To Old Friends and New Beginnings
Location: Tenerife, Canary Islands
And here I am once again tasked with the duty of narrating our life on Argo, my morning duties started early with some exciting talks in the kitchen with my friends Matthew and Teo and continued with some very polite rounds of wakeups to prepare for the full day ahead. After consuming a delicious breakfast and getting briefed on the activities for the day we hurried to finish prepapring our dive gear and headed to the bus stop, the journey was treacherous and your courageous skipper eperienced the fatigue of carrying all of his dive gear for more than 5 steps without a single break, something that could be compared to a modern representation of Hercules holding the entire world on his shoulders.
After our crew overcame the challenges of the spanish public transportation system they were met with the ultimate reward! A full day of diving in beautiful underwater settings… The first dive of your humble narrator was the deep dive for our advanced certification that consisted in diving straight from the shore into the seawall and following its side to enjoy the different kinds of underwater life, amongst some of my favorite sightings there were a huge slippper lobster that was hiding amongst the rocks, a cuttlefish (which escaped Meg’s sight causing her enormous displasure), a school of Barracuda and many more. During the dive I had the opportunity to shadow Meg’s movements and try to improve my buoyancy control obtaining good results altough still very much lacking when compared to the original. the dive concluded with a backwards swim against the current and towards the coast, an ardous task that proved challenging even for your humble narrator while also being an absolute blast.
After that our advanced crew returned to dry land and prepared for the next shallow dive, in this dive I paired up with my buddy Bryson (love you Bryson) and we absolutely locked in staying always at the head of the group and being constantly aware of our surroundings and even managing to spot camouflaging organisms like octopi and scorpionfish.
Our day trip then concluded with packing our dive gear and walking back to Argo. On the boat we did some chores and had classes and we sat alll together for dinner and prepared for my squeeze question “what was your favorite moment with your previous watch team?”. The qustion came up to me after we recived the announcements of our new watchteams and most of us got reassigne to a different one, everyone seemed really enganged in the onversation and I appreciated how not many people endend up talking about the same event which goes to show just how much fun we had on our teams. That is also what inspired me for the title of this blog, a personal farewell to the good times we had on watch while also looking forward to the future and to the many adventures that we will continue to have together.
Lots of love from the whole crew of Argo to all the relatives and friends who will read our blog
Gianluca