Nuku Hiva Nuku Meva
Location: Nuku Hiva, Marquesas
Today began much like many others, with me forgetting both who I am and what I should be doing. This time, I was supposed to be the skipper, and I should have been waking everyone up. Oops! Luckily, I caught my mistake and gaslit everyone into thinking they slept in. Our day was off to a fiery start, and everyone was ready for a fantastic day of diving after our day off yesterday. The plan was simple: we would divide roughly into two groups. The first would practice some skills for our rescue diver certificates, while the second would go on a fun dive, and then we'd swap after lunch. That was the plan… but reality doesn't like plans very much. Just kidding, everything actually went super smoothly, and nothing exciting happened at the end.
Alright, now that all the people with short attention spans are gone, I can tell you what really happened, and oh boy, are you gonna be glad you stuck around. So I was in dive group 1, obviously (because I'm number 1), and we started out with our rescue diving stuff. I was lucky, because I just so happened to fall into what was easily the most skilled and dextrous group of divers in Argo history, consisting of (in order of skill and dexterity): myself, Meg, Will, Ruby, and Arthur. Now Will and Arthur think they are better than everyone else, so they are doing this thing called divemaster, which basically means they get tortured for 3 months and then have to pay PADI a bunch of money for a piece of paper that says they know how to swim (sarcasm). Practically, this meant they had to be a buddy pair, and I got to be partners with Ruby. Since we were doing rescue, one of us had to be the rescuer and the other the rescued. Now you can say a lot of things about Ruby, but one thing you can't say is that she goes down without a fight. Normally thats great; it's not so great when she has to pretend to be an unconscious diver. Oh boy, did she kick. By the end of it, she had almost taken me down with her. Just almost, though, because I am an unstoppable rescuing force. I dragged her kicking and screaming out of the water, and boom, lunch break!
Lunch was obviously fantastic because we were graced with the force of culinary excellence that is Chef Sydney. Imagine, if you will, legumes, braised in stock spiced with only the finest herbs, products carefully curated by thousands of years of French influence on the Polynesian palette, accompanied by the hand-shucked fruit of the rice plant, steamed with aromatics, and served delightfully warm and tender. Yes, some may say we had beans and rice— but for me, it was a symphony. Oh, also Nick brought us mangoes, they were sooooooooooo good.
Hi Blog. It's Sarah. Today on our dive, we saw crazy huge piles of coral and some cool nudis. During rescue diving, I learned how difficult it is to be a dead body. It takes a surprising amount of core strength, and sometimes, you end up getting waterboarded. I was also choked by my own BCD chest strap. Thank God I'm not an actual dead person, because it wasn't the relaxing back float I was expecting. Our group also sacrificed 3 masks to Neptune today. But rescue diving was all in all super fun and gave us a lot of time to swim after being on the boat for a month. Also, bless Nick's nice cold sodas for us at dinner, that was amazing.
Ok Bye Blog… Hi Mom and Dad, if you're reading this, and hi to the doggies
Sorry about that, folks. Sarah grabbed the keyboard when I turned around for 15 seconds. Anyway, my afternoon was filled with a fun dive, where I had the immense honor of being one of future divemaster Will's first students. Basically, since he's going to be a super professional dive shop owner someday, he has to practice dealing with clients, so Meg and I got to pretend like we were tourists paying him for a dive tour, and terrorize him and stuff. Let me tell you, Will delivered. His dive briefing was the best I've ever heard. It even took Meg out of REM sleep. He was moving and grooving, he even got on the floor and did the worm for a hot second, which Kinda freaked me out. When we actually got in the water, we didn't really see anything too crazy until we surfaced, when a little black shape started wandering towards us. Then another, and another. Everyone was terrified except for me. They got bigger and closer, bigger and closer, until we were almost touching them and could finally see what they were. Manta rays, manta rays by the dozens, or hundreds perhaps; but probably dozens. They swirled around us and did a little dance, and flips, and it was soooooo cool. I thought one was going to eat me, but apparently, they only eat tiny fish and plankton. Thank god Ruby wasn't there.
So we returned to Argo, happy and tired. Those of us who could rested, while those who couldn't (Arthur and Will) partook in more horrible trials and tribulations. Take a minute, dear reader, to give them a round of applause, because today, after so many attempts that we have long since lost count, they finally finished their stress test, which was probably the hardest activity they are going to have to do for their divemaster. The day closed with the smell of breakfast wafting through the air, bacon, for our BLT dinner. Thanks, Chef Sydney, on behalf of everyone except for me, because I'm too Jewish to eat bacon. I had a PBJ. Then we had a test which we all aced, and watched a presentation about Nuku Hiva by Ruby, telling us all about what we are getting into tomorrow, when we finally venture on shore.
It's time for me to take my leave, because like all of us here on Argo, I have to prepare myself mentally for whatever touching land after 20 days at sea entails. A good night to all, and to all a good night.