples played in the water.  The place is called the Barcelo in San Jose, just down from Cabo San Lucas.  It is very American centric.  Beyond having everything labeled in English and Spanish and the staff speaning English, you notice things like the mariachi music piped into the high end buffet area.  I heard mariachi muzak versions of Lou Reed and Meatloaf.  Now there is some cognitive dissonance. 

The beach here is pretty amazing.  I haven’t been on a beach so clean and free of shells and sea weed.  I expect the groom it somehow.  It was great for running on.  I love that barefoot running on wet sand feeling.  However, here the sand was strangely soft and your feet sink in, even where the sand is wet.  It gave me flashbacks to a recurring nightmare I had as a teenager where I was running from an assailant with a gun in soft sand and the sand caused me to run in slow motion.

Despite the luxury surroundings, I was bummed out not to see Murray.  We only had two days before I leave for Guatemala.  Now we just have one.