The Tired Diver

Wanted to give a few highlights from our trip to St. George for two weeks.

We are from Arkansas – When we load up a car, we load up a car. We had the suburban packed to the gills, a car topper on the roof, a canoe on a trailer in the back, a kayak tied on top of the canoe, assorted bikes and other large items crammed in between the canoe and kayak, and my husband’s large fishing cart strapped onto the top of the car in front of the carrier. Not exactly aerodynamic. I am sure dogs started barking three minutes before we entered into each town because of the loud whistling noise that fishing cart made. We have a Razorback on the front of our car which identifies us as Arkansans. As if people would not have gathered that by looking at the Grapes of Wrath getup we were driving. We need no introduction.

Tired diver – Hubs and I wanted to learn to dive on this trip. After completing our classroom work, we spent an afternoon in the pool going over emergency drills. Some of the drills were about what to do if you run out of air underwater and how to rescue a tired diver. That meant I had to pull (drag) my 200+ pound husband in full scuba gear across the length of the pool. At one point I yelled at him and told him he was supposed to be a tired diver, not a BITCHY one. I added I was doing my best and if he didn’t like it I would let his ass drown next time. That poor instructor.

I know this is hard to believe, but I had a hard time standing up underwater. The book said diving was about taking in the underwater landscape and to be careful not to disturb the ocean floor. I stirred up silt and shit everywhere I went. I would trip over my fins, start floating off in the middle of a drill, or not be able to control where I went next. The instructor kept telling me to establish neutral buoyancy and to control my movements so I could glide through the water. I told him to not hold his breath. Evidently awkwardness translates easily in the water as well.

Shortcut – My husband, in his infinite wisdom, chose a shortcut to get us home from our diving lesson. He feels he can sniff out a good shortcut and thinks he is James Bond with his phone GPS.

Chad: Boy there is not a lick of traffic on this shortcut I found!
Me: That’s because it’s a damn dirt road! Not even gravel, just DIRT! People don’t usually take a logging road to work!

That makes up for the time when my shortcut around Nashville abruptly ended when the road ended. It took us 2 hours to loop back around. Evidently construction was not finished, but it looked good on the map…


Scallops – This was the highlight of our trip. We took a boat out to a shallow area where the scallops like to grow, and the captain described to us what we were looking for. He gave each of us a bag to fill. It takes all of us a little time to find the scallops, except for my father in law. He had a full bag in about fifteen minutes…of the wrong thing. I don’t know what he had in the bag but they were probably some endangered species of which there are only 100 left, and he had 99 in a bag ready to fry.

I snorkeled for two hours picking each one of these scallops out of the water and putting them in my bag. I even held the top of my bag closed so I could be sure none of them escaped. My husband grabbed my bag as soon as we started climbing back onboard so I could take off my fins and not fall down. This ain’t his first rodeo. I noticed that every time he would move my bag a couple of scallops would fall out. Why? Because there was a big hole in the bottom of my bag! Of course there was a hole in the bottom of my bag. Is there a one armed man around here too? I can just see the line of scallops escaping out of my bag… No wonder I was finding them so easily, they were the ones that had just escaped from my bag. I probably caught the same 30 all day long.

As always, thank you for reading my post, and I hope this makes you feel a little better about yourself.