Hello all,
I had a bit of a lull in the writing. Something to do with work, dentists and missing front teeth, but that will have to wait for another story on a completely different topic on some other forum since it really doesn’t have anything to do with Sint Maarten. It was really annoying though…
For now, please enjoy the next post in the series on our beautiful and secure villa in Beacon Hill, Coral Breeze…
As usual, if you haven’t yet done so, please check out the previous posts in this series since that will help put some of this in context. Also, please understand that the following observations are mine alone and that you may have different experiences if you rent this place or swim in this bay.
And now…
The villa – part 3
I was roused by the sound of one of the auto-turret’s firing at an intruder. The dawn was near, but had not yet lit the sky so the hapless figure was trapped in the billion candlepower illumination of the security perimeter lighting system and was almost cut in two by the rounds before his now-limp body slumped backwards into the electrified pool. Frazzht! I thought “Damn! Now I won’t be able to swim until the pool guy has come. And it might be worse when I realize... What if that was the pool guy?!”. I then awoke and realized it was only a fatigue-induced dream and the day is beginning to dawn on Sint Maarten.
So… I’m standing in the kitchen this morning talking to Sonia when I notice something else about the whole security issue with this place. There are stickers on most of the windows that say “ADT for security!”. No big deal here but, the thing that strikes me about this is that the stickers are facing inwards, telling us! How nice. Once the evil doers have broken in and are busy rifling through my laundry and selling Sonia some jewelry, they can rest assured that they are being secured by ADT. I of course had to wonder just who was in fact being informed of the ADT security here at the villa. I turned my attention to nuclear physics so I could decide how I wanted to use the stove to create new chemical elements while I cooked breakfast. I’m thinking of “Maartinium”, or maybe “Cummerbundium”… Fun with Fusion! Brisket. That’s another of those neat words. Brisket.
Coral Breeze is really well set up for being sandwiched between the beach and an international airport. The floors are all stone tile and therefore easy to clean and easy to keep slippery should you be foolish enough to come straight inside after swimming. I am apparently foolish enough. Twice. There are a lot of large windows facing the beach and bay beyond and you could, in a safer world, open these up to be exposed to the wonderful fresh sea breezes and the smell of roasting crew members coming across from Saba, which is only thirty miles away. This isn’t a safe world, though, and we never did manage to figure out how to open the windows in such a way that the alarm system would properly reset again when we closed them. So… no breeze. They made for an impressive view of the ocean though. Especially during the day when the various weapons systems were stowed (off) since evil doers only attack at night. There was a bright green gravity-well couch with its back to the view so we didn’t spend a lot of time in it. These types of couches are deceptive since they look quite normal but when you sit in them you are sucked down towards the floor and end up feeling like an overgrown kindergarten student waiting for play-time. Given my size, such furniture is impractical. The other bedroom at the front of the house is mostly solid concrete walls with a couple of small windows with heavy bars on them to keep us from accidentally crawling out (away) and being shot at by our own security mini-gun turrets. The windows are set high up by the roof so you can’t look out of them unless you stand on some furniture and stretch your body and crane your neck. This looks funny to other occupants of the house, though, since you look like you’re acting a scene from Papillion or maybe Midnight Express and they’ll wonder why. The advantage of this setup is that you are really never bothered by the noise of aircraft coming or going, unless one of them drifts a little wide and crashes into the house while they are distracted by video-taping their landing. “Koort! Pas de camera aan om een beeld van me te krijgen die een handstand naast de controles doet. Mijn meisje zal van dit houden! Koort?” “Pull Up! Terrain! Pull Up! Track! Track!” which, roughly translated from Dutch, reads… “Koort! Adjust the camera to get a picture of me doing a handstand next to the controls. My girlfriend will love this one! Koort?” “Pull Up! Terrain! Pull Up! Track! Track!” That kind of thing could put a dent in your vacation (among other things).
As for the bedrooms each one is a sanctuary unto itself. As the only two rooms with air conditioning, these rooms are ruled by these units which are, in fact, sentient beings that have attached themselves to the wall in a position where they can look down upon the hapless bed occupants. I’ve seen the whole bedroom-only air conditioning thing before and I had been amply forewarned about this from advice gained on the TTOL forum, so it was no surprise. I must say that I’m not sure I understand the true economics here since I had to figure that the large, pretty much constantly running room units might actually be more expensive to run and maintain then a small house AC unit. The part of the villa we occupied was, I would guess, about 1000 square feet in size and it wouldn’t take much of a home unit to cool that space evenly throughout the house. This would certainly cut down the incidence of respiratory ailments that helps keep libido in check – oh, that’s right. This is the Dutch side – no romance. Of course, if you were tempted to put in a whole-house system, you had to take into account the difficulty in removing the intelligent wall units in the bedrooms. They were “intelligent” in the sense that they had emotions and, like small children, were pretty good reflectors of your mood and attitude towards them. If I got angry with them, they conspired and made life miserable. When I was calm around them, they seemed calm too, and went about their business without incident. It took us three days to work this out. I wish I’d known about this bit from the forum folks. It certainly pays to be specific when you ask questions about how to avoid double pneumonia while staying on Sint Maarten. Now we’ll know. The units demanded that you treat them well. The main bedroom was ruled by Shifty, who had the ability to redirect the airflow at the touch of a button on a Remote Connectivity Request Unit (I can’t call it a remote “control”, since one did not, in fact, “control” these machines. One simply sent requests to them in the hope of compliance.). Shifty could also redirect the air when he figured you needed to have your nipples erect and you feet warm, which he felt was reasonably often. He would point a jet of super-cooled air at my chest, and re-route the exhaust to my toes. This can have an interesting effect that is a little like carefully placing the hand of someone who is sleeping into a pot of warm water. Try it on your spouse tonight. They’ll really laugh about it later. I think when I pointed the RCRU at Shifty and pressed the button for “Redirect Airflow”, I could just make out the sound of his laughter above the compressor. Once I had done this, 26 degrees Celsius became 16 degrees Celsius… for the remainder of the night, regardless of what I reset the temperature to be.
In the other bedroom lives an overseer with an American Indian name – “Runs With a Strange Noise”. This machine had bipolar disorder in that its settings were “angry hot” and “polar cold”. Runs With a Strange Noise had not learned how to redirect his airflow (and was therefore not supplied with redirecting vents or the offending button on his RCRU) and I suspect this was why he complained as he entered the polar phase. He would growl a low, guttural drawl as he summoned up the energy necessary to phase shift. Exit the area immediately, or find out what it’s like to be bathed in liquid nitrogen. We eventually figured out that both bedroom lords were happiest when we were calm and spoke nicely to them and we actually got to the point where the rooms were nicely balanced with the living rooms and kitchen. Heaven and Hell… You decide. We came to a sort of arrangement with both of these fellows and finally managed to get things adjusted pretty well. Sonia had a bad cold when we got back to Florida, which we blamed on Spirit Airlines and the “horrible dry air” that you get when flying, but in reality, I’m sure that Shifty and his pal Runs had a lot to do with it.
There are many reasons to go into an ocean. There are also many reasons to stay out of an ocean. The Spiny Sea Urchin falls into the latter. Also, when a scuba diver describes themselves as “underweight” or “overweight”, they aren’t referring to their body shape or size. Now we’re going to tie these two pieces of information together into the first shore scuba dive I took in Burgeaux Bay. We need to backtrack a little though, of course.
One of those things you’re supposed to learn when you dive is proper use of “buoyancy control”… This means that you need to train and equip yourself so that you will be able to remain within a small and consistent range of vertical space at whatever depth are diving. To assist with this, you are usually equipped with a device known as a buoyancy compensator. This is an air bladder you can inflate to provide “positive buoyancy”, which is diver speak for “flotation” (and you thought jargon was confined to boaters). You can also use it for emergency ascent as in “blow the tanks and put this baby on the roof! Come on Fly, Big D, Fly!” for those of you who have seen the movie. To counteract flotation you then carry a certain number and size of lead weights to provide “negative buoyancy”, which is rookie diver speak for “Ahhhh! Help! I’m sinking! Ahhhh!!”. We take weights with us when we dive since our bodies (especially when they’re “not svelte”) float, our wetsuits (stupid wetsuit) float and even, if you can believe it, our dive tanks float when they are getting empty (but it’s more complicated since the tanks sink when they are fully charged with air – still with me?). The weights are used to make us marginally negatively buoyant (“Ahhhh!”) at any stage of the dive so we can actually descend and carry out the recreational activity of scuba diving. The amount of weight one will need varies depending on the equipment you will be using and the type of diving. I’ve dived in extremely cold conditions where I needed 18 pounds of lead to overcome the buoyant effect of my gear and my body (like your first few dives with a dry suit, which is supposed to be the ultimate answer to the wetsuit, except that the air tends to congregate around your ankles meaning your dive will now proceed upside-down). I’ve also dived in very warm tropical conditions where I needed only 10 pounds of lead. Little lightweight divers tend to require less weight. Large divers (me) tend to require more. I usually carry 12 pounds of weight in the tropics and up that amount to 14 pounds if I am going to wear a stupid wetsuit, which I rarely do for the reasons I stated in the last post.
When I booked the rental equipment online I requested “as much as 16 pounds of weights”. When I came into the Scuba Shop to pick up my rental tanks and weights I encountered a lovely looking young woman whose name I just can’t remember. I got the distinct impression that, when she looked at me, she was convinced I had no idea how to scuba dive and that I was better off lying on the beach so I could receive treatment from some of those ecology minded “rescue” crews who frequently show up whenever a large animal has found itself stranded. I occasionally bristle at this kind of treatment since, underwater, I’m perfectly at ease and have been for a very long time. Much longer then this little girl-child had been alive. After introductions, my little girlfriend remarked “How many of you will be diving? You asked for so much weight I figured there would be more of you!”. My first thought was “butthead”… but then, I looked at her butt and head and thought, if people had butts for heads, I’d rather see her walking down the road then me. Definitely. So I said simply, no, it’s just for me. She presented the weights on a weight belt the size of an ankle bracelet and said “I don’t think that’s going to fit you…”. I had to hand it to her and the dive shop. Since this was the only size rental weight belt they had, it meant I had to buy a belt of “appropriate size”, since I hadn’t brought mine with me to the island. I realized that this beautiful little lady and I weren’t going to see eye to eye on much, so I paid for the tanks, enough weight for her and fifteen of her friends, and a shiny new weight belt I wouldn’t need when I got home, and left the shop.
As I prepared my gear for the first shore scuba dive of my trip on Sunday morning (the lack of sleep during the night had dulled my brain and made me forget about the experience of getting into and out of the water less than eighteen hours earlier), I thought about the tiny girl and her comments on the weight and had become concerned that maybe I had forgotten how much weight I really needed and that she actually knew more than I did about these things. Maybe I was planning for ice diving and this was in reality unlikely to occur on Sint Maarten anytime during the week I was going to be there (it was early summer, after all). Maybe I don’t really need the same amount of weight I’ve used for a thousand years since I first started diving with the Vikings on their undocumented trips to the Pacific. Maybe I’m just self conscious about my weight and might like to impress that little undernourished lady back at the shop when I return with 8 of the 16 pounds and say “sorry my dear, but the rest of the crew decided to stay ashore, I won’t be needing these!” in a proud manly voice. She would pout, fall into my arms and say something like “please take me diving with you. I want to have your baby!” in a soft, European accented voice. I put 10 pounds of weights on my shiny new belt and headed down to the water. Standing on the beach, facing the incoming waves, I was nagged by a couple of thoughts but couldn’t put my finger on them. I was too busy re-evaluating my gear while I waited for a small boy named Connor or a marine-like person with a shovel (entrenching tool) or the eight foot rogue wave that would end it all. Since none of these ever came, I finally waded into the surf, holding my fins so I could negotiate the waves standing on my feet. I had pre-inflated my buoyancy compensator so I would float once I reached deeper water (which is pretty damn quick on this little beach, by the way) and I could then safely put on my fins and begin the surface swim out to sea. I struggle with the effort, trying to contort my body like some circus show freak but finally manage to put on the flippers and begin the swim out to the adventure that waited out there in the deep. In about ten to fifteen feet of water, I begin the descent process. To an observer on shore, this is a curious event since the diver stops swimming, treads water, and hold up a hose to the sky. As they hold the hose up, they begin to sink and I can only imagine what someone who isn’t stupid enough to scuba dive near eight foot rogue waves thinks this looks like. If they were near the diver, they’d see him press a release valve and hear the rush of air and go “ahh! I get it!” but from their vantage point, it looks like you raise the hose and gradually let it fill with water from below, causing you to sink. I fill my hose to try and sink. Nothing happens. Then I try again. I squeeze every molecule of air out of the buoyancy compensator and try again. I can turn over and point downwards and then I can get to the bottom by swimming hard towards it. Then, when I reach it, I rise quickly back up to the surface. This is going to be an interesting dive. And there’s another problem… Ploink. I think that’s what it would sound like when one of the points of a Spiny sea urchin pricks your body just about anywhere. This was on my mind since I was hardly in any state of buoyancy “control” when I forced myself to the reef below, which was just covered in urchins. They were hard to avoid. Ploink. And they hurt like the Dickens. Ploink. Each time I force-descended one of the little jerks was waiting with the jab-welcome that accompanies a visit to their world. Ploink. Ploink! It begins to occur to me that there is a tiny amount of venom in the end of each of their spines and, at the rate I was going, I would end up being injected with about a gallon of the stuff by the time my body washed ashore. At least I was assured of the fact that I wouldn’t sink. There just wasn’t a chance with the lack of weight I was carrying. On several of my ploink-drops I would search for a chunk of rock or lava or a sunken battleship that I could stuff into my pocket to make up the weight but these were all being jealously being guarded by my prickly friends down below and I’m not sure I could have wrestled one of them away before my hand was ploinked into a pin-cushion by these little buggers. Oh well, off I went on my roller coaster ride through the bay. It must have looked pretty funny to Sonia who was sensibly back ashore. There he is! And again. Oohh look! There he is again. I was this slow-period bobbing head slowly making its way out to sea.
The dive proceeded to the point where I had really had enough and I turned and bounced my way back towards the shore. I have to say, though, that my egress was a pure Cousteau moment as I timed the wave sets just right, removed the fins, surfed to shore and stood up in between waves to stride out of the water up onto the beach to be greeted by my lovely smiling wife. The strains of “This is a Man’s world” were playing in my head. Sonia and I walked the twenty steps to the pool and as I entered the welcoming water the shore dive was over. I was exhausted. For the rest of my dives, I added the necessary weight to my belt and, even though it was entirely my fault, I secretly sent some bad vibes to my tiny little girlfriend at the dive shop willing her to eat lots of pastries, drink milkshakes and come over to my world. I tried perfection once and found it really didn’t suit me. Also, if you swim or dive in this little Burgeaux Bay anything more than fifty to a hundred feet out from shore, be prepared to meet on of the little prickly ploinking fellows and several thousand of his friends and neighbors since they own it and have an interesting way of collecting rent. You will need to be in water over your head (unless you’re a ten foot tall freak) to encounter them, though, so casual swimmers are probably safe from the urchins. Watch out for the Swordfish, though, especially when you are returning to the beach.
I dived the bay again during our trip and had a really pleasant time exploring the various reefs I found. My only other moment of note was on the return from my last dive when I surfaced over at the far end of the bay (I had been following a beautiful pair of large Batfish and they took me for a long ride), and figured I was too lazy to get out and walk the length of the beach in scuba gear, so I decided to swim back to my usual egress point, a thousand feet to the west. Big mistake. Rip currents typically form when frequent waves of significant force are breaking perpendicular or at a high incident angle to the shoreline of a gently curved bay or a long beach. The currents spread out in both directions from the middle of the bay and run along it for what can be several hundred yards before abruptly heading out to sea. They are strongest near the center of rip and they get more pronounced when the sea floor falls away sharply close to shore. All of this described Burgeaux Bay Beach the entire time we stayed there. The rip wasn’t dangerous (it wasn’t going to pull someone out to Saba to be eaten, for instance), but it was present. I now needed to swim from one end of the bay to the other. You can see where this is going. I couldn’t see it though since I had just surfaced from a long dive and was happy and in a mood to forget about such things. I began my surface swim. This is an interesting exercise in scuba gear, which is designed rather well to work with you under water and less than well above it. If you swim as though snorkeling, the tank tends to want to make you flip over. If you swim on your back, like the tank wants, you tend not to be able to go very quickly since your flippers are now “reversed” and don’t propel you well. Snorkel it, and you’re going to get tired pretty quickly trying to make headway. Swim it on your back and you’re going to get tired with the slow pace. I could have submerged, but the urchins knew this and the little jerks had gathered in a veritable carpet in this area of the bay and, with the water only about twelve feet deep and the waves running about four feet, I wasn’t going to chance more encounters with them again. Besides, whenever I looked up I could clearly see my destination and everything in the little bay looked so close. This is, of course, an illusion formed by the arc of the bay but you’d have to remember an awful lot of physics and optics for that to be meaningful. Within a few minutes, I wished I had remembered my college physics days. I kept looking up at the villa and I kept being reassured (since it looked so close) until I eventually realized that it wasn’t getting any closer. No matter how much I swam. Now, I’m usually pretty sharp and the rip current thing should have occurred to me, leading me to swim to the beach and lurch-walk myself on the shore through all the dog crap to make it to the villa in time to cook dinner. I wasn’t sharp today and, at this rate, I wouldn’t make it to the villa until my body washed up in September, by which time Sonia would be with a handsome rancher in Missoula. I kept swimming and I kept getting more exhausted. Swim. Look. Swim. Look. Eventually the presence of the rip current dawned on me and, what did I do? I swam harder! Simply push the legs harder and things will work out just fine. Swim. Look. Pant. Now the snorkel is shipping water since the waves have grown and it’s only a “dive snorkel”, which means it doesn’t actually work. I’m tasting bay water in addition to air and this isn’t helping my exhaustive state at all. Why do we do this? We know exactly what the correct course of action is but we don’t take it. Swim. Look. Pant. Gulp. Cough. Swim. I keep pushing at this for about fifteen minutes until I finally reach the center point of the bay with my heart and lungs pounding. I feel like, after all I’ve been through in 47 years I’m going to die fifteen feet from the shore on Sint Maarten resting on bed of Spiny sea urchins who have decided to take pity on me and not sting my lifeless hulk. Suddenly, the swimming is producing results. Things are going much easier and I’m being carried towards the diver-crusher egress point rapidly. I must have died and this is what the afterlife is like! Nope, you have now arrived at the egress point and if this is the afterlife, you didn’t take the fork in the road to heaven. Now you can take one of the many options available to Cousteau-Bridges types for exiting on your feet… or you can simply roll ashore in an exhausted heap like a giant clump of “Sea Suits Australia” branded seaweed. I determine that rolling ashore is the only option open to me and my now oxygen starved and fried brain. I let the waves carry me in and prepare for the thump. Thump. Up again in the wave and… thump. Back with the recess into the next wave and… thump. Time to call the cetacean rescue society. I crawl to my knees as my lovely smiling wife trots up to greet me and asks “Can I help you with something?” I look up at her and, lovely as she may be, I say “Talk to me again in the next half an hour and I’ll kill you…” “Say anything. Anything at all and you die…” She really is a wonderful woman since she puts up with this kind of behavior from me all the time. She knows I will recover and will again be the loving man she once married as soon as I can breathe real air and have destroyed every piece of dive equipment within a half mile radius…
By the way, on Thursday (we were leaving on Saturday), I was by the pool, standing out at the edge of the seawall by the hammock looking over towards Bliss to see if anyone was doing the learn-to-swim classes when I glanced down at the poured concrete area of the strange structure next door and I saw… Concrete steps leading gently and directly into the water, protected from the oncoming eight foot rogue waves by the large outcrop of lava about twenty feet out to sea. If a diver knew about these steps, he could simply don his gear on the smooth and firm concrete platform and step down into the bay enjoy his battle with the ploinkers and then swim past the beautiful yellow coral formation by the lava, up to the steps, place his hand on one of them and reach around and gently remove his flippers, toss them up on to the dry, solid concrete platform ahead and then just step right out of the water like a true hunk of man. So much for beach sand and breaking waves! Of course, I would need rope to attach to the villa so I could swing out and climb down the ten foot of seawall to the concrete platform below but… no beach! I never ended up using it but it sure was tempting… We actually shopped for rope. We even asked for some at the Food Express shop. They must have thought… “Stupid tourist!”…
So since this is as good a point as any, I’ll leave it there and post the rest in a couple of days. You must stay with it to the end now since you have to meet Claws and see what television is like in Sint Maarten and come with me as we answer the “riddle of the Turkish Mosque and the disappearing islanders”. I know what they are really doing there and soon you will know too.
Thanks again for reading this far and for being so patient in the wait. The next posts should come soon and I hope you all continue to enjoy Sint Maarten as I saw and experienced it.
Until then…
James
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