Stumbling Blocks

originally published October 24, 2017

This is going to be tough. A lot of crazy things have happened since I last posted and now it's time to sort them all out. Why the long absence? Well, my house was broken into and my computer was stolen. I guess I should count myself lucky that the only things taken are replaceable. I'm a sentimental sort and have things like my grandmother's china and my father's fire helmets scattered about my home. If any of these things had been taken or damaged, I would have been inconsolable. So, yeah, I was lucky. 

Still, it's disconcerting knowing strangers were in your home, pawing through your personal things, disrupting your life. Not an experience I wish to repeat. It took a few weeks for me to feel back to normal. I was not only afraid to be away from my home, for fear the thieves would return, I was afraid to be in it as well. I checked and rechecked that all the doors were locked each night and slept with the lights on for days. 

But, rather that let the scourge of polite society get in my way, I put in some overtime to scrape up enough cash to replace the laptop and am finally ready to plunge back into my dive training recaps. Now... where were we?

Oh yes... I had signed up for Advanced Open Water and was trying to narrow down which specialties I would choose. I asked around a lot. Perhaps too much. Finally, I came to the point where I just had to stop hemming and hawwing and make a bloody decision. I knew I wanted to continue to fine tune my buoyancy. I also knew I wanted to delve into wreck diving. The deep dive made me nervous so I wanted to save that for last. After meeting with Chris and Will for the umpteenth time, we came up with a game plan.

Though I really wanted to do Wreck Diving, the effects of multiple hurricanes were still lingering in South Florida. Conditions were rough, and visibility poor in many areas commonly used for training. I would need to either choose another option, or put off completing my AOW for an indeterminate amount of time. So, I decided to switch tacks and take Search & Recovery instead. Combining this with Navigation and Peak Performance Buoyancy, Will would lead the class at Lake Denton and we could knock out all three in one day. It was now late October but I was finally in the AOW starting gate.


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