Surprisingly, it was a very smooth class. I went into it expecting the worst and have been pleasantly surprised by my students’ effort and water skills. The Governor in particular seems very comfortable in the water and had no troubles with any of the training. This past week we had their certification dives. This is when the students get to go on real dives and show me that they have actually learned something from our classroom and pool training. So the first day I decided to do their certification dives in a place near and dear to my heart Faga’alu Bay. This is where me and my friends, and in fact most people I have trained to dive on island, go on a regular basis. It is basically centrally located, has easy shore access (even for night dives), usually has decent visibility, has interesting (albeit dying) reefs, and most importantly we go in at a public elementary school so we can go there on weekends and without having to ask for permission. Did I mention you often have to alert other divers that trash (such as used disposable diapers, etc.) is floating their way? Well, for all these reasons I took the Governor there for his first cert. dives making sure to point out that the school simply throws their trash over the hill behind the school (where it makes its way into the water) rather than proper disposal. They did okay on their skills and as usual Jay (my indentured divemaster) was a huge help, all the more impressive since he was distressingly sick and should not have been in the water, much less diving. For the next set of dives (dives 3 & 4) we got onto the National Park boat, along with Jay and Markus on hand to help with the training, and headed up into the National Park to an area called Tafeu Cove. This area is a protected bay that has really nice coral cover and lots of (small) fish. Again, my students did well enough despite poor visibility from all the rain.
The only really significant part to these dives was that we had a police escort. Now this police escort is not just the marine patrol boat we had along with us (which we did), but in fact one of the marine patrol officers (George) came on our dive with us to watch. Funny for so many reasons, mostly because I had trained George to dive about 3 months earlier. That is not the significant part though. At about 60 feet down I found a HUGE giant clam (a local delicacy) and pointed it out to everyone. George then grabs this clam so he can bring it up and eat it. Never mind you are diving with a park ranger in the National Park. Never mind you are a police officer and it is illegal to fish/ harvest anything with SCUBA, never mind you are diving with the leader of your country. Nope, just mmmmm… tasty. Funny. I gave a good underwater scolding. George is a great guy, but come on.
So after having completed 2 weeks of dive training with the Governor, culminating is his being certified as a “new diver”, Jay and myself got invited to go to the Governor’s mansion for dinner. Not often you get to go to a head-of-state’s private residence. So I asked if we could bring spouses, and since Markus dove with us for the second day of dives I asked if he and Liz could come as well. I found myself actually discussing what I was going to wear with Jay... “So what do you wear to the Governor’s house?” (mind you- He asked me). What did I have to say? Ah, the quintessential flip-flop. Yes it is okay to wear flip-flops and a t-shirt just about anywhere. I say “Ha” to all of you who said I would have to dress like “an adult” once I got a real job.... “Ha.” Anyway, Mel will tell you all about our evening at the Governor’s in a later blog. All I will say is that he is now a certified diver and a really smart and really likable guy. I had a lot of fun training him and look forward to more dives.
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