Y'all, if it's any consolation, I know I'm the worst. It's been almost three weeks since my last post and I hardly know where to start, so I'll start with the most recent: I ate my first cray today! You don't even know what that is, though, because I haven't told you! Gah! Okay maybe start back three weeks.
I'm living in a weird scuba-filled world and I have to say I love it. That second Open Water course I helped Terry with was followed by an Advanced OW and then a third OW. I was just spending every day squeezing myself into a wetsuit, reminding students of best practices for good diving (don't leave a standing tank unattended! Open air valves with the pressure gauge facing away in case there's a crack and it blows up! Don't put your mask on your forehead - put it around your neck if you aren't holding it or wearing it - because it's a sign of a distressed diver AND a wave could knock it off!), filling air cylinders and washing gear, and then crashing into bed when I got home. I didn't know what day it was, was constantly smelling of pool, river, or ocean water, and was meeting some fab people - both instructors and students - who also want to spend time looking at cool stuff under water. This is exactly why I'm here.
The weekend after my last post I chatted with the store manager, Dom, and he offered me a JOB! Real employment for pay! YES! So that new iron in the fire basically eliminated all the free time that I already didn't have (in a gainfully employed and so grateful for it kind of way). I haven't been properly grocery shopping since three weeks ago, my laundry pile of socks and underwear is huge (I wear one of two tee shirts to work every day depending whether I'm on course or in the shop, so I've taken to bringing them in the shower with me and washing them rather than doing actual laundry OR being smelly. Which is great because it means I have limited items to be cleaned!), and my blog has gone unwritten til now, but I'm spending every day with fascinating people who love to travel, love to dive, and love to joke around.
Speaking of jokes, Aussies (or at least the ones in Western Australia [WA]) are way more laid back about jokes than Americans. I don't mean "you millennial snowflakes can't take a joke and you've ruined everything with your PC nonsense" jokes, I just mean that they bullshit with the best of them and don't limit it to family and close friends. Honestly, it's a little like being at home with the Duffy/Morans! I spend my days getting teased for being American (they call Americans seppos - short for septic tank. I would be offended except they have hilariously derogatory terms for everyone. Brits are pomes - pronounced "pomme" - Prisoners Of Mother England. Eastern Europeans are wogs - idk why. You get the picture), walking around the shop singing, tripping over my own feet, mucking up air fills and making VERY loud compressed air sounds in the shop; that sort of thing. Sunday in the shop I blew an o-ring on an air tank (it's a little synthetic rubber ring used to help seal the tank when it's connected to your regulator's first stage - none of this is important for the sake of the story, sorry y'all) and the dude who owned the tank - who I've never seen before in my life - popped over and asked my hand in marriage, placing the blown ring on my finger. Another person might not be on board with the sense of humor here, but it fits me just fine. Diving is a male dominated sport and I spend my days surrounded by goofy men. Also some weirdly serious tech divers, but I digress.
My co-workers in the shop are a blast, too. Nat drives me to work anytime we're both on the schedule, Wes and Dom the assistant manager/manager keep things running but have been so extraordinarily patient as I've been learning how to do everything in the shop, Terry (the instructor I helped on the OW course also works in the shop) has the most irreverent sense of humor and keeps me from wallowing when I get something wrong in the shop and just laughs in my face instead. The days are long - 8:15 to "6" but more like 6:30-7 in my experience so far - and there's so much to learn how to do (working for the dive shop back home when I was in high school hasn't been great prep for working in a fast-paced retail environment like this one). The shop is the largest scuba store in WA, December 1st marked the first official day of summer, and dive conditions have been really good the past couple of weeks (forecast for perfect conditions every day this week, too!), so every day the shop is constantly busy.
Jack, my DM candidate buddy, and I have to do a mapping project as part of our coursework. I can't remember if I've mentioned this already, so the long and short is that we have to make a pamphlet for a dive site that could be given to someone who hasn't ever been there before and they'd have all the information they need to successfully dive it. So that means mapping the actual site, noting what hazards exist, where the nearest bathrooms/changing facilities are, where the closest hospital is located (along with directions) in case someone has a dive emergency (not every hospital can accommodate diving injuries because the equipment is VERY expensive), what aquatic life you might see, explaining the best possible entry and exit points along with advice on best practices for entering/exiting (are there steps? Is it a long surface swim? Are there submerged rocks that might make entry/exit difficult?). It's meant to be exhaustive so that anyone who goes to the site can dive it even if they've never been diving in WA before. AKA me when I arrived. And, realistically, still me.
So anyway, all that background on the mapping project is to say that we had to actually go and DIVE the thing, so we did that last week and again today! We're mapping a spot called North Mole in Fremantle, and we've been super lucky that our friends can be suckered into diving with us on their days off! Nat came both times, and three other friends came for one or the other. Dom, the shop manager, assigned us the site and mentioned we should bring a rope. He didn't fully convey that you have to scramble maybe 15ft. down over some giant boulders that form the sea wall of a HUGE commercial shipping lane in order to enter the water. Nice. Last week our rope was dead (desiccated in the intense sun on a car dashboard for too long), today our rope wasn't long enough to reach the water, but both times we made it in and out without major mishaps! Plus the site's irritating accessibility means that the 5 of us who went last week had it all to ourselves for the full hour long dive (it's only in 25ish ft. of water so dives can be basically as long as you have air to breathe - no worries about nitrogen) and the 4 of us today only had to share it with 2 other divers and a huge ray! Maybe 5ft across? It was gorgeous.
After the dive we went for drinks (just got off a phone call with Dad and he suggested that I should include the closest pub in the mapping project I hand in since every time I go out it seems to end with beers... and I think he's probably right), and then on to home.
One of our group today went cray fishing which is completely different from home. Home crays are like little shrimp. Aussie crays are some big ass lobsters that just don't have front pinchy claws. Some days (most days) it seems to me that cray fishing is THE past time for men in WA because every third customer in the shop seems to come through buying snares for catching them, getting air fills from having an early morning dive to hunt some down, or battle stories of the biggest crays they've snagged. So anyway, Grant, who didn't have to spend his time mapping the site, instead spent the dive looking for crays. And he got one! And he agreed to cook it for me since I haven't had one yet! So tonight I had pasta and cray and even though I had to suck it up and accept that the wiggling lobster thing in my refrigerator (we ate at the pub, so a stopover was necessary before dinner could be eaten) was going to be dead and then inside my belly, it was worth it.
Fam and friends, I love it here. I miss you guys, and it's weird to get winter storm alert texts from Philly when it's 100 degrees outside, but I'm so glad I did the thing :)
