I had high hopes of diving with my sweetheart today and finding "our" LCM, then coming home to report all about it in this blog, but I suppose it wasn't meant to be, at least not yet. Before even leaving the dock at the Scuba Shack, I noticed my BCD strap that goes around the tank was twisted. I've had that BCD for over 10 years, so I figured I would have noticed if it was twisted previously, so in my infinite wisdom and experience with Scuba Pro BCDs, I attempted to fix it. It turns out that it was put together wrong in the factory, and the twist was put in there purposely to make it work as it should. My patient dive partner graciously sat on the boat and tried to help until we both started to feel nauseous. Remember, we are still at the dock, and the boat it rocking so much we are feeling sick. This was to be the first sign that the afternoon would not go as planned and hoped for. We took the BCD on land, and my boyfriend was finally able to fix what they apparently could not correct in the factory, and I could now operate my BCD the way I should have been able to from day 1.
By the time we got back in the boat, we had already lost a good amount of time, meaning we might only be able to fit in one dive instead of two. In an effort to speed things up, we started up the boat and pulled away from the dock on our way to the Lost Tank dive site where we originally discovered the LCM. During the ride, I completed getting my gear ready to go. This includes hooking up my BCD and regulator to the tank and turning the air on. My computer has had a little glitch since the beginning in that it takes over 15 minutes to register the full amount of air in my tank on the digital computer screen. We've sent it in for servicing, and it still came back the same. It's not been a problem or safety issue as far as diving, just a pain because it takes so long to register the correct amount of air. This time, as I turned on the air and checked my dive computer screen, something didn't seem right to me. It was loading unusually slow, but it was registering that air was in the tank, so I figured maybe I just needed to be more patient and stop watching it load. I didn't say anything to my boyfriend as we were already getting off to a rocky start with the dive, and I really thought it would be fine. This was to be the second sign that something wasn't right today.
Once we hit the site on the GPS, we threw in anchor and swiftly began dragging in the sand. After pulling up the anchor and repositioning the boat, we tried again, without success, I might add. Now, all of this throwing in the anchors and then driving the boat forward to pull up the anchors again can be quite time consuming, especially when I have to drive the boat as I am not very adept at it yet. To top it all off, it was windy and choppy on the water. Neither of us had taken any seasickness medicine, and we'd had little to eat since breakfast, so this was not a good thing on our tummies. We really just wanted to get in the water. I figured the third attempt would be a charm, and it was to some extent. We were still dragging a bit, but not too fast, so if we hurried and got in the water, we could get down to the bottom and re-set the anchor to a better place and finally dive as we'd been wanting to do all afternoon. Unfortunately, sign number 3 cropped up about this time. As I got my gear together and my boyfriend was just about to flip into the water, I checked my slow loading computer. It was stuck at a little over 1000 PSI. A full tank like the one I had hooked up to my computer, would read 3000+ PSI. We checked the tank before leaving, and this is what it had in it, so something was seriously wrong with my computer. Since it was a deep dive, it would not be safe for me to dive with a computer that was registering only 1000 PSI, and I didn't bring my old back-up computer. It was time to abort the dive. There were just too many signs, my boyfriend said, we were not meant to be in the water today.
I was terribly disappointed, but everyone has days when nothing seems to go right, and it would have been better to stay in bed. We tried to make the most of it, though, by heading back to the Scuba Shack and enjoying the lunch my sweetie had made for us while relaxing by the beautiful Pacific, and as we sat and discussed all the things that went wrong, it made me remember something I had been reading in a book on the plane that morning. The book is called "Surviving Paradise: One Year on a Disappearing Island" by Peter Rudiak-Gould, and it's about a World Teach volunteer's life on Ujae atoll in the Marshall Islands. In it, he describes how he went sailing on a traditional Marshallese outrigger canoe. The Marshallese way still permeates our everyday lives here on Kwajalein and Roi-Namur, although maybe not in such an extreme way as we would experience living on an outer island like many of the World Teach volunteers.
For example, the marina rental boats here constantly have engine problems. When we let the Marshallese marina manager and attendants know about the problems, they will show and tell us tricks for how to make it work better, such as revving the throttle a few times before putting it into full gear. This is just like the outrigger canoe sailors on Ujae, who figured out a way to rig the mast back up using only the ropes they already had with them on the boat. They are so used to doing without certain luxuries, such as the money and actual resources to fix things that are broken that they automatically go to alternate ways of dealing with the situation, and they are not easily rattled or angered by these situations, like Americans tend to be. We are used to having everything and having it in relatively short order. We are used to being able to take our problems to someone and have them fix it properly because that's what expected in a powerful, rich, highly infra-structured country like the US. But there are many things to learn from the Marshallese, such as laughing at the little annoyances of life and figuring out a way to make things work until we can find a better or more effective, long-lasting solution. The island way of making do with what you have and not letting it take away your enjoyment of life is what I remembered when dealing with my own insignificant American frustrations today. No, life on the atoll is not always idyllic, but it has its advantages, and after more than a decade here, the ways of the island have become as much a part of my heart and mind as the island itself has become my second home.
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