Ten Days in the Caribbean

Today is the first day of our cruise. We left Fort around 4:00am. Connie had slept the night (till 3:00am anyway), I spent the dark hours sorting out my dive gear and packing. Unfortunately, my nice mesh dive bag was still out at the hangar, which was inaccessible due to the 14+ inches of snow we had gotten earlier Friday. It took until the afternoon to dig out far enough to escape the house; there just was no time to dig out to the hangar. Fortunately, most of the rest of my gear was in the back of the truck. On top of that, Connie bought me an Oceanic Datamask for Christmas. It is a dive mask with a built in heads-up display for its depth gauge, air (tank) gauge, and dive computer! Buoy! Does it save on set up time!

Madison airport has made great strides in improving their operations. We got to skip the “usual” search for the one everyone else endures. Nevertheless, the local TSA did hiccup at the underwater camera, but just passed it through the machine a second time.

We changed planes in Detroit, where we were delayed for an hour, not by the weather, but by an impatient ground crewman (and it was a guy) who damaged the seal on the wing tank trying to refuel. I actually watched the guy first fumble, then angrily ram the nozzle up into the wing and get cooled down with a shower of fuel. Not that he should have been hot in the sub-zero weather outside. They had just closed the doors on the plane. The pilot’s voice on the intercom had the distinct tone of, “you’re not going to believe me for a minute when I say this, but it IS the truth,” when he said, “Ladies and Gentlemen, we have just closed the doors on the plane, but we have a delay due to a bad fuel gasket and we’ll be delayed about an hour while it is replaced.” I felt sorry for him.

The flight down was uneventful and relaxing. We had an extra seat between us. Room to stretch. (Connie: Even though Rob had a window seat, he slept most of the way.) Once in Florida, we transferred to the boat and then rushed around filing forms and confirming reservations. THEN we had a safety drill and all tried on our life jackets. Rob noted that it wasn’t a very realistic drill because there was no screaming, trampling, or panic. The officers didn’t even dress up as women to get a seat in the lifeboat. We though at least Leonardo DiCaprio would be there. No luck.

When we got back to the room we had most of our bags. Rob discovered that not only had TSA searched his diving gear (tearing a compartment in the suitcase) but his wetsuit had been drenched in jet fuel. I wonder where his bag was in Detroit? The last two bags showed up that night. Don’t want to rush things, do we?

After three or four trips through the washing machine, we were able to tolerate the suit in the same room as us.

At that point we collapsed. The boat was well on its way to Princess Cays.