Almost a divemaster

My friend and colleague at The School of Life, Gaylene Gould, recently wrote an interesting blog post about writers' difficulties finishing things. Sometimes you can get too attached to the process of producing something that you don't want it to end. I am going through a similar thing with my training here. 

For a week or so, we have been almost done, with just two or three things left on the check list before I qualify. For a combination of reasons - not having the right equipment, the sea being too rough, general faffing around (mine and others') - we never quite had a chance to make a map or locate and recover a lost object from the seabed. (This latter task feels a bit melodramatic until you realise that people are always dropping things like cameras off the side of boats and expect the divemaster to go and get them for them.) So, with a calm sea a couple of days a go, Tullio and I went out to kill two birds with one stone: make a map of part of the reef and drop something, find it and bring it back.

We noticed the dark clouds amassing inland but they seemed to be far away when we went in the water. But, almost immediately after we had gone down, a storm struck and what had been crystal-clear, calm water turned into a washing machine. Mapping was out of the question as it requires swimming in a straight line, taking a compass bearing, writing neatly on your slate and so on. We couldn't do the first and sometimes there was so much sand being churned up from the sea bed that I couldn't even see the compass on my wrist. We weren't in any danger. The reef is about three metres deep at the most, and every so often we popped our heads out the water to see what was going on (big waves, hard rain, black sky). In fact, it was incredibly good fun. The surge of the waves above you toss everything back and forth in unison, so Tullio, I and a lot of fish spend half an hour in each other's company waiting for things to calm down.

We had taken with us one of those big, plastic water-cooler drums to use as a lifting bag. The idea is, when you find your lost object, you can raise it to the surface by attaching it to something you can fill with air - like a hot-air balloon but underwater. (A camera you can pick up yourself, of course, but an outboard motor needs some help.) There are proper floats made for this, but ours had a hole in it so we had decided to improvise, attached some ropes to an empty drum and took in in the sea. You can tow something like this along the surface for a bit but in the end you have to fill it with water and bring it down with you. A 25-litre drum of water weighs 25kg and, when the surge got stronger, it was like towing a recalcitrant child. Wherever we wanted to go, it wanted to go somewhere else, often straight into someone´s head.

At this point we really lost something. We had taken along a weight belt to "lose" and then find and recover when a particularly strong surge knocked it out of Tullio's hand. We looked around but we could only see about two metres around us and it wasn't there. It's interesting how hard it is to see things underwater even when the visibility isn't poor. It's not like glancing over a beach to see where you dropped your towel. You have to divide the seabed up and systematically scour it about four square metres at a time. (The PADI manuals are full of different shaped search patterns to make sure you don't miss a bit.) So our fake search and recovery become a real one. This would be a better story if the thing we dropped had been valuable, the storm was steadily increasing and our air was running low. But in fact (diver nerd alert) we used a circular search pattern ("suitable for recovering a small object on a flat bottom") and found it after about a minute.

When we came out of the sea the storm had passed but you could see its effects. The sun was out again but everything was glistening with rain water and all the people who were on the beach when we went in were having lunch in the restaurant instead. It wasn't the dive we had planned but I was pleased it had turned out that way. On my first day, I swam 800 metres in waves much less strong than that and had almost given up with fear and exhaustion. Since then, I have been in the sea every day, trying to make it more of a friend, and the fact that the two of us came out of that dive grinning says to me that that has worked. We still have to make a map - and Pablo, the owner, is making threatening noises about delaying my actual "graduation" until the end of my trip - but for all intents and purposes I am there. What a journey it's been. I'm even grinning now thinking about it.

He lived on the left, she on the right

I am now in Mexico City for a couple of days. Ever since I watched a programme about it, I have always wanted to see Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera's house, where they lived in separate buildings with a bridge connecting them at roof-level. (Psychoanalysts, you can start now...). So I am going to Coyoacán, which I am hoping is a short metro ride from where I am staying, to see that, her Casa Azul, his other house and the house where Trotsky lived and was murdered. (All of this is brilliantly brought to life, by the way, in Barbara Kinglsolver's book Lacuna.) I like Mexico City but I am already longing for clean air and the sea. I know I will return here many times, so tomorrow I am going to visit the Museum of Anthropology and then, maybe the next day, I´ll go back to Tulum.

My MacBook has finally died after eight years of heavy use, regular dropping and other assorted moments of disrespect. The final straw was a day of incredible heat and humidity combined with the electricity supply at the beach, which fluctuates wildly. (You could feel it longing for a better life in a Shoreditch design studio.) I am going to take it home to repair and but I can't do that here, so some photos I was hoping to post will have to wait.

In the meantime, I have bought a little Asus Eee PC netbook, which runs, gasp, Windows. It's nice to use and very compact. But after Apple it just feels second-best. (It was, of course, also a quarter of the price.) We'll grow to love each other, but right now we have constant little arguments about things like Windows' infuriating "notifications" and the weird trackpad. I am also tripping up over the Spanish keyboard. Things like ñ and ¿ are easy, of course, but how many times am I going to type "¿" ? But other characters are in weird places. Yesterday I spent literally an hour trying to work out how to type @. Mexico City is also south-east-Asia-like in the availability of pirated software. The guy who sold me the laptop also installed Microsoft Office "with compliments" while I was there. It's a dreadful set of programs, of course (apart from, maybe, PowerPoint), but the fact that all the menus are now in Spanish gives them an exotic feel and makes even using Word almost bearable.