The Vessel Puffs Her Sails
a. dog outside/chair/his dog
b. bike outside/ass/jellyfish
c. trash outside/flip-flops/his trash
d. outdoor light on/porch/skeeters
This is a critical Utila Skill Question.
This is my friend Lloyd.
The foreign exchange guy that is still in me wants to have something to do.
Accordingly to Wikipedia, “Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) is a way of measuring economic variables in different countries so that irrelevant exchange rate variations do not distort comparisons. Purchasing power exchange rates are such that it would cost exactly the same number of, for example, US dollars to buy Euros and then buy a basket of goods in the market as it would cost to purchase the same goods directly with dollars. The purchasing power exchange rate used in this conversion equals the ratio of the currencies’ respective purchasing powers (reciprocals of their price levels).”
So I have collected some goods for the basket. I will create some sort of weighting system to create an index later. For now, here is a look at the costs of some of these items.
PS: yes I realize I don’t have any fresh food here. The local fresh fruit don’t provide a printed out receipt. I will report back on the usual items.
So my mentor signed off on my log book. It still needs to go through the system, but Divemaster accomplished.
My last task was to map a dive sites.
Couldn’t resist doing it in PowerPoint.
8am boat dive (2 tanks), which means I’m there at 7am to bottle the boat. NP.
I’m buddied with Lloyd the Englishman who is logging his 100th dive and wants to go “Commando” to celebrate. Yes, that commando.
We are diving the Haliburton “Hali” wreck that’s sits at about 30 meters.
We drop down and get to the bottom and I have to hold Lloyd’s fins as he strips off his shorts and parades around the wreck with his boonie hat (which he brought) covering his junk from the virgin fish. English modesty.
We (he) putzes around for 20 minutes or so (depth being what it is) and he puts his shorts back on and we get back up.
And as we surface…we hear…”get on, we got sharks!”…Relax.
So we briefly retank as Captain Ray takes us East to a fish boil. A boil is a place where there is a plankton accumulation that brings larger fish and they make the surface “boil” as they move around at the surface and EAT. And it also brings Whale Sharks.
Whale Sharks have no teeth. They eat plankton which are tiny organisms.
SO…
We all get out of our dive gear (we are not allowed to “dive” with WS…only snorkel) and stack up sitting on the deck of the boat so we can quietly slide into the water without making a big splash (and scaring this beast).
We drop in once and don’t see him/her. Surface. We wait for 20mins or so (good because we need a longish surface interval because of the deep dive…google it). We scan the horizon for a boil…and then hear… go,go,go and we drop in with just snorkeling gear and we catch a brief glimpse of this 9 meter beast. Other boats had more and we only got a brief peak, but this thing was huge.
Anyway, could have better, but we headed to another reef later and Lloyd (now with clothing) and I mapped a reef. The water was supper clear and there were 3-4 types of jellyfish that I could just hover and look at.
Of all the things in the sea, jellyfish are the most fragile looking things you can imagine. Dangerous, small, whispy, opaque, exotic. I just hovered there watching them just inches from my face.
Can’t remember when I fell in love with the sea. It was probably living in Southern California.
I added some salt to the sea from my tears today.
Will add some videos and pics from some friends when I get them.
So I will change it up and ask anybody who is listening to give me a song for this website.