Meeting a Mermaid

Ok....so I know that the title of this post is a little strange, but you will understand by the end of th post. Let me start off with yesterday and everything.
I went into the shop with the rest of the interns. We had several new divers that had dive packages show up for the week. I went with Mike, along with his two divers, Kathleen and Barbara. They are two older women that are really nice. Anyway we took them to Milton's Bight and then Emily's Escape. I didn't really see anything really exciting. A moray, toadfish, and several small interesting fish. The really neat part was the the conditions. Since the weather has been really strange lately, the water has been acting just as weird. We had a really strong current and there was a really large swell. I was watching my depth gauge and I was being thrown up and down about 5 to 6 feet. It was a really neat feeling. It was like being inside a washing machine. Afterwards, we went back to the shop and debated whether we should go out again after lunch. The women decided they wanted to try again...so we went just outside the channel and dove on the house reef, Labyrinth. This reef was right by the channel so the current was ripping through there. It would have been a really horrible dive, but I found it really fun since it was conditions I was not used to. We were fighting the current, the visibility was poor and there was so much debris in the water. I felt like I was in the Sahara Desert fighting against a dust storm. Though, just a little wetter. We decided to end the dive early and just head up.

Later that night, Mike's (an instructor) girlfriend, showed up at the island. He was really excited to have her so he wanted everyone to come down for drinks and dinner. It turns out that she has just turned 20, dropped out a college, ran away from her parents, just escape from a psychiatric clinic, and jumped on a plane down here. She told me her parents were putting out a missing persons report. Yeah, I have met some crazy individuals down here. They partied it up down at his apartment and I decided to leave early to go study. Unfortunately, some other intern decided to go with me, and she would not shut up. I kept telling her I needed to study, and she would shut up for 5 seconds then start talking about the most inane things. I was very much over her. Finally I just decided to go to bed, but then everyone else showed up at the house. Half the people were drunk or stoned or both and of course my room mate was the worst off. We just put him in a hammock outside and left him there. He survived. Then as I was in my room getting ready, I heard someone enter my room. I went to see who it was and it was this drunk girl who decided to lock the door behind her. At this point I was kinda freaking out. She preceded to talk to me and then try to seduce me. let me just say, drunk girls really have problems with this. I just laughed it off and told her to go to bed. Luckily she listened and as soon as she left I locked my door and went to bed.
By this morning everyone had slept off there stupidness and everyone forgot about the night before. We had a a busy day ahead of us because a group of six divers were coming in. This was going to be the group that I worked with for the entire week with one other intern and Marshall, our instructor. When I first met everyone they all seemed normal and reasonably good divers. Yeah, well once we hit the water that all went down the drain.
We got to the first dive spot Shipwreck Wall and Marshall gave the briefing. He was going to lead and the interns were going to be in the back making sure no one strayed to far. As we descended Marshall was having some trouble at the surface so I went to check on him. As I approached him I noticed that he was writing something on the slate. To my horror, I watched him write the words "Problems with ears, you take divers, just get them back." Then he ascended. At this point I had so much running through my head. First, I had never lead a dive, let alone with paying customers. Second, I had never even been to the site and had no idea what to expect. Lastly, I really hadn't listened to the briefing, NOT GOOD. I tried to act like I knew what I was doing and preceded to swim along the wall. As we got to the end Marshall suddenly appeared and signaled that his ears started working. However, he wanted me to finish the dive. Looking back I did pretty good, got everyone to the boat and no one complained afterwards. However on the dive I noticed that the divers were quite independent, some seemed lost in their own worlds, and others had obviously not listened to the signals. One lady kept giving me the okay signal everytime I asked for her air pressure. Then on the three minute safety stop another lady forgot to empty her BCD and shot up to the surface. I happened to look behind me and see her trying to swim down as she burst to the surface like a cork. Not good. However it was their first dive, so they were just working on getting back in the groove of things.

The second dive however went just about as good as the first. We went to Fish Pot and the other intern, Steve, was going to lead it. My job was to follow behind and watch for stragglers. I thought it was going to be easy. Once everyone was situated underwater and on there way I noticed this one lady darting around after schools of fish. She would be going on track with the others, then she would spot a school and break from the pack on an all out sprint right towards the fish. She would follow them arms outstretched trying to catch them. It was the funniest sight, and I immediately thought of my mom. This kept going on and once she disappeared up a canyon. I went after her and brought her back. Meanwhile Steve was having trouble with the rest of the group. I got back to the group with the fish chaser and he was sitting in the water column so confused. No one was following him and they were all spreading out in seperate directions. We finally gathered everyone up and checked everyones air. It turned out that the fish chaser had used all but 500 pounds in 20 minutes because she was sprinting around. Steve paired me with her and told me to take her immediately to the boat. We got there in time and when she was climbing out of the water she started to explain what she was doing down there. She told me she felt like a mermaid, Ariel to be exact, and that she was chasing after her friends. She also said that her favorite dive spots were caves, cervices and caverns because she was searching for her hideaway like Ariel's. Yeah, I wasn't to sure how to respond to this so I just told her Roatan had plenty of dive sites she would like.


That was the last dive I had with them today, but I will be diving at least twice a day with this group. I am sure I will have more stories about them. The rest of the day was uneventful with lots of studying. Now I am just trying to rest, and prepare myself for the rest of what is sure to be an interesting week.