The nines

I feel bad for you. You see, last night, Kim, Scott, Mario and I logged a wicked dive on the Aloha and Effie Mae. And you missed it. This was a foolish decision, as I intend to demonstrate to you.

When you drop the 55 ft line to the 1888 wooden schooner, you feel like it says "hello" to you. And when you leave, it says "goodbye". That's because "Aloha" has come to mean both "hello" and "goodbye" in the Hawaiian language. [It also means affection, peace, love, compassion, mercy, or salad-spinner. Don't believe me? Check it out.] When you think of Hawaii, you probably think of how warm it is? Well, these waters were warm, too. You had better sit down before I tell you this, but Mario went with no hood, and no gloves! The water was twenty-one degrees! That means that if you were playing blackjack against the water, you wouldn't even have to look at your cards. You would have been served a brutal smackdown in temperateness.

I want to put this in terms you understand. Here is a graph of how much fun we both had last night.

Now if I had seen only the Aloha last night, little cherubs could whisk me off to a blissful afterlife, as I would be satisfied. But this dive was not over, oh no! It also featured a trip to Kingston's first live aboard dive charter, a steel trawler built in 1967 and scuttled in 1993. You say "Effie Mae"? I say "F'-ing eh!" It's a piece of Kingston diving history! I can't believe you missed it.

Do you know how small a fish's brain is? So small you cannot detect it under a microscope with the lights out. And still, hordes of smallmouth and rock bass seemed to find their way to these wrecks. Those gobies are so stupid, I don't think they could swim out of a paper bag with an extra two holes cut in the bottom. Plenty of them made it. What is your excuse?

Perhaps you stayed home to watch the premiere of So You Think You Can Dance? Obviously I did not waste my time on such trivialities, but I can let you know how it turns out: A bunch of people dance poorly, and then they get voted off and then some people who dance less poorly get voted off later! You missed diving the greatest dive of all time for this? You poor little shmoe.

I can imagine that in your shame you might try and think up some possible advantage to be gained from missing this night's awesomeness: "I can go on an airplane flight now", you might report, "and you divers are grounded for another twelve hours". First, let me make clear that this dive achieved such legendary status that if none of us could ever fly again, it would be worth it. Second, imagine you were to fly around the world to such wonders as the Pyramid of Cheops at Giza, the Roman Colosseum, or China's Great Wall. How many freshwater drum do you think you would see? I have prepared the answer in another chart for you.

Now it may be overwhelming to you to learn how badly you messed up by not coming diving last night, but I suspect you may need to hit "rock bottom" before you can truly begin to recover. So I hate to do this to you, but you need to know:

Kim brought donuts. Not Tim Horton's or even Krispy Kreme, but home made donuts.

As we returned to Northern Tech Diver, the sun set over the Kingston skyline. With the dive complete, there was no need for it to stay in the sky.

After missing an awesome dive of such magnitude, I can understand if you would be tempted to never show your face again. But if, even knowing that you have missed the best dive that there ever has been and ever could possibly be, you should decide to return to the water, Anne-with-an-E assures me that there are still available spaces with Kingston Dive Charters.

I'm sorry the truth had to hurt you so much.