regroup with your students. Now you can finish the dive. And then you end the dive guiding the students back to the boat knowing full well that you left them all unattended at one time or another. You ponder this while lugging back the eighteen pound weight belt.
Veronica H.
VIDSS dive operation was a revolving door. The turnover rate for instructors was high due to the amount of work you had to do and the volume of ugly and bazaar tourists you had to deal with. The average instructor lasted about two and a half to six months. VIDSS was the epitome of a cattle dive shop. It was just plain crazy.
I hadn’t been on the island very long when two other divers joined the ranks of VIDSS. Erin, who was a divemaster, came from California too. She was young, maybe twenty one or twenty two, and full of spunk. As a divemaster for VIDSS she couldn’t teach, so she acted as an Assistant Instructor until the dive shop could send her to an instructor course over in St. John when one opened up. Erin fit right in with the rest of us. She had that typical instructor slash divemaster personality; Adventurous and fun.
About a week after Erin arrived Dan, Erin and I were kicking back in the Tutu slum when we heard the growl of a safari bus. It was Marty the Jew with the other new instructor. Then the dumb son of a bitch starts honking his horn like we didn’t hear his ratty engine coming down the driveway. I opened the front door and a petite girl with short brown hair jumps out of the safari bus and grabs her dive gear from one of the empty rows of benches in the back. Marty gave a wave and backed out of the driveway blowing gray blue smoke from his dog turd out of the car window.
“Come on in,” Dan said.
She is really cute.
“I’m Dan and this is Erin and Eric.”
“Hi, I’m Veronica H.” She said shaking our hands.
“How do you like the place?” Erin said gesturing with her hand.
Veronica H. just stood there for a moment slowly looking around and then she said with a half smile, “This place is a real shit hole.”
“I said the same thing.” I made eye contact with her. She was really cute.
“Wait until you hear the goddamn goats up on top of the roof during the middle of the night,” Dan said, looking up.
“Goats?” Veronica asked.
“No, it’s not goats,” I said. “It’s the Chupacabra.” Veronica looked at me with a puzzled look for just a few seconds then started to laugh. That’s when I noticed her tongue ring. I almost melted. I needed a beer to compose myself. Veronica H. was hired to teach diving on one of the Princess cruise ships. VIDSS was the dive operation that supplied dive instructors for a fleet of ocean liners along with the Raddison Diamond.
Veronica H. settled in as best as she could in that rat nest. Later, we all went out for a few beers at a little bar down on the corner. We got shit faced. It all turned into a blur. I know the local lady behind the bar was getting annoyed with us because she stopped serving us rum and beer. I think she should have cut us off a little sooner because when we got back to the Tutu slum, I found myself trying to get into Veronica’s shorts.
“Behave, Eric,” she said. “You can sleep next to me but that’s as far as you get.”
I tried to say I was sorry, to apologize for my drunken actions, but found the only thing that came out of my mouth was a defining belch.. It sounded worse than those
godforsaken goats. Dan and Erin, who were bunking in the bedroom on two single
beds, just busted out in a fit of laughter. Veronica H. joined in.
Not long after that night, Veronica and I did hook up. Funny how things happen. Christ, I was ready to play the field, have a different girlfriend every week like you are suppose to when you are a dive instructor in the islands. But no. I had to shack up with a female instructor several months after I arrived on St. Thomas. However, little did I know that I still would play that instructor role down the road.
Fire Coral and a Firefighter
I was on the pick up crew one morning. There were about four or five cruise ships that sneaked into port in the early morning Caribbean darkness. We had to pick up tourists from three of them. It was about 6:30 AM and I felt like a zombie; too much of the good life. I jumped into the cab of a safari bus who’s driver went by the name of Hook. He was an old West Indian dude with yellow eyes and a nasty temper. Hook took pride in his bus. With a fresh coat of paint and new seats it was the cleanest bus on the island and he made sure it stayed that way.
We drove a short distance to the Havensight dock where three of the towering monsters were tied off. I was picking up passengers from from one of the Carnival ships called The Festival, and let me tell you, this was the filthiest goddamn cruise ship to sail the seven seas. It was old and ratty. Beverly and I walked up the gang plank, showed our ID’s to the cruise stewards, then went to the grungy on board movie theater. This was the pick up point for the resort course and the snorkelers. We had all the people fill out the necessary paper work, health questionnaire and waiver.
This one lady with curly, greasy black hair was not happy with the legal content of the paper work. “Excuse me,” She said. “This waiver is not very specific. It’s too generic.”
“Well, that’s our company waiver that we have everyone sign explaining the risks of diving.” I told her. She gave me bad vibes. She liked confrontation and I could tell she was going to be trouble. Then what she said next explained everything.
“I’m a lawyer and I can tell you that this waiver is garbage. I’ll just scribble out this part here and add what should be pertinent here, before I sign it,” she said, while showing me the form and pointing at it with a pen.
I looked at her for a moment, then smiled. “I’m the scuba instructor, and I can tell you that if you alter the form in any way or refuse to sign it you don’t go diving.” The dude sitting next to her, no doubt her loving husband gave her a disappointing look. She signed it as is.
We loaded everyone on the buses and then headed to Coki beach on the other side of the island. A big, muscular guy in a white tank top that said “NYFD” was on my bus and I heard him spouting off about how he was a firefighter from New York and that this scuba would be a piece of cake, even though he had never tried it.
“I climb ladders with sixty pounds of gear on, into burning building wearing a Scott Air Pack. How hard can it be?” I heard him say more than once. It’s always the macho idiots you have to watch out for; The know-it-alls, the braggers.
On the way to the beach is when we’d give the lecture on beginning diving with the aid of a large, bulky flip chart. This was a pain in the ass. We instructors had to complete the lecture before reaching the beach. I never had a problem getting it done but it still sucked because you had to yell the whole time over the engine and other traffic. The attention of the passengers faded in and out. In some respects I couldn’t blame them for getting distracted. There was a lot of cool sights to see on the way to Coki Beach. But at the same time, these door knobs signed up for scuba diving not a damn island tour!
For the most part they did pay attention to the lecture; However, there were always a few ugly tourists that blatantly could have cared less about what I was yelling about. These individuals may have taken the course on their last cruise and felt they knew it all. Then there were the macho shit heads whos arrogance and pride said that they were better than you, like my good friend the firefighter from New York City.
It was beautiful morning in the USVI. The warm wind was blowing, white cotton candy clouds moved through the blue sky and the smell of thick greenery steamed off the trees and plants from a brief sun shower. Over-sized iguanas resting on top of large rocks and tree trunks were effortlessly eating bright red hibiscus flowers. The picturesque heaping piles of trash scattered along the roadside from the locals that had gotten rid of their garbage, all made it another gorgeous day in “The American Paradise.”
I was