I left Tortola last week very happy to be heading home to the family but I was underwater (diving) all of Easter weekend which is good for the waistline but it was dissappointing to miss the easter bunny!

BVI from my window seat on the Cessna…

The flight out of Tortola was fun as it was on a Cessna flown by a women pilot. I have decided that maybe my next session of training once I tick off Divemasters might be flying!

I did an underwater navigation course in Monterey on Friday and then Saturday and Sunday I was assisting with an Open Water group as part of my internship. They did really well seeing as it was their first time diving in the ocean. All the days were beautiful and sunny despite starting out a bit iffy. The visibility was up to 40 feet and I got to dive at three different sites – Lovers Point, Breakwater and Monastery.

Breakwater – the most visited divesite in the US….

A self portrait after my 6 dive of the weekend in 48F water – tad chilly after the BVI’s! After finishing the underwater navigation course I became a master diver as I have 5 specialties – ice diver, altitude, drysuit, nitrox and navigator. I have a lot more work to do to complete my divemasters cert so will be back down in Monterey at the end of May.

Hope you had a great easter with lots of chocolate!

I drove up HW 1 on Monday after a day in Monterey doing Divemaster exams. It really is very beautiful – I guess sometimes I forgot how beautiful it is right outside my front door!

I stopped to have dinner with some friends at a British Pub in Half Moon Bay with a double decker bus and London taxis outside. All good fun.

I will try and get some photos up and video as soon as possible. I am sore at the moment after only three dives of a very short duration – 6 minutes each. We drove up to the dive site Lake San Isabel near Rye Colorado this morning and then cut a hole in the ice. Unfortunately one of the instructers fell on the ice dislocating his shoulder. It took 2 hours to make the hole and a total of 7 dives were completed. If you went deeper than 15 feet it was pitch black above that it was light. The tether line only allows you to move 130 feet maximum away from the hole. It is hard to deal with a first as you are tethered to your buddy. Communication is by a jerking on the line to the line tender on the surface. If for some reason you have a problem you surface to the ice and stay vertical. There is a rescue diver always at the ready at the surface with a 200 foot line. If there is an issue they go down and start circling the hole and their tether line will eventually catch on the missing diver.

It was best to stay in the light zone as the visibility was poor in the first place. A much more exhilerating experience was surfacing under the ice and then looking up through the ice and seeing all the variations and cracks in the ice and looking up through old ice fishing holes. The air you exhale forms a bubble moves randomly on the underside of the ice causing black shapes that move kind of like ink puddles. The first dive went well, the second we were tangled in the tether line and spent a lot of time trying to get out of the human knot, then my mask kept on flooding so I told my buddy I wouldn’t mind surfacing – I wasn’t comfortable. The third dive I went down with the rescue diver as the instructor and my buddy were done with the cold. It was a much easier dive as I was a little more comfortable with the situation and we had fun walking on the bottom of the ice.

Anyways off to soak in a bath and bed time.

Life around Ashley is like life inside a tornado…not that I’ve ever been in one but that’s the closest description I can think of.

As I type this, she’s here in my kitchen, which never gets used for anything more than a steak and some steamed veggies ora sandwich… and she’s cooking Coq au Vin for 14 crew for the race to Key West! I wonder if the crew has any idea how much she goes out of her way for them…probably not.

Oh, and I should mention that it is now near 2300hrs and she flew in from SF on Thurs. night at near midnight, and went up to Palm Beach on Fri and worked on the boat all day and slept aboard in an older spinnaker and worked all day and and arrived back here at about 2030hrs or so and has been cooking ever since.

I spent the day with Ashley on the boat on Friday trying hard to be useful… just little tasks like taking inventory of their packaged food and the first aid kit and emailing them off to where they needed to go. I also managed to get the lifeline cushions on the port side, though I must confess it took me 2 tries to get them right.

So, that’s my story for the moment. When she finishes cooking, we’ll vacuume seal the food and clean up the kitchen and try to get a bit of sleep and tomorrow we get to go SAILING!

We’ll do a bit of a car shuffle, and head back up to Cracker Boy Boat Works to get Yeoman XXXII and SAIL down to Ft. Lauderdale so she’ll be here for the start of the Ft. Lauderdale to Key West race on Wednesday.

The above was written by my gracious host Steffi who is now trying to revert the raping of her kitchen back to virgin status. The coq au vin will NEVER be made again. Started at 8pm and it is now 12:20am…. bed time.

So after a day in the classroom with 3 exams and mulitple knowledge reviews towards my divemasters certificate on Saturday I got to help with an open water class on Sunday. We did two hours in the swimming pole and then two open water dives. The students were brothers one 19 and the other 22. They hardly needed teaching! To them the dives were very exciting. To me I had a cold was finding it hard to equalize and it was 51F in the water which even with a drysuit was cold. I ended up with blocks of ice for feet which took a long time to unthaw. But on the positive side I was moving along in 40 feet of water when something came at me from above like a rocket – turned out to be a cormorant. Took me a bit by surprise at first I was thinking that is an odd fish and by the time my slow brain clicked the bird had taken off along the bottom. Amazing site.

I did my Nitrox course on Saturday so at the end of the month when I do my wreck diving course I will be doing the dives on enriched air. A little bit of extra oxygen isn’t a bad thing unless you get hit by oxygen toxicity which is totally counter intuitive to me. So this week I am finishing off lots of little jobs on all my Bay Area boats and packing for 3 weeks working in Florida.

A splash and dash according to pilots is when they run out of fuel and need to land to refuel! I did two in two days one in a boat and one in an airplane!

Arriving in Florida late on monday night from the UK very tired I found that as I had thought Yeoman had not unloaded and I was taking her off the ship that had brought her from Southampton. I stayed with my friend Steffi and in the morning we headed up to West Palm Beach and Cracker Boy Boatworks. Lots of security to get onto the port including fingerprinting and picture taking.

The forecasted 25-30 knot winds made things interesting as the boat was unloaded to weather of the tanker so we were plastered against the side of the tanker and combined with the throttle cable being broken (I had a new one to replace it but the reason for the cable breaking meant we needed another part as well) we asked for a tow from Towboat US.

They hip towed us to the haul out at Cracker Boy and were very good about it the guy knew his boat – sometimes they don’t so I was a little worried.

After hauling out, pressure washing all the salt off of her deck and hull I crawled around inside for 4 hours getting a to do list and question list going as I haven’t seen her in 18 months.

Christmas eve is not a time to fly needless to say the airport was packed at Fort Lauderdale and sadly there were 4 wrecks in the airport area with one car turned over. The flight from Fort Lauderdale to Philidelphia was on time and uneventful. However, we left Philidephia late and completely full and then the pilot announced we were running out of fuel due to un forcasted 155mph headwinds and would have to stop at Salt Lake city for a Splash and Dash. Amazingly it took the 15 minutes they said it would and we arrived only 2.5 hours late into SFO. I was amazed at how the passengers treated the flight attendants like personal servents with the call buttons being pressed continuously! US Airways is not a great airline – no inflight entertainment (not even music), even water has to be purchased and box meals for $7 each. I felt bad to for the flight attendants having to deal with upset people for 9 hours in the plane!

Merry Christmas everyone

Christmas display in Lauderdale – the kid who lives there says they start putting lights up in September! Even their sportsfishing boat behind their house is covered in lights.

I took the day off on Sunday and had great fun with my nephew and mother in San Francisco walking around seeing all the lights and window displays. It was raining so there weren’t many people. The Macy’s display was very cute with puppies and kittens and the Hyatt had a very large gingerbread house display. Henry was pointing out all the details some which I missed it is amazing what little kids notice. After an attempt at a nap which didn’t happen it was time to go to SFYC for the yacht club childrens christmas party. Santa arrived by boat and Henry was very quite taking it all in with wide eyes. He sat on Santa’s lap and said ‘merry christmas’ than we had a green reindeer made from a balloon and decorated some christmas cookies for mum and dad. I have a great week of christmas dinners/parties to attend it is nice to be home at this time of year.

Good times.

Merry Christmas everyone.

So I got to see my nieces who are called Charlotte Beatrice Perrin and Phillip Ione Perrin. I think they are going to grow up to be pretty special little kids but than again I am biased!

There is a good story to go with my black eye! It will make you laugh I am sure.

So I was putting up a shed over at my old place with my worker Francisco. The base was propped against the fence as he levelled the ground for the shed. Well it ended up on his head and caused a very large laceration that was deep. If you are squimmish stop reading here!!

So as with all head injuries there was a lot of blood. I got some rags and had him hold it on his head and sit down until the bleeding had stopped. Then I called my friend the paramedic who wasn’t answering. There was no way Francisco was going to the hospital… being without paperwork. If it was me I would have been there in a NY minute. So as I waited for my friend to call back I finished the shed and kept an eye on Francisco checking for concussion etc. I took him to my house and pulled out the medical kit for on the boat which includes a suture kit which I am not qualified to use but it also has all the materials to clean the wound.

I was doing a good job washed his head under the shower, hair by hair had to be remove from the wound and then used an iodine swab to clean it really well. At this point there was no blood I was just trying really hard not to hurt him. Francisco was being very brave. I am poking at his head with surgical gloves and a pair of tweezers. All of a sudden I didn’t feel good so I stopped poking his head and lent against the sink for a few seconds. Well after that it is a blank!!

I woke up to Francisco yelling my name and shaking me and pain on the right side of my face. Well I was out apparently for only 30 seconds or so. I had passed out and hit my head on the wall on the way down. Poor Francisco was beside himself and very scared. So I got up and took a breather on the couch and went back to working on his head as I had to close the wound.

I ended up using dermabond it seems to have worked really well. After 30 seconds of holding the edges of the 3 inch laceration together it seemed to have kicked off. Poor Francisco is definantly going to have a big scar as I didn’t do that great of a job of knitting the two sides together. I took him home with some Advil and have been checking it out for the last few days. Speaking no spanish and him very limited English meant I had to resort to an online translation tool to ask him about pain etc. There were many moments where he stared blankly at me not understanding what I was trying to say it probably didn’t help with him huge headache!You can only imagine the story he had to tell about the crazy gringo women he works for when he got home! At least my black eye will heal and there won’t be a scar. So now I am on a mission to get over my new weakness and learn how to use sutures as that is really what needed to happen. I think this however, will take a lifetime as I can’t even recieve injections never mind give them.

I put together a group of friends (8 people) to go for dinner and a movie and see the movie Morning Light put together by Disney. It was almost a private showing only 15 people in the whole theater. I can’t see them running it for long with that type of turnout. Good movie but probably wouldn’t see it again. Unfortunately for the movie producers it wasn’t a windy race so there was as dramatic shots as they could have hoped for. Those kids were very lucky to get such a great opportunity – I wish I was 8 years younger. It does show what offshore sailing is about for non sailors so I might use it to explain what I do and unlike most sailing you see in movies it is actually technically correct!