End of Week 1 in Mahahual, Q. Roos, Mexico

Hello from Mahahual.

I´ve just finished my first week with Global Vision´s Marine Conservation Expedition. By this time in the Seychelles, I was doing my advanced diving training, emergency first responder and studying fish. Down here, I´ve already passed my written fish tests (for adult and juvenile fish), am going through the emergency first responder course again just because I don´t think you can ever do this too many times, and because I want to know what to do when someone has an epileptic attack (which I can´t even spell) right in front of me as happened in Costa Rica. We´re finally in the water after being shorebound due to high winds, maybe too high even for sailboats, though I don´t get daily weather reports to know how high they were. I just know they were too high for us to get beyond the reef and back into the lagoon without turning over the dive boat. We´ve been told this has happened. That would be bad news for future diving. I´m studying for my dive master´s certification, which I plan to do after I finish my five weeks of fish monitoring. Who know´s what I might do with this!

The diving down here has been great. Out of our first five dives, one, my 100th, was at 12 feet. We practiced 16 skills, which was a great review. That shows you how dive safety conscious GVI is. The other dives have been to spot fish, to prepare us for our in-water testing. We have to be exact on this one, not just 95% as the written tests. Today we saw a sea turtle in the distance and a five-foot Southern Stingray very close up. Mother Nature has truely blessed us.

I´m going to be forced into learning Spanish down here, which I´m looking forward to. I have to if I´m going to use computers down here. They´re all in Spanish. Since I don´t know the Spanish words for spell check, who knows what this read like, and then there´s the matter of different keyboards. You never know where or how to get to the @ symbol.

The volunteers and staff here are great. There´s a big age range, and maybe a bit older than usual, from what I´m told. We have people from Sweden, Germany, the UK, South Africa and the US. In fact, one of the interns is from the Minnesota/South Dakota/Iowa area. She makes me feel a little at home here and practices Minnesota-nice. The head of the expedition here, Richard reminds me of Johnny Dep from Pirates of the Caribbean.

Mahahual is a very small village that´s expanding almost daily. A year or so ago, few had heard of it. Since Cancun is so busy now, the cruise ships are heading south and you can see how it´s adapting to the tourists. We can have a massage right on the beach if we´d like. I though maybe my new career could be the ear waxing. It´s a Chinese custom I think. You light a cone of some material, place the non-lit end in your ear and it draws out the wax in your ear. Several people are having issues with their ears, which made me think of this new business idea. Maybe I´ll talk with my dive master instructor about it. He´s Mexican, but believe it or not, he´s spent a lot of time diving in Lake Michigan. I think he´s going to try to convince me to dive in cold water. It´s cold enough here, so he´s got a lot of convincing to do.

On base, we do have our daily duties. We either have to clean up the grounds, load and unload the boat and scuba gear tubs, or prepare the meals for 19 people with rice, pasta and veggies mainly. One of the women in our group must eat similarly to me, cuz it seems like we prepare meals with the least amount of pasta, but then we also have made bread twice. We´re also into plate presenatation, which probably no one else cares about. Anyway, it makes us feel good.

Speaking of kitchen duty, I will sign off now so my mates don´t think I´ve forgotten about them.

Hope all is well in the Winter Wonderland north of here.