Encylopedia Brown & the case of the Missing First Aid Kit

“El maldito equipo! $@*#$#$!” When I surfaced alone from my last dive in Las Marietas in the Bay of Banderas, Puerto Vallarta, I got an invaluable opportunity to employ the latest additions to my knowledge of Mexican slang. I didn’t see our dive boat, and my band aid-bloody left hand stung from a brush with a rock that in geological circles must no doubt be called ginsu-ite.

Preventing me from soiling my pantalones, there were other boats I could see away off, and the visibility was so good I could see clearly all the other five divers on our expedition, fifty feet below. “Hmm…guess it didn’t turn out to be a bad thing that there are no sharks around here.”

I had known that my dive would terminate early; I noticed early in my descent that my pressure gauge was farting big bubbles, and no amount of fidgeting would stop it. The dive profile was fairly shallow (45-50 feet), and I doubted that my “amigos” from Chico’s Dive Shop had brought an extra-BCD, as the shrugging dive leader N. gave no indication to surface after showing him the issue.

As problemas like to do, and why textbook wisdom or just plain wisdom is to abort after the first sign of trouble, they multiply. The first seven minutes of the dive I spent making an equalization seesaw, distracted by having to obsessively check the rate of air consumption (and to add to my state of inexperienced disorientation, there was a current until the point we reached a thermocline).

The highlight of my truncated last dive was being able to check off my first undersea sighting of another species of the aquatic menagerie. N. had caught a black octopus the size of two fists, spewing tendrils of black ink and none too-pleased to be temporarily captive.

I had conflicted feelings about N. handling the critter, since I had only seen octopi hiding in crevices before, not that clearly. (In the first dive of the day, my dive buddy G. from Aguas Calientes had intentionally brushed against a pufferfish’s tail unsuccessfully trying to get it to inflate, leaving me wondering if the spines are venomous.) Personally, unless I’m going to eat the said sea creature, my instinct is to be hands-off, both practically because of my ignorance of for which species handling would be a painful mistake and a gut discomfort with it. In the PADI training manuals I’ve read this is put as an ethical precept (or in cases of nature reserves, legal precept) to preserve and protect sea life, but this made me wonder how much this reverence is grounded in the otherworldliness of the undersea versus instances where this has a rational basis in the period of time needed for a specific organic structure like coral to regenerate. If N. had instead captured a terrestrial invertebrate creature, perhaps a scorpion, and similarly treated it like a toy, would I have passed a moment’s thought on it (though given the likelihood that an octopus has greater levels of sentience this is an inexact parallel)?

After a few minutes bobbing, I. on the dive boat finally noticed me and motored over. I passed up my weights, then my BCD. Doing dips was good for something, and I hoisted myself up over the hull instead of taking the ladder so I could keep my fins on, and asked I. if he had a band aid or something for my bleeding hand. No. But he did have plenty of beer to offer. Priorities, priorities.

I picked the wrong company to dive with, overly taken by the slick presentation; being in business since 1968 hadn’t taught them to have a first aid kit available on every boat. At that point I didn’t even want to find out if I had been so stupid as to have gone diving with a company that didn’t bother to have a tank of emergency oxygen onboard. Not to say I was unhappy that I went or that aside from having to abort my second dive any part was unpleasant (in my first dive that I day I saw for the first time a giant Manta Ray gliding by and went through for the first time an underwater rock arch). But imaging how things could have gone worse brought home an essential aphorism: “diver beware.”