There is a tradition in the diving community to celebrate dive number one hundred by diving naked. My hundredth dive was my instructor exam, so it was quite out of the question to let it all hang out… Since I didn’t do my hundredth dive naked, the idea was to do it for number two hundred instead, and that dive was this afternoon. I had two divers with me, Justin was doing his fourth and final Open Water dive for his course, and his friend Bryce joined us for a fun dive. When we arrived at the dive site this afternoon, and I saw that there were no other boats at the site, I asked the boys what their thoughts on nudity were, and whether they were easily offended… 😛 Being quite liberal and easy-going guys, they thought it sounded like good, clean fun. We started the dive with Justin doing his final skill practice. When we headed out for a tour of the dive site, I took off my board shorts, and spent the next 45 minutes diving in my birthday suit. At the safety stop at the end of the dive I put my shorts back on, and we ascended to the surface as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. 😛 Although it was a bit strange to dive naked with two other people who were not, it was an altogether liberating feeling, and an experience I wouldn’t mind repeating in a somewhat more private setting.
The coconut tree that grows up through the dive deck where we de-kit and rinse our equipment has been heavily laden with coconuts lately, and a few days ago one fell down as we, the Sunlight staff, were sitting around having a cold after-work brew, and crushed Mike’s can that sat right next to him… It became abundantly clear that the heavy nuts needed to be taken down before someone gut hurt or killed, and today we finally managed to convince Nick, one of the staff at Moonlight, to brave the tall trunk and the stinging ants that live in the top of the palm tree. Legend that he is, Nick spent the better part of an hour perched in the tree top with a cleaver, cutting down the bunches of coconuts and lowering them down with a rope. I’ve drunk my fill, and eaten so much coconut that it feels like it’s going to come out my ears, and that was just from one nut! We’ve probably got over fifty liters of coconut juice, and several kilos of delicious coconut flesh, so Nick, ever the businessman, has put up a cardboard sign on the huge pile of nuts on the deck:
COCONUT RM 5!