Day 47

There is a single road that runs the entire length of the island and that is the only way to get from one end to the other (short of having your own boat and sailing around). The shop is about half an hour away from the intern house and this morning we made it about ten minutes before being stopped to find out the road is blocked for the triathlon. So there is no way to get to work today, which is just fine by all of us because another storm is rolling in.

So Valentine’s Day was absolutely amazing. We were told by Edwen, days in advance, that we had a top secret mission to work on at White Hole. White Hole is one of the major dive sites that we usually end up visiting at least once a day and consists of a 50′ sand patch next to the wall which drops to 130′. It took a while to find out what exactly this “secret mission” involved, but we finally were informed that Ed, the guy who is running Subway now, was going to propose to Kim, the shop manager, and our job was to gather up rocks and dead coral and such to create a giant heart at the bottom of White Hole and spell out Mary Me Kim? I think it took a total of three dives to complete it all, and all the while, Kim had no idea.

We spent the morning doing this, well actually I was guiding customers around (my first dive lead!) while the other interns worked on the secret mission. More about my dive lead later. That is a different story. After lunch, we all decided to celebrate Valentine’s day by going for a dive. Ed had taken an underwater slate and written a message to Kim to meet him at White Hole for her present, and so Kim, who hadn’t been diving in a year, borrowed gear from the shop and came out with us. We took out the Esperanza, our nicest boat, and quickly descended so that we would have time to clear the area before Kim showed up. Lurking in the distance, all of the other interns and divemasters and I watched as Ed knelt down next to the heart and waited.

It was a fair amount of time before Kim finally appeared, and the rest you can probably imagine better than I could describe. Kim and Ed celebrated on the Esperanza and the rest of us swam off to another boat that was waiting to pick us up.