A Safe Bet

~ Kana Smith

Writing yesterday about the canoe trip my dad and I took together got me thinking about the other road-trip he and I took, five years later…

The first thing I signed up for, when I hit college, was a course to get certified as a Scuba diver, because I planned to study Marine Biology. I was attending school in the land-locked state of Idaho (because it was a state school and I had a full scholarship), so the plan was a B.S. in zoology from UI, with a Marine Bio minor picked up during summers at University of Hawai’i. First order of business: Scuba diving!

I was still a kid at the start of that semester. Literally—I had to raise my hand and ask, on the first day of class, if I could sign my own liability waiver (being a minor) or if I needed a parent’s signature. (Mortifying moment!) I was also the only girl in the class.

The training sessions took place in the university pool, but the open-water certification dives, just after the semester ended, would take place on Whidbey Island in Puget Sound, a frigid body of water near Seattle, six hours away from home. As it turned out, it would be two days before Christmas, in Puget Sound, in a snowstorm—which almost never happens there. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Certification requires five dives, spread over two days. And I didn’t quite know what to do with myself, with regard to the overnight between. The guys in class were bunking up and making it sound like a party, none of which sounded appealing—even if I were included in the plan, which I wasn’t sure I was. My dad was my regular sounding-board for stuff in those days, so I laid out all my nerves (about the dives) and discomfort (about the other divers)—and he responded by asking tentatively if maybe I’d like him to come along. YES! Yes please!

So he did all the grownup things (fueling up the Blazer and making a hotel reservation) and I packed up my ill-fitting university-issue wetsuit, and as soon as my final exams were done, we hit the road. I actually don’t remember a lot from that trip, but the memories I do have are vivid flashes like photos or video-clips.

Eating Ivar’s clam chowder in the dark, waiting for the ferry to Whidbey Island…

A Denver omelette that I could barely swallow in the morning, for nerves… (Food apparently makes an impression on me—even when I don’t eat it.)

The rush of cold seawater into my wetsuit as I waded in to my waist, waiting for everyone to get their shit together and get in the water, and watching snowflakes fall, through my dive mask…

Sitting in the front seat between dives, with the heater blasting and my teeth chattering…

Being told there was a betting pool about how many dives I would get through before I quit… (I’m too stubborn for that. One of the guys quit, after Dive Two.)

The rush of freezing water to my eyes and nose, and the slightly panicky feeling it induced, when I demonstrated that I could take my mask off and put it back on underwater…

And sitting in the back of the Blazer after the final dive, still in my wetsuit, with Dad hightailing it to our hotel so I could jump into the hotel hot tub and peel off my wetsuit in warm water.

Dad wasn’t sure, when he suggested it, if I would want to be seen with a parent. (He knew I’d felt humiliated when I had to take my waiver home for a grownup signature.) But I had quite the most comfortable experience of anyone in the class.

And I’m thinking now that I should have gotten in on that betting pool—I could have bet against myself quitting. I wonder if anyone did.

13 thoughts on “A Safe Bet”

  2. Kana,

    My dive experience was in the warm waters of the Gulf of ‘America’ and the Caribbean. I had been rated as a demolition ‘expert’ by the US Army during my training as a combat engineer. Destroying things was always fun!

    When I got kicked out of Vietnam at the end of my second tour I got sent to Fort Snelling Minnesota for reassignment as a Reserve Advisor. Since we really didn’t have any significant duties in that role (except to verity payrolls for the reservists) the Army used us to fill quotas, school seats that they couldn’t fill.

    I got a call from the Pentagon “Captain Taylor can you swim?”, “Yep” good we’re sending orders for you to report to Key West, FLA – Underwater Demolition Training! I was still drawing demolition pay (did so until I was a Captain for two years). The Navy was incorporating the old UDT School into the SEALs BUDs course and they had one last class scheduled and they couldn’t fill it!

    I flew into the NAS there and started a three- and one-half-week course. Since we were supposed to be Demo trained the emphasis was on military diving. The two- and three-mile swims morning and night were exhausting but the night life was great for a Bachelor!

    The final ‘exam’ after dive certification was a night infiltration into a small island off of Jamica called NAVSTA Island, an old navigation island owned by the US. We went in by submarine and exited from underwater – not like the guys can do it today but through the torpedo tube. We crawled in with all of our gear in a waterproof bag and when they flooded the tube, we scooted out one man at a time. When everyone was out, we surfaced and swam to the island which was about three miles away. That night we set our explosives on the targets that they had establishes for us and hid out on that barren rock for the day. That night we got back in the water and swam towards where the sub was waiting for us. About three miles out we set off our charges.

    The sub was at periscope depth, 54′ IIRC. They would run the periscope around every 5-10 min so we could keep our bearing on the target. When we found the sub we had to dive down and enter through the torpedo tubes.

    As the ‘officer’ I had to be the last man in (Army tradition). My problem was scooting into the tube and then pulling the equipment bag in with me. I couldn’t get the bag in all the way! Every time that I thought I was in they would try to close the outer doors, and we would get the ‘blocked tube’ warning. I was on my third attempt, and I started to panic – am I running out of air in mu tank!!!

    Fortunately, the third attempt worked. They drained the tube, and two seamen jerked me out back into the sub. I swore that I never wanted to do that again!

    All of that and I never used that training. My NAVY certification wasn’t qualification to dive as far as the civilian community was concerned and I never made another dive after that one, A short time later I lost my demolition certification – Officers don’t blow things up – and I was ordered back to Vietnam for my third and final combat tour.

    I enjoyed diving but I wasn’t in a position to do it again. I did some snorkeling when I was at Guantanamo Bay back in 1991-92, but that’s been it ever since.

    Regards

    “Hardcharger”

    http://www.ptaylorvietnamadvisor.com

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    1. When it comes to coral reefs, a lot of the “good stuff” is in shallow water, easily viewed by snorkelers—and snorkeling is something you can continue to do at any age, if you ever decide you want to get back into it and don’t feel like full-on diving No more blowing stuff up, though. ;)

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  3. Interesting memories. I got some sort of scuba diving certificate when we visited the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. We were scuba diving for five days and a certificate was required, so we took a scuba diving class the first day. I do not know if that certificate is valid elsewhere. Well I have a feeling the water was a little bit warmer for us than for you.

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