Day 33: Meet Hercules

Vela Luka, Croatia

Bobby had listed out my task for the next three days on the schedule board and it looked daunting!! I arrived today at the dive center at 6:45 and immediately started loading Hercules with 30 tanks and other boat equipment.

Overall, to deal with the craziness of 70 divers in a day, we’re launching 4 boats in total: Hercules, 57VL, Ana Maria and Thor; refilling, loading, unloading, reloading of some 150 tanks.

I was scheduled to go on a boat duty the whole morning from 8:00am with Charlie and Deni leading dives. The boat duty was particularly tough since it was the first day we were using this new boat and it was also the first day diving with this group of 12 divers. Furthermore, the sea was wild today with waves as high as 2 meters. It made our first dive pretty disastrous. At first, we had a hard time anchoring the boat; then we had a diver going into the sea without his fins and being swept again by the waves (Charlie with her quick thinking jumped in the water and got the situation under control); then we had a diver with nose bleed and seasickness. With my lack of experience, I was not at all sure what to do with this diver. He’s bending over Hercules’s tubing and blood just pouring out of his nose and sick out of his mouth. The poor chap was cursing (not particularly to anybody) saying that we took too long to get the divers into the water. In the end, Charlie had me help him into his equipment because he couldn’t do much at all at besides laying down and propping himself up by the tubing.

When the divers were finally down in the water, I had to tie up the tanks or else they’d be falling left and right due to the heavy waves. I nearly killed myself a few times in the process! The boat was so slippery and was rocking so hard, it was tricky to keep balance. At one point, I was sitting in the middle of the boat on my own, staring into the waves, bracing myself and thinking what a bizarre situation I had gotten myself into. At the same time of the day a month ago, I would just be strolling into Music Choice, making myself a cup of coffee, stealing Max’s banana from his desk, checking my emails and browsing some blogs. A much easier and comfortable situation eh?

Long story short, I got back around 12:45pm, chomped down the homemade pasta in 5 mins and started gearing up my equipment. I was set to lead two dives in the afternoon. My group of divers were to arrive at 1pm. By 2:00pm, Tom and I were done with loading Hercules again for the afternoon dives, briefing our divers and off I went again to the sea. Good thing it had calmed down by then.

My dives went alright despite the fact that I was not familiar with the dive sites. I didn’t lose any of my divers and I made my way back to the boat.

Croatian phrase of the day:

Sviđa mi se Hrvatski = I like Croatian