Mmmmmmm Swiss pancakes...

Bonjour. It has been a most pleasant day. Started off with a cracking headache, but things warmed up nicely. The Blue Moon party was thumping until the wee hours of the morning on the other side of the island, but I am not sure if it was that which woke me up or the dogs starting Dog War 6 of the week….whatever it was, I was up at 2:45ish until about 3ish. Made for a shitty start to the day.

But so I had an easy start to the day following that. A bowl of Alpen (oooh look at me embracing the granola lifestyle) with mini bananas. I’m not sure why you can only get stumpy bananas here, they’re kind of odd looking. What was even more freaky is that I think they gave me a minor case of the shits. Went off to town for an hour of internet time (yes, I probably should have done my blog then, because this will be short because I am knackered tonight, but whatever, I managed to get a crapload done on working on my law school application), when all of a sudden a shit-attack gets me. Oh crap!!! Stone, sorry I forgot to warn you. But this one won’t be so graphic, so chillax.

And subsequently all day I have had gas. Nothing like diving to 28 metres and letting one rip. I swear, it actually created an air pocket in my wetsuit!! Every time I moved, I would rise a little in the area that the gas pocket had moved to. I guess this is what dry suit diving is sort of like.

I didn’t have any dives this morning, so it was a relatively slow start to the day. Got to Sunshine in time for the afternoon dives. I helped Noé with some fun divers. Actually quite skilled divers so there wasn’t much to do (the way I keep hoping Heather will be…ahhh I can keep dreaming I guess). What was kind of crazy was that we went on a dive where the bottom depth was 28m and we were down for 46 minutes. Now the recreational limit without the deep diver specialty is 30m. We were diving with three comparatively skinny women. Women, in any event, tend to use less air than men. Noé is also a skinny Swiss guy. So out of everyone likely to suck back on the old air, yep, the newly qualified DM was the most likely candidate. As you consume more air at greater depths deeper dives don’t tend to last that long. Noé was primarily concentrating on the fun divers. So in the end I had to get his attention quite dramatically to let him know I was low on air. How? I simply went straight to a safety stop when I hit about 40 bar of air (you should be back on the boat around 50). I figured the boat boys would be grumpy seeing a tank that low, so I grabbed a bunch of empty dive tanks and made it look like I was simply helping move the tanks back for refilling. That way I could hide my pretty much empty tank in the midst of the rest of them. Tsk Tsk. Fun dive though.

The second dive was very very shallow and we stayed down for 59 minutes. The area we dived is full of fishermen’s refuse. So I took a mesh dive bag and collected all the trash we found along the way….yep, Mr. Environmental over here. Problem was that Noé realized how long we had been down about 55 minutes into the dive and so tried to gun it back to the boat. By which point it felt like I was carrying a half-ton of trash. So I lost him and the fun divers in the haze. One of the fun divers, who I had buddied up with on the first dive, came back, but unfortunately Noé and the other diver were long gone. We surfaced to find Noé about 100m away.

Still, good times. Noé and I messed with each other to the amusement (or was that incredulity I saw in their eyes) of the fun divers, as we tried to grab masks off each other, fins, turn off air, inflate each other’s BCD’s, etc. Ahhh the joys of being cocky DMs.

Anyway, mellowed out when we got back to Sunshine.

Then had dinner at Noé and Celia’s. He really is a good chef. We had some crazy good oat, egg, carrot, garlic and bunch of yummy stuff in a pancake type concoction with white rice and a salsa-esque tomato accompaniment.

I am taking these cats out for Indian over Christmas as my little treat for them. Despite Noé’s continued attempts to assassinate me underwater (he kind of reminds me of Kato in the Pink Panther movies springing from nowhere when I get home), these are good people. I have already offered to present the culinary wonders of Toronto to them if they make it that far across the pond.

I told you about my wounds from yesterday, no? I made a fool of myself to myself on my way for drinks yesterday. Pop home after my foot “shave” to drop off y stuff and spray some manjuice on the pits. Get back down the steepest flight of stairs you’ve ever seen and am about to kick a wheelie outta there on the moped when I realize that the porch light isn’t on. Trying to open the door with a combination padlock in the pitch-black is damn tough. So I run back up the stairs to turn on the light when…..I blow a flip-flop. Don’t quite fall, but I kick the living crap out of the stair with my shin. Crack the skin in three places and bloods-a-flowing. End up getting down to Sunshine after a 25 minute iodine/patch-it-up session.

It actually hurts like a bitch, but I am more embarrassed that I fell “up” a set of stairs. Who does that? Me, I guess. Yes, thank you, thank you very much (shades of Elvis creeping in….talking of which, I have been singing “In The Ghetto” in a Cartman voice for the last four days….seriously, where does that come from…..weird man, weird).

Well, after the dives today, the bandaids I put on are toast and a strange sticky weeping substance is oozing out of my wounds. Yum. Stop licking your lips you bunch of vamps. Let’s just hope it doesn’t get infected.

Anyhoooow, I have to be at Sunshine early tomorrow and before that I have to pick up my gear from Bans and then pick up Noé, so sign off time for me tonight…..