37

That's the number of skiffs I can see in motion right now from the sun deck of the boat. The lagoon is alive with 40 HP Yamaha powered 20' fiberglass hulled skiffs. If this were Somalia, I'd be nervous right now. All is well, though, as everyone is headed to town to buy food for Christmas. Looks like the 24th is THE day to shop in Chuuk. Shopping for the boat is complete, so I get to kick back and watch the world, or at least a good portion of Chuuk's population, go by.

Merry Christmas to all.

Sized Up

Below entry leads me to another point: it is thrilling on a basic, primordial level to be sized up, eyeballed by something hungry of another species and know it is trying to figure out a) if you're tasty and b) how getting a chance to sample you balances on the risk/reward scale. Would probably be less thrilling and more terrifying if there was anything in the lagoon bigger than me, but no such luck so far. I'm going to keep looking, though.

Running Interference

It being the Pacific, we get that clouds of tropical fish all over the place effect that looks so cool in coffee table book photos and BBC documentaries. You know the shot I’m talking about, the one where the cameraman approaches the edge of a reef thick with a wall of scintillating, brightly colored fish that, at some predetermined signal, some minimum safe disturbance distance, scatter en masse, startling down into the reef for a few seconds to cower until one of them gives the all clear signal and they ease their way back into the water column? We have that here, as well as the schools of baitfish whirling and flowing in circles and patterns phenomenon. The fish inside the lagoon aren’t typically as brightly colored as what you’d see on the reef outside, but they behave similarly, have the same schooling groupthink mentality which includes either slowly edging away from or outright fleeing noisy bubble blowing divers, depending upon the speed of said divers’ approach. Ease up on them without making noisy exhalations or sudden movements and you can actually get close to the fish clouds. As soon as you breathe or twitch, though, they almost always move away. Almost always.

Sometimes they don’t. Sometimes, if you’re close to a reef or the mast of a wreck, they even edge towards you. Get close to you. Snuggle up right next to you as if, despite the fact that you are a big bubble blowing monster, you aren’t the scariest thing around. Almost like they’re using you as...cover. That’s when to start looking around, because somewhere on the other side of you is a guy who looks something like this:

Eggs Are Heavy

Eggs. You buy them regularly. Unless you are baking heavily, you buy them by the dozen, maybe two. They go in a separate bag at the grocery checkout aisle, and you carry them in a separate hand when you load them in the car and unload them to the house, where they go in the fridge and then come out egg by egg.

Hold an egg in your hand. Wave it around a bit, carefully. Kinda heavy, isn’t it, this compact, dense little bundle of protein? Come to think of it, even though it was just one or two dozen eggs in that grocery bag, it was still pretty heavy for the actual size, no?

Now pack thirty dozen of them in a crate and try staggering from the store to a van and then several hundred steps from the van to a boat landing, a skiff, a boat, and eventually a fridge with them, said staggering done in a cautious manner to keep them from breaking. Then you’ll see why I say...

When Ya Gonna Ring It?

After we brought it up and cleaned it we put it back on the wreck. Promise. You can come out and check. And hell yes, it was heavy. Titular apologies to Jack White.

Fastenating

Do you ever feel like your life is just a long series of double ended stainless steel bolt snaps, cable ties, Aquaseal, surgical tubing, rubber bands, bungie cords, swivel snaps, #36 braided nylon line, slices of bike inner tube, velcro, wing nuts, rivets, and duct tape? Yeah, me too.

Technicality

Tech week. Also known as deep week. Three, four times a year, we offer a technical charter to divers qualified to venture onto the deeper wrecks. What counts as qualified? Well, the main qualification seems to be that you have to pack a lot of expensive stuff that weighs a bunch and is no fun to carry. Second qualification is that you be able to actually put on said expensive heavy stuff and use it without hurting yourself. It’s often the second one that catches folks. But when it works, it works, and boy is it a good time.

Technical diving in Truk is fairly tame in comparison to much of the technical diving that goes on around the world. There’s no place in the lagoon deeper than 250’, and the deepest wreck is 220’, just at the limit of safe air diving, so there’s no need to remove part of the nitrogen in the breathing gas and replace it with something inert like helium, nor must one dial down the percentage of oxygen for the deepest portion of the dive, obviating the need for a separate travel gas used during ascent and descent that is different than the bottom gas used for the actual dive. The lagoon is calm, so no current lines, granny lines, down lines, or John lines, or the fear of rough water entries and exits. Also easy to find the boat at the end of the dive, where there will be sweet sweet hundred percent O2 decompression goodness from surface supplied regulators hanging at 15’, eliminating the need to haul around every breath of decompression gas needed. Calm water also means it’s possible to hang from a bar at the back of the boat to decompress and slurp said O2 without getting tossed around like a rag doll. The water is warm, so leave the serious exposure suits, the dry suits, and the large amounts of lead needed to sink them at home next to the dry suit inflation hose and separate bottle of insulating argon used as a nonconductive barrier against freezing water. The visibility is passable, so goodbye braille diving. We tie in directly to the wrecks, so no wandering around, searching for the dive site at 200’. When you consider some of the crazy technical diving people do, under ice or at 300’+ or thousands of horizontal feet inside a cave system, sometimes all three at once, Truk is small time.

Fact remains, however, that nowhere else in the world is there such a concentration of shipwrecks in such good shape, and to get to the deep ones, specialized gear and training are necessary. This is not reef diving, nor is it swim over the top of a jumbled pile of metal that was once a wreck wreck diving. You want to get serious, you can wander around three decks deep inside the sideways tilted collapsing engine room of a WWII Japanese ship that’s been underwater for 67 years, black as night and covered in powder fine silt that kicks up in clouds and creates an impenetrable rust storm with every exhalation and misdirected fin swipe, 200’ down and surrounded by decaying live ordnance and human remains. In other words, put on the game face along with the gear and know what you’re doing when you come out for tech week.

Be prepared to see places that not many folks frequent. Chuuk gets about five thousand tourists a year, most of them divers, and even though this place is known as a mecca for technical wreck diving, a vast majority of visiting divers see only the shallower wrecks. There is little traffic on the deep wrecks. Finding them, taking enough gear to explore them, getting back safely, none of these things are simple. Less traffic means less wear and tear, less day boats dragging grappling hooks across the coral trying to tie in, less careless or sticky fingered divers abusing or pilfering from the wrecks. With such light traffic, it is easy to feel, while wandering around a superstructure seeing half buried china and the detritus of daily life haphazardly scattered, that no one has been poking around here for a while; some of the places we access during deep week, maybe not since the ship sank. Exhilarating. Also, being deep, the wrecks take less of a beating from the elements: less growth, less water movement and wear and tear. The shallower wrecks we visit on a weekly basis look how you’d imagine a shipwreck to look in your mind’s eye: lot’s of growth and decay that lends spooky ambiance. The deep stuff often looks, from a distance, like it hasn’t changed since the day it sank, and that’s exciting in a different, more exploratory and less we’re on a ride at Disney way.

So what does tech diving in Truk look like? Take a 200’ wreck. The whole wreck isn’t that deep, but some of the interesting bits, like the engine room, or the bottom of the cargo holds, or something out in the sand that got thrown clear of the wreck as it blew up or sank are. Have to breathe air instead of nitrox, as the added oxygen content in nitrox, denitrogenated air, can be toxic at that depth and can cause seizures. So the air lets you go deeper, but you load more nitrogen faster, leading to shorter bottom time and longer decompression requirements, as well as a dance with friend/ foe narcosis, the stupor that can hit at depth. Fill the tank with air. Tanks, actually; most technical divers here use dual tanks connected by a manifold that allows one tank to be isolated from the other in case of failure on one side. Shut down the intertank connection and you can save half your gas if you are having a problem. Also means you can haul more air. Redundant regulators, the things you breath from, run independently to each tank. Then there are the other hoses involved, inflation, pressure gauges, etc. Takes a lot to get the air from your tanks to your body in an easy to access fashion.

And those are just the tanks on your back. Breathing that air at depth is going to squeeze a bunch of nitrogen into your system, and when you ascend, you’re going to want a gas leaner in nitrogen and thus higher in oxygen content to coax all that nitrogen out of your system. Think of it like two interconnected pools: the larger the height difference between the pools, the faster the water wants to flow from the higher pool to the lower pool. The water in this case is nitrogen in your body trying to escape. The less nitrogen you’re taking into your lungs when you breathe, the lower the other pool is, the faster that nitrogen leaves. So, fill a small tank with something between 50 and 100% oxygen, breathe it as you get closer to the surface, and feel that nitrogen jump from your blood to your lungs and out with your exhalations instead of lodging in your joints and spine. Ideally. Gotta have a way to breathe off that small tank and tell how much gas is in there, so that’s another regulator and the attendant clips needed to strap the whole mess to your body.

The mess grows exponentially when you add a floatation system, lights, cutting devices, spools of line to spin out like a trail of nylon bread crumbs on the way into and hopefully out of a wreck, inflatable marker buoys, redundant diving computers, writing surface to make notes, an exposure suit to keep you warm on a long dive, maybe a camera rig to record the dive, and a harness upon which to strap everything, the list goes on indefinitely. It all becomes quite a bundle. Worth every wiggle and strain getting into and carrying all the stuff when you get to do what comes next, though.

It is a thrill to sink a hundred feet and more before you even get deep enough to begin to see the top of the masts of the ship. Lots of water overhead. Then the hazy outline of the wreck comes into view. Get oriented, then head off to the part you want to explore. If you have on your game face, go inside. The choices are yours, you are being effected by the environment into which you have ventured, and your adventure and your health are dictated solely upon how you comport yourself. Don't know about you, but I don't think like that during day to day cross the street life. Down here, though, as I decide to go down that one more stairwell, take another turn away from daylight, round that one sketchy looking beam that may or may not be sturdily supporting tons of metal overhead, all with narcosis tickling the edges of consciousness like that one last ill advised cocktail before a ride in the car, it all comes into pinpoint focus. Trite to discuss T-shirt slogan if you aren't living on the edge you're just taking up space silliness, but tech week provides opportunity to not only see amazing places but to feel truly alive while seeing them.

Go deep, stay a while, have fun snooping around, then head up. Stop about half way from your deepest depth, pause. Ascend ten feet. Pause. Repeat repeatedly, easing your body back to the surface and allowing the nitrogen time to work itself out of your system. Get to the maximum safe depth for whatever your decompression gas is rated for. Turn on your deco gas, switch regulators, and slam your lungs with an oxygen rich, nitrogen poor gas that speeds decompression. Continue to ascend and pause, taking longer stops the closer you get to the surface. Find the back of the boat, where the surface supplied oxygen is hanging at 15’. Switch regulators again and huff O2 until your dive plan dictates that you are sufficiently off gassed to surface. Climb aboard, slowly, so that nothing in your system gets fizzy like a shaken soft drink. Congratulate yourself and others on once again spitting in the eye of death. Compare nitrogen narcosis addled notes on what you actually remember seeing in the depths. That’s what tech diving looks like around here. It’s nothing I’d want to subject myself to every week, as deep diving is rough on the bod and big oxygen cylinders are really heavy to get on and off the boat and who do you think has to fill all those little decompression bottles, but tech week is a wonderful departure from the usual routine, gives us a chance to break out the big boy toys, and allows access to some great, less often dived wrecks that still hold mystery, wonder, history, and a tickle of Indiana Jones thrill.

Rolling

Another number related aside. I have this dive computer. Got it when I started working in the dive industry in, what, 2002? Began using it when I was working in Hawaii in 2003 or 4. It goes with me on just about every dive I make, and continues to be a faithful companion, easing me back to the surface without allowing me to froth my blood with nitrogen. It has a history function that keeps track of the number of dives it has made and the amount of time it has spent underwater. Every once in a while I access it for a chuckle; when it got close to 1000 dives, I started paying close attention to it to see what it would do. After 999 it goes back to...1. That was 999 dives ago. It rolled over to one for the second time, and has now attended 2000 dives and spent 1715 hours underwater. That, my friends, is a lot of nitrogen. No wonder my brain is turning into Swiss cheese.

1 2 3, 4, 5...6 7 8, 9, 10...11 12

Meant to mention this earlier. Jumped in the water at 11:12 on 8/9/10. Wouldn’t have been nearly as cool if I read my dates European style.

Scarred for Life

Some people are proud of their scars. I am a bit embarrassed by most of mine, as it seems they are almost all permanent reminders of my own stupidity. Boat life is, for me at least, an unending cycle of wound recovery: I am in a constant state of healing something, and about the time I manage to successfully form a scar, I start in on another wound, ever coming up with new and profoundly clumsy ways to hurt myself. Best part is that daily immersion in sea water guarantees that proper, rapid healing will not take place. All those wives tales about salt water being good for wounds? Take a glass of sea water and put it on your window sill for a couple of days, and tell me it doesn’t start looking like a high school science project involving a worse for the wear piece of Wonderbread. Now take that freshly scabbed wound of yours and, instead of cleaning it once a day in a shower and keeping it covered in Neosporin, soak it three times a day, an hour each session, in a lively biotic soup of water that, by nature of being in a closed lagoon, doesn’t really circulate the way the open ocean does. How’s that scab coming along? Keloid tissue, people. I’ve learned to welcome it. Proud of it? Not really, as it seems more a badge of stupidity than anything else. Wary and oh so devoted to avoiding it whenever possible? You bet. Ever finding new ways of covering myself in it, despite care and caution? Sigh. I’ve almost healed this diagonal gouge on my chest, so I’m off to find something to bang my head on in the engine room.

Doom Generation

People ask me what wreck diving is like. I have had a lot of time to think about it, mostly while I am wreck diving, and the best description that I can come up with, having been a teen during the advent of first person shooter video games, is that it is like playing Doom. Without the monsters and demons and shotguns and explosives and rocket launcher ammo and whatnot...actually, there are explosives and ammo here, there just aren’t zombies actively trying to use them on me. I’m getting ahead of myself.

For those of you who haven’t wasted inordinate amounts of your life playing video games, here’s the short version. First person shooter games present an explorable environment using the screen to give a first person perspective of what you would see if you were moving through that environment. Turn left and your view changes left, look up and you see what is above you, crouch to examine something on the ground and you zoom in on it as if you were getting closer to it. The themes of different games range from ancient times to the far future, with attendant weapons, foes, puzzles, maps, clues, etc., but certain mechanics of these games are pervasive. The world is broken down into areas. Each area has a layout, a map through which you navigate. The designers insert into the maps hidden areas and navigational puzzles to reward the observant, persistent, thorough player. Careful examination of each area reveals in the nooks and crannies hidden rooms with caches of goodies and passages that allow access to hard to reach areas or shortcuts through the map. Play enough of the games or figure out the designer’s logic, if there is any, and finding the hidden goodies becomes easier.

What the hell does this have to do with wreck diving? Simply this: exploring the wrecks, learning them, mapping them out mentally, poking into every nook, is similar to exploring in a first person shooter. I am looking for the same things: hidden goodies and ways to get to hard to access places. I get the same feeling in a wreck as I do in a game: show me everything, leave nothing unturned or unexplored, poke nose and flashlight everywhere. I enter new areas in wrecks the way I do in games, methodically moving from one side of the space to another, searching high and low. Granted there’re no aliens waiting to jump out and liquefy my face or axe wielding zombies bent on dismembering me when I disturb their lair, but I have found more than one pile of human remains in the wrecks, and that’s something one often encounters in the more macabre games. Ammo too. Much of a shooting game revolves around finding enough ammunition to get the job done, and there’s plenty, plenty of ammunition around here. I’m not going to fall back on that old video games are useful because they improve hand eye coordination saw, but I have solved more than one maze riddle in a wreck superstructure by using the always turn left trick everyone who ever played Castle Wolfenstein learned. Who said video games are a complete waste of time?

Agora Sweater

Ever have one of those simple misconceptions from childhood that bleeds over into adult life? You know, one of those things that you got in your head as a kid, something that seemed logical, and it just stuck until you had a definitive mental map reconstructing moment that put things on the right track? I’ll give you an example. I knew Washington was a state. I knew Washington D.C. was the capital of the country. Naturally I assumed that someone had parked D.C. in the state of Washington. Why would they be on opposite sides of the country? It took an embarrassing snafu in fifth grade geography to set me straight.

Same with agoraphobia. I’d heard and read the word enough in context to think I knew what it meant: a fear of large spaces. It took junior high Latin and, by association, Greek to find out that the root, literally translated, was fear of the marketplace. It took walking into my first Super Ultra Mega Do You Like What We’ve Done With This City Block Consume Anything Your Greedy Heart Desires Welcome Back to America For the First Time in Two Years Sucka Wal Mart to really, really understand agoraphobia.

I traveled to Texas while on vacation and, on a whim and the need to feed a super premium jones, I entered a Super Wal-Mart in an effort to make up for two years of ice cream deprivation. Everything’s bigger in Texas, but Lordy I wasn’t prepared for what happened as the automatic doors hissed apart at my approach.

I took two steps inside and froze, woodland creature in headlights, completely overwhelmed and confused. Fluorescent lit space disappeared into the unfathomable distance in all directions. Cavernous, yawning commercialism stretched as far as I could see. The hugeness was staggering. Those patient enough to have read some of my other entries know I’m not above hyperbole to make a point, but I kid you not, my chest actually tightened, my breathing became labored, my vision started to tunnel, and I broke out in a prickly sweat. I make a living squeezing my body into small, dark, claustrophobic places inside collapsing shipwrecks, and here I was, in a store, the most innocuous of places, panting, jelly kneed, fight or flight response fluttering. I backed up against the wall just inside the door and put my hands on the gumball and temporary tattoo machines to steady myself.

Super Wal-Mart. Ultra K-Mart. Mega Target. Did we really need to supersize these already massive establishments? Only in America could a bunch of guys sit around the board room and decide to take America’s largest indoor business establishments and make them bigger. “I know what old Sam Walton would have wanted. Let’s EXPAND. Not just our store numbers. Our internal volume. Our footprint.” Can you picture it? “We’ve already undersold small town America into oblivion, wrecking every local business economy we enter. But the grocery stores are still in business. There’s a slice of middle America’s paycheck we aren’t getting. We should do something about that.”

I finally got over the fact that I was standing in a store that had a greater volume of retail space than every store in the town in which I live put together, and far more stock, to boot. I remember getting off the live-aboard in Kona after a long stint at sea and wandering around a regular Wal-Mart thinking that it was like being in downtown NYC, but this feeling was somehow different. In Chuuk, people are content with little, mainly by necessity. They’d be just as happy to have the cardboard container or the wooden pallet in which all the merchandise I was seeing was packed, much less the contents. I was standing in a space, a huge space, where you could get, well, anything. By design, you can go into Super Wal-Mart with a wildly diverse list of needs and errands and knock out every one, from grocery, appliance, garden, kitchen, and electronics shopping to meals, a health check-up, bank visit, and a new set of prescription glasses.

I guess I don’t have to tell you guys; you can see it any time you want, and I envy that on many levels. Point is, people ask me what strikes me as different in the US since I left. Being on a bus full of people absorbed by the data devices whose screens they are poking and massaging, relating not a bit to the outside world or anyone in it until their PDA’s GPSs tell them they have arrived where they are going; that’s different. Successful business models for artisanal bakeries and chocolatiers that make nothing but seven dollar cupcakes or thirty dollars a pound chocolates; that’s different. Having a mobile pet grooming service willing to arrive at my doorstep in a small RV and wash my pet; that’s different. Seeing someone in a type of shoe other than a flip flop and driving down at a road at double digit speed, both very different. Turning on the internet and having a web page load up instantly is certainly different.

People also ask me what I’ve missed in the US since I left. The food, the variety, going to a movie theater or a museum, those things I’ve missed. Super Wal-Mart? Not so much.

Family Matters

Between Christmas, visits with the folks, and a trip to Honduras with just about everyone on my mother’s side of the family within one generation of me, I spent a lot of time with my family the last couple of months. First time I’ve been around most of them in two years. They are the coolest people I know. Now that could be because I’ve been around them all my life and I’ve just gotten used to them, but I don’t think so. I really believe that I just hit the jackpot and happened to fall into the deep end of the gene pool. My family is as diverse, talented, intelligent, and downright interesting a clan as you could ever expect to meet. As a bonus, the cousins in my generation are marrying age, and many of them are dating or getting married to entertaining, fun people who mesh perfectly with the rest of us. There’s no other group with whom I’d rather spend my time, and the fam was the highlight of my trip.

Okay, enough sappy gushing; let me get to my sappy point. My family gets along famously. There are no warring factions or people on the outs or members who, through withdrawal or due to distance, have achieved long lost status. Nobody bickers or does anything backhanded. It’s all love, respect, support. In this, I’m lucky.

Some of you reading this may not be so lucky. There may be issues, real or imagined, that keep your family members apart. It is to you that I say the following: take the first step. Rift in your family? Someone with whom you don’t see eye to eye? Hate the person your family member married? Old grudge? Skeletons in the closet? Long distance hindering communication? So what? Let the healing begin, people! Make the effort to reach out. Patch up an old misunderstanding. Send a thoughtful gift to the niece you never met. Write a newsy catch up letter to a lonely uncle. Forgive a debt. Forgive a slight. Hash out your differences with a sibling. Basically, recognize the fact that blood is thicker than water, that you are stuck with your relatives, and that you may as well enjoy their company. Who knows what redeeming qualities you may discover or rediscover? Naive advice? Perhaps. But hey, they’re family. Give it a try. Okay, preaching over, soapbox kicked aside.

Publish or Perish

That’s how the old expression runs. Though I feel in no threat of imminent demise due to my recent laziness, I want to thank those who have gently and not so gently pestered me to get off my butt and type something. It is to those of you I now apologize for the...bloginess of this entry. Merely a way of catching up so we don’t jump from Nan Madol directly into tepid Truk without a little backstory. I’ve been in the US a couple times since last year; musings to follow. The differences are overwhelming. Not good or bad necessarily, just mighty different. In between those US trips I have spent a couple months back in Truk and am back again until the end of the year. New boat responsibilities have introduced a new learning curve that has been eating up my time and sleep, making writing a distant second. No excuse, unfortunately, for all my off time when I could have been writing instead of messing around. It’s fun to blow off a year’s worth of weekends in a two months, but not conducive to keyboards. So, without further bloglike ado, some half baked stuff that’s been kicking around on the drive for a while. Once again, thanks for reading and prodding me to get back to it.