Finally did the Hooker!

I has been a while since my last post.  As usual it is because of all the crazy stuff that we have all been doing here.  I will do my best to catch you all up on all the going's on.

On Saturday I participated in a clean up dive at one of the piers downtown.  I actually forgot my dive computer and had to go back to get it and ended up diving with a complete stranger (I can't even remember his name) for my buddy.  It worked out okay.  I felt really confident in navigating around this new dive site because it was similar to Yellow Sub (the place where we have made the majority of our dives).  It felt good to help clean up the area.  There was so many things there!  A lot of glass bottles!  Glass is the only thing that they recycle on the island.  I believe that this is because there are no facilities to deal with any other type of recycling.  There was a barbeque after the dive to celebrate all those that participated.  There were approximately 70 people.  CIEE was a good number of those people.

We were supposed to go to the national park on Sunday, but because of all the rain that we have been getting, some of the roads were impassable so we rescheduled for the next week, the day that our project proposal is due.

On Monday, we had Tropical Marine Conservation Ecology.  We always have this class on Monday.  We learned about pollution.  The point was really hammered home when we drove to the landfill and did a beach clean up.  There was so much garbage on this beach that for the hour we were there cleaning up we barely made a dent.  I can't help but feel a little hopeless about the whole thing.  What possible solutions are there?  Recycling can only do so much.  Where is the garbage supposed to go, especially on an island this size?   This is such a global problem and sometimes I feel as though I'm one person and though I want to make a positive difference, there are so many forces out there rallying against what I could be doing.  I remember a few summers ago when I became so frustrated with my dad because he threw a bag of recyclables in the trash and said that those few recyclables didn't make a difference.  I want to believe that the recycling I do will help, but seeing the amount of trash on that beach stopped me short.  I suppose that I have to stick to my beliefs that I can make some sort of impact with the help of others trying to make a difference as well.  Those were all the thoughts that went through my head on Monday.

Today was really exciting!  This morning consisted of doing the knowledge reviews for the deep dive and night dive, learning about dive physics, and taking the Rescue Diver exam.  All-in-all it was a pretty relaxed morning.  In the afternoon, I was fortunate enough to do my very first deep dive, and to some degree, my very first wreck dive.  The site was called the Hilma Hooker, hence the name of the post for all of you dirty-minded people out there.  Caren, our teacher for Advanced Scuba, Coral Reef Ecology, and Marine Ecology Field Research Methods, told us the story of the Hilma Hooker.  Apparently, there was a ship that was injured, but instead of coming into harbor, it attempted to hide behind Klein Bonaire.  Obviously the ship of the story is the Hilma Hooker.

In case you can't tell from this picture, Klein Bonaire is extremely flat and not at all a good place to hide behind if you are a 300 foot ship.  So clearly this is a suspicious occurrence and will only become more so.  Officials go and board the boat to find a skeleton crew.  They seize the ship and begin searching, but don't find anything out of the ordinary.  Captain Don (a local hero of the island who pretty much single-handedly made the scuba dive culture on Bonaire and named practically every dive site) and his girlfriend of the time went to scuba dive around the ship and found a fake hold filled with marijuana.  Needless to say, the crew was sent back home.  The owner of the ship was never identified or found, so the government of Bonaire was left with a ship and nothing to do with it.  They decided that divers on Bonaire needed a wreck dive, considering that they didn't have one, and so decided to sink it between the sand flat of a double reef.  They gutted the ship and got rid of anything that could be potentially dangerous to the reef.  The problem that they encountered was getting the permits to go ahead with the sinking.  The story goes that some time later an inflatable was seen racing away from the Hilma Hooker (said to be Captain Don) just before it began to sink.  It sank in twenty minutes and landed upon the intended spot without any damage to the reefs.  Now it stands as the most popular wreck dive on Bonaire and lies at 99 feet.  

The skills that we did for the deep dive certification was looking at colors (mainly the color red) and an imploded tennis ball.  Caren, my instructor for the dive, cracked an egg and then sucked it into a water bottle.  Our last task was to solve six multiplication problems.  At the surface, I was able to do this in ten seconds, but at depth it took me twenty seconds.  Also of note was that the problems were different between the surface and at depth, but of the same difficulty.  We started at the stern and then went around the boat, looking into the cargo hold (because the Hilma Hooker is laying on the starboard side) and ended at the bow.  We then left.  It was so cool!  A lot us want to go back to check it out for a little bit longer for a fun dive.  Being at 98 feet felt no different to me than being at 30 feet.  I didn't even realize that we were really descending until the wreck came into view.  The only thing that was unfortunate was the weather.  It was raining the vast majority of the day (due to the tropical depression in the area that has cause us to cancel our planned trip to Lac Bay tomorrow to work on our independent research projects), so the visibility was terrible and the clouds didn't give us much light to work by.  I got to use my dive flashlight for the first time which was pretty fun.  At the surface we worked on a rescue scenario.  That was my day which was very exciting!

Tomorrow will be all about getting the vast majority of my project proposal done.  They work us really hard.  It feels as though all we have time to do is eat, sleep, dive, and work.  It has been a while since I have had such a structured environment that wasn't self-imposed.  Working hard and continuing to get to know everyone here.  Every so often I have moments where I tell myself how much I love everyone here just because I do.  It's a great feeling.  Love you!