"Happy Birthday" or "The Ask"

 

“Luke has a question to ask you,” his mother prodded as the scenery whizzed by heading north from San Diego’s downtown international airport to their home in Scripps Ranch.  I was in town to see my brother and his family on the way to a weekend of diving at Catalina Island in April 2014.

“O.K.” I responded looking at my soon to turn 12-year-old nephew riding in the back seat of the SUV with his grandmother.  “Go ahead and ask!”

“I want to learn to scuba dive,” he asked shyly.  I am not sure why he didn’t ask directly.  I guess I can be a bit intimidating to people, especially youngsters. 

“O.K.,” I responded and added, “you have a birthday coming up pretty soon and I will be happy to pay for the lessons and the personal equipment you need.  Of course, we have to find a dive shop in the area that will teach someone your age.  Some places may want you to be a little older.  Let me call around while I am in town and see what’s up.”

He seemed very pleased at the prospect.

Looking back on that moment a decade later, I am very happy that Luke asked the question.  He blossomed into a competent, enthusiastic diver and one of the best buddies a diving uncle could hope for, especially when he totes my gear.  Of the dozens of people I have dived with in the 1,000+ dives over 40 years, only Brandon Cole has more dives with me. 

 We experienced a two-year pause between the “ask” and the “do.”  I guess school, water polo, and other things kept pushing the “do” further down the list of immediacies.  Then, in the spring of 2016, he messaged me, “I am taking lessons this summer in July,”  I rearranged my travel schedule to lay over a few days in San Diego on the return trip from diving in the Cayman Islands.  The stars were aligning for Luke and me to make his first dives together.

A dive-shop-induced glitch in his training schedule nearly torpedoed that plan.  Quick action, a lot of cajoling, and intervention by the shop’s chief instructor got Luke’s open water dives back on schedule. 

Luke and I made his first post-open water certification dive off the dive boat Lois Ann in the Goblin Forest near Point Loma—an area of very thick kelp beds.  Luke learned the basics of boat diving that day.  He followed and led during our two dives.  He also acquired the skill of surface crawling through the elastic spaghetti of a kelp bed without getting entangled.   We followed that dive with lunch at Hodad’s in Ocean Beach. 

Our second boat a few days later was canceled due to insufficient passengers.  But, it all worked out. Luke played his first high school varsity water polo game that day.

Over the next eight years we completed 67 more dives together.  Our shared experiences include diving with mantas and whale sharks during our first trip to the Kona coast of Hawaii, spearfishing for invasive Roi on Maui, watching dolphins stoned on puffer fish venom behaving badly on a second trip to Kona, getting skunked trying to find Giant Sea Bass at Catalina, and wreck diving while helping eradicate lionfish on the coral reefs on two trips to Roatan, Honduras.  Topside, we hiked up a volcano that violently erupted a few weeks later, took in a lot of Hawaiian culture, watched every dive movie in my collection, and enjoyed the Caribbean tropics of Roatan.  I had a lot of fun and learned a lot along the way.  I recently transcribed my dive journals of our adventures—the text runs more than 80 pages.

I think the best insight I felt I provided to Luke scientific diving maxim, “any diver can stop any dive for any reason at any time.” To that  I added Lima’s Corollary,   “if you do call a dive and your dive buddy complains, it is time to find a new buddy.”  The extent to which he took that to heart was demonstrated on a recent dive in Roatan.  Back on the boat after our first dive, I noticed I have muffled hearing in my right ear.  I talked to Luke about the potential reverse block and that I will not make the next dive.  I started to offer Luke the opportunity to join up with other divers.  Before I can complete the sentence, he says “don’t even think about suggesting it, the buddy team stays together.  You would do the same for me.”  I silently give thanks for Luke's keeping the buddy pair intact.  Such above-and-beyond loyalty is rare.

I do believe that if not for a two year hiatus in our diving because of Covid 19 restrictions, we might have reached 100 dives!  A couple of the planned-but-never-started excursions include a dive trip up the California coast to show him locations that I dived, like my “happy places” such as the Anacapa Island landing cove and “Jim’s Reef” at Refugio State Beach.  I had also sketched a road trip down the Florida Keys to replicate one that Luke’s dad and I had done in 1996.  I guess lyrics from an old ABBA song sums up these “what might have beens”

What happened to the wonderful adventures
The places I had planned for us to go?
Well, some of that we did, but most we didn't
And why, I just don't know