The Dive Evangelist

What has two thumbs and no brain?

THIS GUY!!!

I said no to a free dive trip and will need some time to recover.

"Fly to Hawaii tomorrow," barked my buddy Chris without any preamble whatsoever. I had just answered the phone with a more conventional, "Hello?" and that was his response.

"No," this seemed an unreasonable request.

"Free!!"

"What the hell are you talking about?"

Chris is a little nuts, so I'm used to peculiar phone calls, but this one was a special sort of awesome. The shop in DC, where he works, still had one paid spot open on the Kona Aggressor. If I could get my gear to Hawaii, I'd be liveabord diving hard corals and lava tubes for a week in 82 degree, South Pacific water. Boat left this morning, getting back in next Saturday... the day I'm to be flying to Bonaire with the NY Aquarium.

If only it had been any other week. If I hadn't just come back from a week and a half in Mexico. Or if I wasn't already committed to go to Bonaire for a week. If only I could walk properly. If only I'd had more than a day's notice. If only the folks at my day job didn't expect me to "work" sometimes.

The diving community is a such a tightly knit little world unto itself and I so adore the ways in which that manifests itself. I suppose the same tight knit can be found in any hobby community, but one is hard pressed to imagine philatelists or ice sculptors or jigsaw puzzle fanciers calling one another at odd hours and making 15 hour flight demands to exotic locations.

While still surprising, this call still makes plenty of sense in a scuba diver's head. It is the sort of call we all wish two or three times a day to receive as we walk through the dry portion of our lives. Luckily enough, in some form or another each avid scuba diver gets this call at some point, often at many points.

That's what happens in the relatively small community of the dive club (such as Oceanblue Divers, for example) or the local dive shops; divers get close and start looking out for opportunities they can share with their friends. And diving opportunities are different from ordinary opportunities. Diving opportunities are usually extraordinary.

I had to let this one go, sadly. The responsibilities of a grown-up life trumped spectacular luck this time.

I am sure, after Chris told the folks at the shop that he couldn't fill the spot some other diver got that call and was able to say yes. I hope they're hovering over the reef right now thinking about how lucky they are to be a diver and to be part of the diving community. We are all very, very lucky that way; I hope we can each appreciate that even before it's our turn to be called. We each have so many stories we're eager to share of far-away places and rare creatures and the eccentricities of other divers. We're lucky to have our own stories and luckier to have plenty of other divers who would love to hear them.

It's the community that promises us each our turn for the free liveaboard. Keep the community alive.

If you're interested:
A last-second flight from New York to Kona then from Kona to Bonaire is about $2,200.

Of course I looked.