A Hero's Wounds

Song of the day: You're Gonna Go Far Kid - The Offspring (Rise and Fall, Rage and Grace)

The day started in a very usual manner. Woke up, had my chicken roti and tea Madras (I've stopped going to the place I had banana roti and ice Milo, they never smile at you and it was getting to my nerves), then went to help loading the tanks on the boats. Damn, those things really are heavy, and there's lots of them.


Anyways, once in the dive shop, there was a bit of a chaos in the management. After being told I was going to three different islands performing two different jobs, I ended up being sent to Mataking one more time. What's the news, then?

Well, I was the Supreme Authority on the boat.

Thou shall bow before me!

No instructor came on the boat: it was just me leading, and Sara, with less experience than me, under my command. Hence I did all the briefings (and the customers loved me!), though for the first dive we went in two separate groups, that eventually came together in the water. The first thing I saw upon descent were two lionfish under a coral shelf:

Never touch one of these: their venom could kill you in minute

 

 

Yup, that's a fish. A crocodile fish. Ain't it cool? 

Yeah, I saw several of those crocodile fish, also known as flatheads. They blend in with the rubble in the bottom, but a well trained eye can easily spot them.

Unfortunately I am still not fully recovered from the cold and I couldn't equalize my sinuses (little spaces of air behind your eyebrows) when coming back up. Equalizing means adding or removing air from air spaces in your body to match the external pressure - PV = nRT, for those physicists out there. So it hurts like a motherfocker, because there's no way to remove air intentionally - normally it just happens naturally, but with every airway blocked it's much harder. After a while at the surface the pain decreased as the air would slowly find its way out. However, I wasn't feeling very well by then, so I decided to skip the second dive, and I took a pill to be able to go on the third dive.

But then, Fate happened.

Mataking Island.

We had left a couple of Chinese non-divers on the beach you can see in the distance on the above photograph, but by the time we came to pick them up the tide was too low and the boat could to get to the beach, because the water was too shallow where there were corals. Not a real problem, you barely have to swim four or five metres to reach average standing level.

But the lady couldn't swim.


Obviously I couldn't let her alone, so I jumped off the boat to give her a life vest, with the bad fortune of miscalculating the depth (these clear waters are tricky) and hitting a coral with my right foot. It only hurt a little and for a moment, and I didn't find any wound, so that was fine. I swam towards the sand and gave her the vest with a comforting smile on my face.

But then, as I was swimming and dragging her to the boat, I kicked a coral I couldn't see - that one did hurt. I've awfully scratched the area where my toes join my foot. And later on, I found a cut and another scratch on the other foot, from the jump.

Apart from huge pain, what worries me about these wounds is the risk of infection in this filthy town. Of course I've washed them and bandaged them, and I am now wearing socks and shoes. And I can't go diving for a couple of days, until they are reasonable healed.

But I got these wounds from being a hero. Or something like that. What if there had been a tiger trying to reach the lady? Then I'd have saved her from certain death. So there. I'm a hero.


The bards will sing my tales.