This really wasn't a Daring Divers from Hell trip in the literal sense: this time we were just "hangers on." This trip was organized by the good folks at Divepoint Scuba in Stevens Point, Wisconsin. What, you may ask, is the connection between the DDfH and Divepoint Scuba? Daring Diver Randy and his lovely wife, Karen, live in Stevens Point, and Divepoint is their local scuba / outdoor adventure shop. Sometime back during the summer, Randy sent out an email to all his dive buddies telling us about this planned trip to Bonaire in October. At the time I declined because I was going bicycling through France and I didn't think it would go over too well at work for me to take two weeks off work to go to France, come back for a week, then leave again for another vacation trip.

But the mystical forces of the universe smiled down upon me: on August 28 I found out I was getting laid off. Now most of you might be thinking that getting laid off is BAD news. But not me. I had been playing "who blinks first" with EarthLink for about four years. I wanted to quit, but kept telling myself to ride it out and eventually they would lay me off and give me a severance package. You know: "pay me to quit." At long last my dreams came true. So within a week I had bought airline tickets and "leeched my way" into the Bonaire trip.

Apparently, the "normal" way to get to Bonaire is to go to Houston, then take a red-eye to the island. This worked out well: it means that the entire group would be meeting in the Houston airport, then catching the same flight to Bonaire. This meant that I would get a chance to meet the entire gang before arriving in Bonaire.

But there was one (very pleasant) surprise in store when I reached Houston: when I got off my plane and strolled into the terminal, there was Daring Diver Jim! He hadn't told ANYBODY that he would be joining us. In fact, he had been moaning constantly in emails about how bummed he was going to be to miss out on the trip. Something about that darned work thing cramping his style. But at the very last minute he bought a ticket and just showed up. How cool was THAT??!

There was one very big disadvantage to the whole "red-eye" thing: the dive resort (Buddy Dive Resort) didn't have our rooms ready when we got there. So we had roughly 15 very burned out people with no place to go. Check out the "action shots" in the pictures. People were dozing off to sleep wherever they could find a chair. I actually have to ding Buddy Dive on this one. They didn't have any place for us to check our luggage, and once the rooms were ready we had to lug it to our rooms by ourselves. And at the end of the trip, we had to lug all the stuff back up to the front desk. At 4am!!! But other than that minor inconvenience it was a pretty great trip.

It's been nearly two months since the trip as I write this, so I probably have forgotten some good stories. But here are my memories from the trip:

Day 1 Breakfast: How to Break Your Camera

This story could qualify for a Top Ten list of Stupid Things to Do on Vacation. We were on our way to breakfast and I was futzing around with my camera and housing. Why I was doing this whilst walking on a gravel roadway I cannot say. A sane person would have waited until they were safely seated at a table before working with their camera. But not me. I blame the lack of sleep. Anyway, I was playing with the camera and DROPPED it. Smack. Right on the road. Luckily, the camera still turned on and still took pictures. Not so luckily, the knob that lets you change the camera from automatic mode, to manual mode, to movie mode no longer worked. The camera was stuck in automatic mode. Which is fine for taking snapshots on land, but WORTHLESS for taking underwater pictures. Look here to see what I mean. Bummer! This story eventually has a happy ending, but I'll tell that story later. Suffice it to say, I couldn't take any underwater pictures that first day. I was not happy. But at least I had no one but myself to blame.

Day 1 First Dive: Wounded Warrior

We were looking for a dive site named Barcadera. But we hadn't yet got the hang of the finding the little yellow stones that mark the dive sites, so we ended up doing a dive at a place that wasn't really an official site. Again, I blame the lack of sleep. Anyhoo, it was a REALLY tough entry / exit. Bonaire in general has some challenging shore entries because it is largely "iron shore", not nice, soft, sandy beaches. But this particular place was "challenging" even by Bonaire standards. And just to make things a little more difficult, the surf was up when we did the dive. Long story short: Karen got a pretty good scrape on her leg. Not life-threatening or anything, but pretty nasty looking. A nice "red badge of courage." Oh well, it gave us material for the ceremony when we inducted her into the DDfH. And it increased our chances of attracting sharks.

Day 1 Evening: Field Repairs on Digital Cameras

I had spent the day fuming because I had broken my camera. At our Buddy Dive Resort "orientation" they had told us that the guy who runs their camera shop is called "Doctor Digital" because he supposedly knows everything about digital cameras. I was a little skeptical, because anybody who claims they can set your camera up for good underwater photography while you're still on land is either a liar or doesn't know what they're talking about. But I was desperate, so I went and talked to him. He was a nice enough guy, but didn't really have much of anything useful to offer. When I asked if there were any camera repair shops on the island, he just laughed. It was looking more and more like I was S.O.L.

Now indulge me while I digress for a moment and impart just a tiny bit of one of Tim's philosophies of life. Whenever I make a decision of any significance, I always try to identify the worst case scenario and make sure I'm OK with it. It doesn't mean I EXPECT the worst case scenario to happen. I just want to be "emotionally prepared" for it, and make sure I'll be OK with it if it should come to pass.

In this case, I'm talking about dissecting my camera in the hopes of fixing it. I didn't think it very likely that it could be fixed. Much more likely that I would destroy it completely. I had to make sure I was not gonna go off the deep end if I completely destroyed the camera. But the more I thought about it, the more I was willing to risk it. In its current condition, the camera was only good for taking snapshots on land. There were plenty of other people with cameras who could do that, so if I destroyed my camera I wasn't really losing all that much. At least, not on this trip. Also, my camera is pretty old by digital camera standards. It's a 4 megapixel Canon S400 Digital Elph. I bought it in 2002 for the Honduras trip. In the digital camera universe, 5 years old is ANCIENT. So I consider the camera to be "fully depreciated" at this point. I decided that the worst case scenario was that I would have to buy a new camera. I've been thinking of doing that anyway, so I really wasn't risking all that much. I decided to forge ahead.

After dinner, Randy and I fixed ourselves some nice, stiff rum punches and got to work. Luckily, I had remembered to bring along my jeweler's screwdrivers. I had neglected to take them along on the DDfH trip to the Philippines back in the spring, and it had turned out that I needed them. So this time I remembered to pack them. We completely disassembled the camera and had it spread out on the coffee table. Upon careful inspection, we found that one of the contacts on the knob that controls the camera's mode was bent. Randy very carefully bent it back into what looked like the proper shape, and we reassembled the camera. No joy. The camera was still stuck in automatic mode.

So we disassembled it again. Randy studied it carefully for a minute, and came up with a very cogent observation: it appeared that the contacts had gotten smooshed (is that a word?) flat when I dropped it. They were no longer touching the metal contacts against which they were supposed to seat. So Randy VEEERRRRYYYY carefully bent them out again, giving them some "arch". Again we reassembled the camera. You could cut the tension with a knife. Oh, who am I kidding? There wasn't any tension whatsoever. Nobody was even paying any attention to us. Plus, by this time we'd had a couple of those rum punches, and we were pretty much beyond caring anyway.

But the damn thing worked! I was ECSTATIC. I was strutting around the living room high-fiving everybody. Randy was less impressed than I was: "No sweat. Piece o' cake!" I guess, realistically, that I should have expected that out of Louie Schukar's son. Nothing can get so broken that you can't fix it with a decent field repair, right Randy?

Day 5: Diving in the Rain

'Twas a rainy day, mateys. And I learned something new: when fresh water drains into the ocean, it causes something akin to fog to appear. Visability was CRAP!!! If you look at this picture and the one right after it you'll see what I mean. That white, milky looking stuff is the fresh water draining from land into the ocean. It really does look just like fog rolling down the reef.

This was our last day of diving, and I hated the idea of those two "fog" dives being my last dives of the trip. I wanted to do another dive. In the afternoon the weather cleared, so it looked promising. I managed to talk Jim into going out with me for a final dive. Which leads me to...

Day 5: Humorous Misadventure, or Complete Waste of Time?

Jim and I had agreed to go out for one final dive. Only we jacked around too long having lunch and hanging out in the room, so we were REALLY late getting our act together. And then I took a wrong turn heading down to the dive site. And the first dive site we aimed for turned out to not be a dive site anymore, because it was now a CONSTRUCTION SITE!

So by the time we got to the water it was nearly dusk. By the time we got out to the reef there was hardly any light left. And like COMPLETE MORONS we had not bothered to bring our dive lights along! So after about 15 minutes, we were out of light and had to give up on the dive.

When we got back to the resort, everybody asked us how the dive was. I thought about it for a second, then answered: "It was 90 percent complete waste of time, and 10 percent humorous misadventure."

At least I came up with a way to get Karen to laugh out loud....