A Welcome Visitor

Boredom is definitely setting in at times. It’s a combination of not being able to do anything and being too tired or sore to try. We’ve watched a lot of mindless TV with coverage of Gustav and the RNC heading the list including all of the ridiculous build up and dramatization on CNN.
That’s why it was such a pleasant surprise on Monday when my good friend Scott showed up at our temporary digs here in LA. It was a breath of fresh air for all of us with time passing quickly as a result of good laughs and stories from a time that seems so long ago. He brought gifts, flowers for Denise, wine for my mom (and Denise) and as a fellow diver he knew I would be missing the creatures of the deep so he even brought me my very own whale shark and red lobster! He also threw in an American Olympic baseball cap knowing how much it had bothered me to watch the Olympics on American TV.
Scott and I worked together at Club Med. First in St. Lucia during the spring of 1995 and then again in 96 at Turks and Caicos. St. Lucia was my very first real job as a scuba instructor and I can remember my first day on the boat with him like it was yesterday. We had just finished our dives where I tagged along with his group underwater. After the dive when the boat was heading back down south towards port, Scott waved me up to the bow and we settled in for the hour-long ride back along the coastline complete with the towering Pitons (a world heritage site) and the town of Soufriere off in the distance.
We sat with our backs against the wheelhouse window overlooking the deck, turquoise clear water on all sides and yes, even two topless French girls warming up in the sunshine on the deck in front of us. At that point Scott turned to me and asked – “So what are your buddies at home doing right about now”. I looked at my watch, computed the time difference and told him they would be heading to the hospital cafeteria for their 15 minute morning coffee break. We had a good hard laugh and repeated the Club Med slogan… “Life as it should be”. Things were really not so bad!

I had the opportunity to work with him again alongside another great team of instructors about 8 months later at the dedicated dive/singles club Turquoise. Living and working a month at Club Med is like living a year in the real world. There are so many stories to tell it’s crazy and the experience is one that you can never really explain to someone who’s never worked there. It’s one of those things where getting together with an ex-GO is like getting together with a fellow country man. There is just an understanding and no need to explain the things that are really unexplainable! Reminiscing with him was just plain fun!
While admitting it sounds a lot more exciting than it really is, Scott currently works on the Scripps Research Vessel, the New Horizon (see my new T-shirt), which ports in San Diego. He says they spend weeks out at sea transversing miles of open ocean in search of sardines and measuring things like water temperature and pH. He also says he much prefers spending port time in SD over LA so I really appreciate his effort to come up here especially since he had to return the same day and his 2-hour cab ride from the train station included fixing an oil leak for the cabbie just so they could get here!

Thanks again Scott and have a great holiday after this next voyage!

For those of you coming into this little open heart surgery discussion a little late you can find all the posts easily by clicking on the Open Heart Surgery Labels at the bottom of this post or by clicking on the links under open heart surgery over on the right hand side of the blog. Those ones are listed in chronological order!