Azure Dives
The speedboat stops in open ocean and I start to get motion sickness.
This is an improvement from the continual bruising due to the boat slapping the surface every ten seconds. Slapping could be better described as the boat dropping in free space a few feet then stopping suddenly.
We’re in between Koh Samui and Koh Tao in the Gulf of Thailand. The ships complement include fourteen foreign strangers who missed the ferry and negotiated a cash deal with a guy at a dock, and two teenagers serving as the captain and first mate.
It’s raining, which helps diffuse the salt in the sea spray. The eyes don’t sting quite so much.
Good, I think.
On Diving
I once capsized a little catamaran in the sea off of Belize. If you could play the movie then one frame would be sunny and contain a sail and ocean. The next few frames would be turning the boat against the wind. The next frame, with no interval, would be upside down in the water.
If you’ve experienced shock, you know what this feels like. Disorientation, an inability to think, a retraction into the lizard brain.
The open ocean contains sharks and also an unknowable void. I hated the open ocean. I also hated being on boats due to motion sickness so crippling I could barely think.
What better way to tackle both problems than learning to dive, which contains continual exposure to both maladies?
That was my thinking.
Luckily learning to dive begins in a swimming pool.
Diving is just like learning to fly a plane (or a hangglider): You are repeatedly exposed to everything that could go wrong, but usually doesn’t. For a plane, that’s engine failures. For diving, it’s lack of air.
Underwater, there is no air. So you take it with you. This air is compressed in an interchangeable tank you carry on your back.
The air from your tank is first put through a regulator (called the 1st stage) you screw on the top of the tank, this takes the pressure down from astronomical to something you can breath. You learn to screw the regulator on properly and test it because if it falls off or fails then you die. Four air lines come off the first stage.
Perhaps the most important line goes to the second stage regulator which goes in your mouth. This can fail in a number of ways and kill you, so you train for that and also carry another one as spare, just in case. One line goes to a couple of gauges that tell you how much air is left (it’s important not to run out), the other line goes to your BCD.
The BCD, or Buoyancy Control Device, is a jacket you wear that has all the other stuff mounted and connected to it. The BCD contains a bladder you can inflate with air from the tank which can help you go up or down or stay level like a mini submarine. The BCD can fail in entertaining ways, and you train to take the whole thing off and put it on again under water and at the surface. Repeatedly.
Your mask can also leak or get ripped off, leaving you blind so you learn to do many of these things blinded and under pressure.
If this doesn’t sound fun enough then there’s the motion sickness.
During my first training dives I got so sick I couldn’t move and had to return to the dock in Nowhere, Mexico where I laid for over an hour to be able to move again. The second time, on the other side of the country, I just plain chickened out.
I wasn’t going to be beaten.
Dramamine is a common anti-nausea pill which many divers take. I was hesitant because the internet listed side-effects as varied as sleepiness and death. I was so hesitant that I investigated old Air Force programs which showed you could cure motion sickness via repeated exposure, but in the end just took the pills.
In the future I want to experiment with ginger which can have similar utility without the downsides. You can explore Google Scholar yourself, but, there’s some weak correlation with Dramamine and fun things like Alzheimer’s.
Your first real dives in open water consist of repeating all the stunts you did in the swimming pool, only this time you’re bobbing up and down, or sitting in silt so thick you can’t see anything, and usually much deeper. Your instructor holds on to your BCD tightly in case you do something extra stupid like panic and kill yourself.
Eventually after many rounds of this you’re allowed to dive.
Not dive by yourself, because you’d probably die by getting lost or some other idiotic thing. But you can then dive in a highly organized environment with someone much better trained than you watching you at all times, always with a buddy. Your buddy has all the same equipment you do so in the event you try to die, they can help stop you, share their equipment and provide emotional support. You also can’t dive deep, or at a shipwreck, or use modified air, or 100 other things.
In total you can do all this basic training in three or four days. If you wanted to be able to dive by yourself, that would be months of training.
Looking around and seeing turtles or fish or whatever is more of an incidental addition to dive training. Something you get if you’re lucky.
Once basically trained, you get an ID number which lets you dive for fun practically anywhere in the world. Nobody will trust you, and if it’s been a while you will have to repeat the training all over again to demonstrate your ability to avoid death, but it can be done.
Fast forward many diving qualifications to Sipadan, an island off another island off of Borneo in Malaysia. Sipadan repeatedly wins “best place to dive in the world” competitions for a reason - it’s like the opening scenes of Finding Nemo. Unreal. You can look around and see clown fish, sharks, turtles and schools of barracuda above a riot of color that is the coral backdrop without turning your head much at all.
Sipadan is what people imagine diving is really about instead of all the vomiting and emergency procedure training. Mabul, the island next to Sipadan where humans are allowed is first of all logistically difficult to get to. Having arrived, Sipadan is another leap because dive licenses are something like Wonka’s Golden Tickets. You are guaranteed roughly one ticket per week of staying at Mabul.
On my last dive in Sipadan I felt odd and then realized it was because I was calm, no longer intimidated by the backwards roll off the boat to drop in to the water or worried about some imaginary thing that would go wrong.
The aim of any professional training in the end is to make you someone competent, capable of independent thought and leadership in a specified field. After training at four dive shops who focused on safety I had landed at one where things were somewhat more relaxed. Thanks to all the training I was secure and happy following what my dive computer wanted to do and staying within a safety envelope somewhat more constrained than the instructors suggestions.
The training and work had all paid off.
Meanwhile on the Stalled Speedboat
Good.
Jocko Willink, ex-SEAL and podcaster writes about a few things that have stuck. One of them is good. The idea is, that whatever happens, then, good! Find the good in it. This is largely useful because everyone else is running around finding the bad in events.
There’s always good in events. I recently had to cancel international travel when someone got very sick, good I don’t have to sit on a plane for 18 hours. A hotel I stayed at charged me for losing the credit-card room key, good maybe I’ll just take one in future, not lose it, and there will be less plastic waste generally.
We don’t really control anything anyway, so we may as well find the good in things.
At Koh Samui airport I knew something was wrong when the people at the transfer desk were not sure if there were ferry tickets to Koh Tao. This was the polite way of saying that there were none, but there might be at the pier, which was the polite way of saying go away.
The pier was total chaos. The carrying capacity of the ferry is ~500 people and there were multiple ferries, meaning thousands of people packed in the open. Hawkers selling street food. Tropical heat. And no tickets. The ticket office made it clear via facial expression that only some kind of complete moron would arrive sans ticket.
Enterprising individuals offer speedboats for those without a ferry ticket and after some confusing negotiations a group of us formed to be one side of a cash deal; money for transit to Koh Tao.
The speedboat had seen better days and required constant attention to one of its motors lest it blow up or something inconvenient. It was about half the speed of the ferry and exposed to the environment.
Worried looks were exchanged when we stopped in open ocean. Engine failure? Did we have to walk the plank? No, we just had to redistribute weight on the boat so we didn’t fracture the hull during this voyage. I started to get sick and knew to look at the horizon.
Good, we were halfway there.
It’s all good!