kaitlyn, part 5: DIY, the extreme edition

Got up Early today. Actually walking out of my hotel at 6:45am. Spare me all your tales of how early the rest of you get up to work your normal person hours, I haven’t seen 6:45am this many days in a row since I was last diving in a foreign country. On the other hand, I haven’t been to bed at 9pm this many days in a row since grade school. So I guess it evens out.

Playa isn’t in high season right now and they don’t really cater to divers who get up that early so I discovered it’s almost impossible to get a cup of coffee at that hour. Not good. As an aside, while I’ve enjoyed Playa I probably wouldn’t come back except to dive. I prefer my third world beach towns to have about 50% more ragged broke backpackers because then there will be about 300% more coffee shops, used book stores and breakfast places where you can order one banana pancake. In short I need a little more color and enthusiasm and a little less bleached blond hair over prada sunglasses and a disdainful expression.

But the cenotes were worth the whole trip. And I like Mexico, overall. It’s fun to be somewhere non-stateside where I understand the language and have some idea of the culture.

Anyway, I took a ferry across the bay to dive Cozumel. It’s a legendary dive spot, so I’m not sure what I expected but I thought it would be a nice finish to this trip. The diving’s nice. Pretty reefs, much better than the diving in Playa. But the bottom line is that I really prefer a little excitement and adventure in my diving/life so I prefer wreck and cave diving and the sighting of giant creatures to pretty reefs that look like giant aquariums. When I’ve seen my 12^th angel fish I tend to tune out and hope a shark swims by. It did get me thinking about the kind of environment I want for my dive master certification but that can be a subject for another post because this one is about Sergio. I mean, now it is. Starting… now.

Sergio is the craggy Mexican divemaster in his late 60’s running a sketchy little dive operation out of Cozumel, the kind with broken cement stairs leading down to the boat and equipment that looks like it’s survived WWII. We won’t get into safety concerns because it’s scary and there’s no one regulating that kind of thing but suffice it to say that shops like his are the main reason I feel I should own my own gear. Heaven knows who was last in all this stuff and how (if) it was cleaned. Anyway… That’s the part we’re not getting into cuz we’re talking about Sergio.

We get on the boat and head out to parts unknown where I’m always hoping there might actually be dragons and about 10 minutes in, Sergio pulls out his camera.

Garth and TJ, this part is for you.

Sergio has a pretty Canon camera in a housing that he made himself out of a discarded aluminum air tank. He cut off about 8” at the top curved part, sliced off the air output to make it flat and then he created an epoxy mold and poured himself a polycarbonite lens for the front of the housing. He welded handles to the side and mounted dive flashlights on top of them (probably attached with zip ties cuz I know he used grocery store bags and rubber bands around the lights to diffuse them). The back opening looks like something taken from one of those clear glass pasta jars with the lids that lock down with metal hooks (and probably was) and inside underneath the camera he stuck a panty liner to cushion the camera and absorb any water and humidity.

I have pictures, don’t worry.

It’s the most brilliant, cool looking homemade housing I’ve ever seen. And it’s orange. I almost asked him to make me one.

After I ask him all these questions and take a bunch of pictures (Kaitlyn, are you a cop??), he gets into all kinds of other stories. I’ll condense for you. Sergio got a mechanical engineering degree in France and spent several years in various engineering fields before retiring to Mexico and opening a dive shop. This is apparently my week for diver engineers. In his spare time, he:

1. Has built his house with a cistern on the roof that collects rainwater. He filters it down through his house water systems – using it for bathing, washing dishes etc. The waste water filters down into his basement where it is segregated by the type of waste it contains and treated with enzymes to neutralize the organic materials and make it suitable for watering his garden. This keeps him completely off the city’s water grid and he says he never runs out of water. His next plan is solar panels to get him off the city’s electric grid.

2. For the past decade, he’s also catalogued the temperature of the ocean on a daily basis and graphed it out so he knows what the average temperature will be on any given day. Any abrupt departure from these temperatures mean he can predict hurricanes. He has also spent the last decade cataloguing coral growth in his dive spots and knows where it’s healthy and where it needs help.

When the city of Playa built a rainwater channel to dump it into the ocean, Sergio went to the mayor and told him he was an idiot for wasting all that water. The mayor wasn’t happy.

Sergio also spoke fluent English and German on the boat, making him fluent in at least 4 languages. When the world ends, I’ll be setting up a tent in the remains of his back yard and hoping he takes me with him.

Alternately, I hope he gets on Survivor cuz he’d go all the way to the finish line.

kaitlyn on vacation, part 4: diving the cenotes

Before I post Kaitlyn's latest, some brief background (mainly for my dad's benefit). Kaitlyn is a wardrobe supervisor. I think maybe Dad thinks this is someone who tells frumps how to shape up. In fact, it means she has degrees and background in theatrical costume design, and now spends her working life with traveling Broadway shows. It's fascinating, and it suits her well. She's also very good at it. It's also very hard work, fast-paced and often packed into a crazy small space, so she spends her vacation doing things like this:

Dove the cenotes today. Magical. One of the best diving days of my short diving career. Imagine a cave system, one of the biggest underground river caverns on the planet stretching for hundreds of miles, all flooded with water as clear as glass that you can float through. Everywhere you look are fossilized shells embedded in the walls, giant stalagmites jutting up from the floor and piles of broken stalactites scattered all over the ground like the bones of an ancient creature. I literally forgot I was diving and felt more like I was floating through air. Want to look at the top of that stalactite? Done. Just drift on up. Want to look at the piles of stalactites on the ground and then visit the next cave? Done. Turn on your light and swim through the cave wall.

We surfaced in a cave where the bottom was all a pool of water and the dome of the cave stretched overhead about 15-20 feet in the center, like being underneath a giant rock bowl. It looked like something out of a jungle movie scene with ropes of vines hanging from the ceiling and one round hole in the very top emitting light and sun and some plants. I expected to see Indiana Jones poke his head into view and let the monkey scamper down one of those vines, perhaps followed by spears from angry natives.

Another cave was called Points of Light because the ceiling of the cave was pierced, also creating a pool inside a rock dome with sunlight lancing through the ceiling in round rays dancing all over the water. This cave is accessible to swimmers without dive gear but you have to know exactly where you are going to find the short swim through route. If you know where you are going, it’s about 10 feet and you can hold your breath until you surface. If you don’t know and you take the wrong route, it’s about 500 feet and your chances of making it are remote. And scary.

There was no animal life except for a few catfish in the outer pools so it was all about stuff. Boulders, giant rock formations, fossilized shells, stalagmites that looked like they belonged in Carlsbad Caverns, hundreds of stalactites all over the ceilings and long cavernous swim throughs. LOVED it. Actually made me consider coming back to certify in cave diving so I know better what I’m doing.

Dove with 2 guys from Canada – Dave and Dorian -who seemed like young former frat boys who had graduated college and gone on to lucrative careers with plenty of money to buy expensive gear and fund their playboy attitudes. Nice enough but perhaps slightly entitled? On the way home, Dorian started teasing that they would have come to Mexico earlier in the month but Dave was a bit tied up.

Dorian: what kind of trouble was that exactly, Dave?

Dave: mmmbmbmm

Dorian: Hm, didn’t quite hear that. Jail, you say?

Dave: *silence*

Dorian: for 4 days? Wow. Must have been bad. What was it for exactly?

Dave (giving in): marijuana

Dorian: How many plants? 2000 I heard?

Dave (with a big sigh): 2100 actually. But technically they weren’t mine since I’d just sold the place.

Turns out our friend to the north, Dave, has been making quite the living as a pot grower for the last decade or so and just sold a “start up operation” grow house consisting of an old barn and 2100 plants when he was busted by the cops. He said it was far from his biggest grow house (“me and one other guy managed 8000 plants at one point”) and even though Canada has lenient drug laws, they “wanted to make an example” of him so they arrested him and he sat in jail for 4 days. But he’s convinced he’ll beat it and his girlfriend Karen, a legal assistant (conveniently), interjects with “Pot should be legal. I mean, what’s the big deal.” I agreed but said that since it is illegal, that makes the legal situation a bit tricky, right? That caused a moment of silence in the back seat followed by Dave saying “Kaitlyn, are you a cop?”

No Dave, not a cop. Just following an interesting story and living in an episode of Weeds, apparently.

kaitlyn on vacation, part 3: diving and Seriously Frank

Met a guy today who is a retired engineer. Steve worked for, built up and partially still owns a company where he designed a machine that purifies water. Not the domestic kind you attach to your sink, the industrial kind that cleans oil out of the Gulf of Mexico. He says the machines are expensive – uh, yes, I imagine so – and previous to the oil spill they didn’t sell well. Until BP bought 200,000 of them.

Now he owns a dive shop in Playa – the Geofish – where he hangs out when he’s not gallivanting around the world, diving and figuring out what he wants to do next. His sons – Morgan and Maxden - run the shop. Morgan’s also an engineer and Max has a degree in international business and they live between Playa and Colorado. All these guys are great, smart, friendly and good divers.

This morning I get to the shop and see the usual general mélange of international divers, a pair of boys from the Netherlands, an experienced diver, Frank, from Quebec and 2 newly certified older women, Dawn and Charlene, who are signing up for their 7^th dive. Frank has a massive dive knife strapped to his calf that reaches from his knee to his ankle so Dawn and Charlene, who have no gear whatsoever, ask him about it. He launches into this tale about a woman in his open water certification group many years ago who died because her gear tangled on some rocks and she panicked. She took her gear off and her regulator out of her mouth and tried to get away and she drowned.

Lovely, right?

Dawn and Charlene are getting paler as Frank goes on and on very seriously with no humor whatsoever about how this woman had a full tank of air but she panicked and couldn’t cut herself free because she wasn’t carrying a knife like this (cue the giant knife that he draws dramatically from the sheath) as the girls clutch each other and back up slightly until Max steps in between them and says “Seriously Frank? Stop scaring the ladies.” And herds them away.

Minutes later we’re getting the dive briefing and someone asks if we’ll see sharks. I had emailed the same question and Max told them what he told me, that bull sharks have been sighted in one of the dive sites because a huge school of mullet is passing through this area. Frank pipes up “Bull sharks? Did you know that bull sharks are responsible for 90% of all shark attacks on humans?” The girls, predictably, gasp as they reconsider whether this is their day for diving and Max just shakes his head and says “Seriously, Frank? Shut up.”

All of us and Seriously Frank lug our stuff out to the boat, which is docked just off shore. The surf is all choppy and rough – possible backwash from Hurricane Richard? – and the boat is small but it's a short ride to the dive site. We get under the water for the first dive and Dawn and Charlene are like newborn horses, all floppy arms and legs and gear flying around. Good divers are very streamlined with smooth movements, these girls flailed all their limbs about, got turned helplessly upside down by the current, thunked onto the bottom of the ocean because they couldn’t control their buoyancy, tangled their hoses in their BCs and swam into everyone. Sometimes divers like that drive me mad but these two were trying so hard and just couldn’t seem to get the hang of it. It was almost cute.

I’d be drifting along and see something race by out of the corner of my eye, and there’s Charlene caught in the current on her back waving her arms around as Morgan or Max tries to catch her before she runs into a shelf of corral and crushes 100 years worth of growth. Dawn couldn’t see well enough to read her air gauge so Charlene would paddle over to her, sometimes sideways, and try to read it for her. Adorable.

The two Dutch boys were similarly crazy divers but fortunately, Seriously Frank was a good diver and I’m a decent diver so we just floated above the fray and tried to keep from getting kicked in the head. The first dive had nothing interesting but we’d been in the water 5 minutes on the second dive and we saw a big black seahorse (caballito del mar)! Morgan had commented that he liked my tattoo but we probably wouldn’t see one as they are rare in this part of Mexico so it was super cool to see one. At the end of the second dive it was only Morgan, the two Dutch boys and I as the others had gone a different route and all of a sudden we are swimming through a GIANT school of fish. Thousands and thousands of fish maybe 5-8” long whirling and zipping around us like colored streamers. I’ve never seen a school that big. And I immediately thought, these are the mullet Max talked about and the frantic agitated way they are moving must mean there’s a shark around here somewhere.

We had just finished our 3 minute safety stop when the mullet absorbed us and I knew there was no way we were leaving until we saw that shark. Sure enough, the school parted a few minutes later and there was the bull shark (Tiburon!) lazing his way along the bottom, 8 feet long, and giantly fat. I probably couldn’t put my arms around his middle, that’s how full of fish he was. We waved, he flicked his tail, we all did the geeky stuff divers do when they see something cool and then we came up and bragged about it on the boat to all the divers that didn’t see it.

Seriously Frank didn’t get to see the shark. He was disappointed.

guest post: kaitlyn's vacation, part 2

Long day of travel yesterday ending in in Cancun last night where I immediately met Lauren, a cute Australian girl who was also waiting on the bus to Playa del Carmen. She’s a paramedic and where she lives they have a hyperbaric chamber and a diver emergency phone line so she fields a lot of interesting calls, like this call they got from kids on a boat freaking out after a shark attack. She said it was like something out of Jaws or a horror film. Crazy stuff. It was fascinating to talk to someone whose job is so different from mine.

We rode in to town together and then shlepped our luggage down the main road of Calle Quinta to find dinner at 10pm. Steak tacos and guacamole with a cold beer in an outdoor café while watching the international world of Playa walk by? Yes please. The weather is balmy and humid and perfect and my hotel had folded my towel into the shape of a swan, which brought back delightful memories of Guatemala.

I got nowhere near enough sleep so I could get up and go diving. The only problem with this pursuit is the freaking earliness of it all. And of course, my hotel doesn’t have internet access in my room so I’m sitting in a different outdoor café with an iced coffee and a chocolate muffin finishing this in a hurry. I know, I know, it’s rough.

More later.

guest post: kaitlyn's vacation, part 1

My life is pretty interesting to me, but a lot of it doesn't make for very good storytelling. My friend Kaitlyn's life, however, is fascinating and she's a very good writer. She's a brave girl, and her adventures sometimes make for such good reading that she is periodically published on travel blogs. She's on vacation right now, and has been sending amazing emails about what she's doing. She gave me permission to cross-post some of them here so my readers can get an exciting break from my (pulse-pounding) posts about going to the flea market and finding the perfect strand of beads. Not that I'll stop telling you about that. You'd miss it. Here's her first installment:

Perfectly perfect day in San Diego on Monday.

Their Museum of Contemporary Art has a “Viva La Revolucion” exhibit showing street art installations by artists from a bunch of different countries. The art ranged from a painted brick wall with a face pecked out of the white paint to giant graffiti-like murals, plants growing out of a pile of found objects including a mobile of empty bottles, a stop motion animation film taken from drawings on public walls and buildings, works by Banksy and Shepherd Fairey and lots of people I’d never heard of. Gorgeous, riveting, thought provoking; everything art should be.

However, my favorite part was the education room where the walls were covered with paper made to look like a stone wall and you could react to the exhibit by “tagging” the wall. One person reacted by writing a simple treatise about how graffiti is a way for homeless youth to express their artistic natures but it costs the city money that should be spent getting kids off the street and so graffiti is a waste of money and kids should tag their houses, not the public walls. (Logically, of course, homeless youth clearly don’t have houses to tag; but no matter…). It’s funny enough that someone graffitied a fake stone wall to protest graffiti but then two other people took offense to this reaction and wrote “boring” and “narrow viewpoint” on it.

They graffitied an anti-graffiti reaction in an art installation glorifying graffiti.

Dude, that’s hilarious.