Please enjoy these pictures and the dive log/story of the trip below.  I cannot tell you how much I enjoy diving in the Flower Gardens and how much I appreciate those that work on the boat and get us where we need to be, safely in the water and well fed.  I also thank all those that I dive with for making diving a shared experience.  I hope that you take the time to read the stories below the pictures.  Enjoy :-)

 

 

 

 

I am always excited when I head out of McAllen, Texas.  Really, it does not matter where I am going - I am just excited to be getting out of McAllen! However, turning the truck north and heading to the dock in Freeport is the best sort of leaving McAllen excitement!  Yes - another weekend on the Fling.

 

The drive to Freeport is a constant battle of distrust and verbal flippancy with my Garmin GPS "recalculating", which roughly translated means "You turned the wrong way again, you idiot."  I have to say that when these car navigation systems first came into being, I was so excited and blinded by the brilliance of getting directions in any language or even 'British English' or 'American English' that I listened to the robotic voice and followed in an equally robotic way.  My topographical road map of America laid idly sulking under the back seat of the truck with its metaphorical arms folded and looking off into the distance away from me. 

 

I do not know at what point it was during my relationship with two GPS's that I woke up and said "I wonder if this really is the best route to take," especially on long journeys.  After that pivotal moment I started quietly checking up on the Garmin, first with my iPhone, and then I found myself reaching under the back seat of my truck and pulling out my road map and one black gold toe sock with it.  Two goods were done that day - a sock was returned to its partner in my sock drawer and I restarted my relationship with my road map.   The road map and I became firm friends and partners in a battle that continues to pit the map, my indecision, and my myopic eyes against the Garmin and its monotone (but clearly condescending) "recalculating."

 

What I have learned is that I wasted a lot of time and miles blindly following the GPS, and regardless of whether I ask for the shortest route or the fastest route, it goes by the same route. So, on this, and all other travel days in my truck, it was a battle of (half) wits between the GPS and me on the way to Freeport.  I recently changed my GPS voice from American English (if there is such a thing) to British English, but I had to change it back because it sounded like I was being given directions by my mother, and that meant that I felt bad swearing at it, so I changed it back. 

 

If you want to scare a passenger or impress a relatively dense co-worker, set the thing to the male, Dutch (Netherlands) voice and turn the volume up full.  Have a route ready to start, and at some stage while you are driving down the road, turn it on.  You can (a) watch the startled expression on the face of your passenger and/or (b) pretend that you actually speak the language and understand what he is saying.  However, "recalculating" seems to sound the same in any language.  What does this have to do with diving?  Nothing, it is just one of my usual tangents! 

 

I signed up for the trip with TOM'S DIVE AND SWIM again.  They have a nice web site, and you can book the trip in seconds.  Warren calls you back within 12 hours to tell you who the trip leader is etc.  In this case, the trip leader was Larry. 

 

Being as efficient as they are, I got an email from Larry within a day with the release forms and a picture so that I could spot him at the 'On the River' Restaurant near the dock.  That was actually a great idea, but the picture and the haircut left me with the idea in my head that I was looking for an ex-British invasion pop star.  I was expecting a British Liverpool accent and could not wait to see if I could get Larry to say 'recalculating'.

 

After a 6 hour drive, 27 recalculatings, and an equal number of specifically chosen and well targeted swear words, and having taken the third different route in three trips, I finally removed the road map from my lap and got out of the truck at the restaurant in Freeport.  On entering the restaurant, I set about looking for a haircut, and my wanderings through the restaurant caused a server to ask me if I was looking for a restroom.  I said "No, a guy that looks like a pop star that is with a group of divers."  She led me to a table of divers - I looked at them, and they looked at me.  I assumed that they could not be my group, because they looked so nice and normal (see my other Flower Garden blogs), but it turned out that it was my group, and Larry was late!  I sat down and started chatting. 

 

Turns out I was diving with Jon, Heidi, and Russell.  Jon is now on his way to Afghanistan, and I appreciate his service and Heidi's patience and strength, as he is gone for a year working to support air power in that region.  Russell is a veteran diver and underwater photographer who has worked on the Fling in the past.  Russell and I immediately started yacking about cameras, pictures we had taken, and pictures that we were going to take, sharing current pictures with the others on iPhones (me) and something prehistoric with an antenna that Russell had. 

 

At some stage the discussion at the table moved to sea sickness, and I asked Heidi if and when she had taken some Dramamine, and she said that she had just taken one.  I was about to launch into my usual 'you have to start taking it 24 hours before' diatribe when I caught a look on Jon's face.  I stopped my mouth just in time (unusually) and said 'thats great'!  Luckily at that moment Larry turned up, and guess what?  He did look like an English pop star!!!   AND guess what I found out?  He plays bass in bands in Austin - HE IS A POP/ROCK STAR!!  Actually, as he described himself, he is the perfect Austin man, because he works in high tech during the day and a band at night.  So I had my 'weekend family'.  I was certainly the strangest person in the group, with Russell a very close second, and we were off to the boat! 

 

I had done most of my packing, repacking, checking, re-checking and re-re-packing of my bags by 7.45 and was standing with my new family looking at the other families on the dock, checking out their gear and sizing them up.  In the background the Fling was tied to the wooden dock with the crew standing about watching us watching them.  Nobody is allowed on the boat until after the first briefing from Divemaster Kenny and, as you will remember from previous logs, getting a small item of gear and being in pole position for the moment that we are released to go to the boat, which is important because it is the race to the bunks. 

 

This was not Russell’s first rodeo either, and he was ready with a bag and we jostled ourselves down the wooden dock, not quite running, not quite walking, with elbows out and ready to jostle as we made our way past the crew onto the back deck, through the main salon and down to the bunks.  I chose the same one as I had last time, #26 on the bottom – that way I did not have to learn a new number!  The numbers are important as they are used to log you off and back onto the boat during the day of diving.  With that done, it was time to say ‘hi’ and reacquaint myself with the captains and crew and to get the rest of my gear onto the boat. 

 

When I was a kid my family was always on boats and my dad was obsessed with  having us take the smallest possible bag of gear on board. This probably has a lot to do with my constant need to reassess what I take on boat trips and is clearly the reason why I am standing and staring kind of embarrassed at the huge heap of stuff that I have to lug onto the boat.  I have a tank, a bag of weights, a camera, a dive gear bag, and a clothes bag (small).  What I was more concerned about were my three exposure suits…yes, count them, three exposure suits.  

  

Call me a baby cat, but I do not like to get wet or cold when I dive.  My early diving was all in the cold dark waters of the Pacific Northwest where I did one dive after completing my open water before buying a dry suit!  So, for this trip I have my dry suit, an 8/6mm cold water wet suit (that I hate) and a 5mm suit that I love. It is going to take a lot of persuasion to get me out of my dry suit and to take the pacifier out of my mouth!! But it gives me something to start worrying about really early in the trip!

Bunks chosen and checked onto the boat by Divemaster Mark, I get caught up in the usual rush to put gear together.

 

Why do we rush to put gear together?  We fall all over ourselves to get BC’s on tanks, regs out of bags, and weights into pouches, and we want all this done before we leave the dock – WHY?   I will tell you why – because you are still attached to the dock and there is the sense of security that if you have forgotten something, you may have another in your truck or someone else might have one. Once the lines are cast off, the world of spares is reduced to what is on the boat or in your bag!

 

Then it is time to stop wherever you have got to in the gear set up and to head into the main cabin for the boat briefing and for Captain Bland to fit us all for Fling Regurgitation Containment Devices, deluxe models with ear tabs that just need fluffing to be ready for use.  As a PADI instructor I have my way of teaching class, my standard jokes and funny stories that bring a titter to the lips and a smile to the face of new students.  Only I know that they are the same jokes and funny lines every time, but the same is true for all safety briefings, so I listened along with Captain Bland and still found myself laughing at the right times.  There were a lot of first timers on this trip – should be fun.

 

Sleep comes easy on the boat as we ride out to the West Bank, but I suffered from the most vivid dreams of disasters, tornadoes, roofs ripping off buildings, and falling through the floor of a building.  I was glad to hear the engines grind to full astern as we arrived at the West Bank and hook up to the buoy.  I am reaching for my pants as Kenny hammers on the bunk room doors shouting "One hour to dive time."  It is 6 am on Saturday morning.

 

Wendy and Todd already have coffee and snacks ready in the galley, but I am off to the dive deck to find something to fuss and worry about.  I look out toward the rising sun and down into the still dark water – dry suit, definitely dry suit.  But as people start to get ready, there is lots of talk about exposure suits.  People are diving in 3mm, in shorties, and in 5mm suits.  Water temp is in the 70’s…..oh, I can feel indecision coming on. 

 

Mark comes back from setting the bridal line and reports that it is 75 degrees all the way to the bottom.  There are ladies putting on 3mm’s!  NO, NO, I am going to stick to my guns and wear my dry suit!  So I am lacing up my rock boots when I distinctly heard the word ‘pussy’.  I am not sure where it came from and I ignored it, but I am sure I heard it.  Well, I think I heard it.  I have time to change my mind, but my 8/6 is so uncomfortable….stick with it Mr Indecisive.  

 

I have consciously decided to pick on Russell – no favoritism, no ulterior motive, I just want to pick on Russell.  It may be something to do with the fact that we have dueling cameras, or that he has over 3,000 dives, or the fact that he has a name for his camera (Hal) and I don’t.  Whatever it is, we are going to be ‘camera’ dive buddies.  Here is the deal – the boat requires that you have a dive buddy at all times. Camera people do not like dive buddies, because we do not have time to watch out for them and the critters that we want to take pictures of.  Normal divers don’t like camera toting dive buddies, because we move slowly and can be fascinated by a single rock for 40 minutes. 

 

So Russell and I agree to be dive buddies, which roughly translated means that we make a lot of noise about being buddies while we are on the boat, we slap backs, compare camera settings and jump off the boat together.  However, as soon as we sink below the surface, we flip each other off and head for the bottom to complete our own dives.  We do keep an eye on each other, and if someone spends a lot of time in one spot taking shots, there is no doubt that I would sneak over there and take a look after he has moved on.  I would certainly not attract his attention to something that I found and wanted for bragging rights.  It is really like having two snipers on a battle field, one from each side.  They both respect the work that they do, but are still out to kill each other!

 

However, this time I see Russell heading for the surface holding his camera in a way that means one thing and one thing only – a leak in his housing – Oh No!  Will Hal be OK?  I turn back to the bottom.  HAH!  Time for the KILL SHOT!!!  I do have some sympathy as I have been in that situation before, and that is why there is an expensive camera in a water filled fish bowl in my apt with a note on it that says ‘check that the catches are locked down’.

 

I like the East Bank as there is a nice variety of coral structures and a lot of different types of fish, from the large marauding amber jacks and barracuda to trigger fish, wrasse, and angel fish.  I just love to head down and poke my head around and under all the coral structures looking for new stuff, but at the time I keep a weather eye up for tigers or hammerhead sharks.  The water is beautiful and I can clearly see the outline of the Fling above me, and Oh, there is Russell coming back down without a camera in his hand – no competition!!  I do hope Hal is OK.

 

I never want to come to the surface after a dive like that.  There is so much to see, and life is so peaceful down there, but the pressure gauge tells me that it is time to start up.  Back on the deck, Kenny and Mark check me in, and I go back to my spot and take my gear off and go over to check out Hal – who is fine.  Then into the salon to see what Wendy and Todd had cooked up for breakfast. The food is always good on the Fling; eat and 2 hours to relax before the next dive.

 

Of course the big issue on my mind as I lay out on the top deck in the early morning sunshine is what exposure suit to wear for the next dive – apparently sun screen was not high on my ‘things I need to think about’ list.  It should have been high on my list, because the last time that I was out there I burned my lily white English skin to a crispy lobster red color and then spent a week shedding dead skin like a snake in its molting season.  

 

As I lay there burning, I came to the conclusion that I would dive in my 5mm on the next dive.  I reason that I can always go back to the dry suit if I am cold, and I might gain a little respect back from those wearing 3mm suits and shorties.  However, that meant heading down to the dive deck to readjust my weights, and there I got to see the nervous bundle of high speed energy which is Brandon, the tank filler filling tanks. 

 

Dive 2 at the same spot, but feeling like a real man in my 5mm wet suit.  I made the giant stride off the deck and felt warm water filling my suit (water from the outside!). It turned out to be another very pleasant dive, and I was perfectly comfortable in my wet suit.  For this dive, I took the Scuba Buddha down with me.  In the future, I am going to travel and dive with the Scuba Buddha and spread peace and love across all the dive sites that I go to.  :-)  So watch for him in pictures from this trip and future trips. 

 

After the second dive on the East bank, we moved to the HI389A rig for what is always one of my favorite trips of the dive.  Rig diving is amazing, and the life on the rig just blows me away; huge schools of Jacks of various types, silky sharks patrolling outside the legs of the rig, and then literally hundreds of colorful fish darting in and out of the various coral and sponge formations on the risers.  I chose to use a narrow angle, macro lens and try to get shots of the smaller critters, especially the various types of blennies. 

 

I was geared up and ready to go as the gate was opened, and I had already been asking Russell if ‘grandpa' was ready to go, should I get a ramp to help you get to the gate?, etc. 

 

However, Russell brushed past me to be first off the boat, and I found myself chasing him and Hal along the bridal line to the rig.  The life down there is truly eye popping, so I settled down to shoot the life on a riser, but my eyes were distracted by the furious flashing of Hal some 20 feet below me.  I looked down and Russell was shooting a loggerhead turtle. That just WILL NOT DO!  I dumped the air from my BC and started a steep swallow dive toward Russell like a British fighter plane coming out of the sun and swooping down on the unaware and helpless enemy fighter plane….strobes popping as I dive!   

 

I crashed the party at 85 feet and barged Russell out the way to get the shots that I wanted.  Actually I only used one of those shots, because I ran into another turtle on the night dive and managed to get THE shot! 

 

Back up on the Fling, and I have to go back to my childhood to explain my gratitude to the boat builder that put normal flushing toilets in for heads #2 and #3.  As I have said, I was brought up on boats.  My dad had a big fishing boat that we cruised around in the rivers of the east coast of England, and everything was idyllic – except for the heads (the boat toilet).  Boat toilets require a sequence of motions to work, including your own (if you see what I mean) and they are prone to blocking at a moment’s notice and sometimes if you just look at them wrong.  Manual heads when I was a kid required that you pumped water into the bowl, raised whatever was in there to a condition that could be described as ‘mostly floating’ and then you turned a couple of valves and pumped another handle like hell and hoped that everything went away.  Sometimes it did, sometimes it did not, and that was when I had to get dad!

 

Let me set the scene a little better.  Dad’s boat was an older fishing boat that dated back to a time right after the war.  The actual fish hold had been covered over and turned into a salon and some bunks.  From there you literally crawled through a bulkhead into the forecastle.  On the left as you crawled in was the head, and you had to crawl backwards in to sit down or shuffle in on your knees for front end work.  There you were, pointing in one direction or another, bent double and pumping the flush handle like crazy.  This has left me with two traits (a)  a great fear of boat toilets blocking and (b) the strange need to kneel down when I go #1 on a boat.  Even at my age today these things are hard to overcome, but the flushing toilets make me feel right at home on the Fling! 

 

One last boat toilet issue that you do not need to know, but I am going to tell you was on our first trip to sail in the Greek islands.  The boat toilets on the sailboats we used were more high tech, but unfortunately the first time I tried to use one I was not aware of how the technology worked.  You will start to get the idea if I tell you that rather than pumping the flush handle like crazy and hope that everything disappears, this new toilet worked by creating a vacuum.  When you put the toilet lid down (not something that guys normally do), the lid forms a seal and a couple of pumps of the handle causes a vacuum to develop in the toilet and sucks everything that is in there – out. 

 

So let’s compare and contrast that new flushing method with my self-taught method of sitting on the toilet and pumping the flush handle like crazy hoping for the best result.  Well I can tell you that forming an accidental seal on the new toilet with your buttocks and then applying all your young anxious energy to the new flush handle causes an immediate and mostly disturbing but slightly exciting sensation.  The last thing that I remember is shouting “DAAAAD”!  But I digress, again.

 

From the rig it is a short ride to the East Bank and buoy #5 where we will make our twilight and night dives.  I am always excited by the idea of twilight and night dives, because the day critters and the night critters are a world apart, and we get to see the start of the change.  However, I still wish that we could do a really late night dive, 2 or 3 am when all the coral is open and all the beasts are out.  I chose the twilight dive to take pics of people, and as I have said before, I am not a big fan of taking people pics, but it is nice to give some memories back. 

So I do my best, and they can be found in the ‘People of the Flower Gardens’ tab. 

 

TO BE CONTINUED.......don't miss 'Should Kenny wear those shorts?'  and 'Did Wendy set fire to the galley?'