The other day my day started not so good, and it should be sufficient to say that I found it a tad hard to be welcoming and smiling to all the customers on the boat. Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately) I had students that day, which gave me lots of good opportunities to yell at them and roll my eyes for no good reason. On our first dive for the day the students needed to do a compass swim. As I have earlier had students’ watches interfere with compasses and a few students on their way to PNG, I decided to make my students take their watches off and leave them on the boat. Which of course sounds like the most reasonable decision. However, things were a bit hectic on the back deck, since the sea was a bit rough and we had our fair share of seasick customers laying around and I should have been in the water 20 minutes ago. So, the watches were put in brown paper bag and left at the tea-and-coffee-table, and off we went into the big blue yonder.
Came back after a successful dive and compass swim, no students halfway to PNG and the number down equaled the number up, so all happy. Well up on the boat again, my student asks for his watch back, since it was a rather expensive watch and he was a bit nervous about it just laying about. I went over to the tea-and-coffee-table, and could not find the bag. Went inside the cabin area to see whether maybe some of the other crew had moved it inside for safe keeping, but not find it there either. Went outside again and asked the deck supervisor whether she had seen the bag, which she told me that she hadn’t. Asked the rest of the crew, now with a slight panic rising inside me, and the rest of the crew denied any knowledge of brown paper bag on the tea-and-coffee-table. It needs now to be mentioned that the brown paper bags are also used as sick bags, and in a terrifying moment where I swear that time stood still, I realised that someone had accidentally thrown the bag with the watches overboard in the belief that someone had been sick in it.
Asako, a Japanese instructor paddled over and readied her dive gear and jumped in, while I had to fob the students off with someone having moved the watched to a safe place and that someone was still in the water and therefore we would have to wait until that someone came back from their dive before they could get their watches back. The guy who initially asked for them back did not look to happy about it, but fortunately his friend laughed at his moody expression and told him that we were on a boat, and where could they have gone?? I guess there is no need to tell that I was praying like a madwoman that Asako would find the watches down in the great blue yonder.
Five very slow minutes crawled by while I did my best of stretching out the briefing for our next dive, and to hide the terror in my voice. Then, there were some small stirring on the back of the boat, and there is Asako, dripping wet in full dive gear, holding two watches in her hand. Brazenly I walked over, collected the watches and gave them to my students like this was the most natural thing. They both looked a bit bewildered, and one of them muttered where she came from and why she had their watches. I gave them a big smile, and jokingly told them that funny enough, someone seemed to have thrown their watches overboard. At first they looked at me in stunned silence, then decided that it had to have been a joke, and fell over laughing of how hilarious I were. Phew for that, although I did spot one of them looking thoughtfully at the water next to the tea-and-coffee-table a while later.
My day seemed to brighten a bit after that tho…
