Drop the anchor!

Read the French translation

To many people in Agnes Water, a town less than 30 nautical miles from the Great Barrier Reef, their first scuba diving experiences can be described with colorful adjectives like “exhilarating”, “jaw-dropping” and “fish filled”. For me, when I look back at the first time I donned on my scuba gear in the southern hemisphere, I will always remember it as the hour and a half I spent in the murky waters of the 1770 Marina, scraping barnacles off the hull of the local dive center’s main passenger ship. I agree, it’s not as glamorous, but it’s a good way to learn the ropes of everything revolving around the diving industry. And besides, that bought me a full day of diving on the reef tomorrow, so I can’t really complain.

So it is how we decided to settle down for a little while in this little peninsula town while I do my Dive Master internship. If it was good enough for Captain Cook back in ’70, it should be good enough for us. Stephanie has already found a job in a bakery and is bringing back home a steady supply of sweets rolls and tasty cakes every night. We should be morbidly obese by the time we skip town, in two or three months from now.

Agnes Water library is also where I bought a really cool science fiction book. It’s a collection of three short stories written way back in 1930, back in a time where it was still politically correct to refer to African Americans as “colored people” and that1999 was considered to be far enough in the future to think that scientist would have built machines to make vehicles go through walls and that we’d have colonized ALL the planets and asteroids of our solar system. It’s a pretty interesting read; and a great insight on the ambition that mankind has toward its own evolution.

For the past couple of days, I have been assigned the very important role of head gardener here at the Southern Cross Tourist Resort in exchange for accommodation and free food. When they first asked me if I knew how to tend to a garden, I just nodded, not really believing it myself. But as it turns out, after only two days of pretending I knew what I was doing, I ended up really liking it and actually being very good at it. As it happens, I am apparently a naturally skilled hedge sculptor, turning bushes into nice geometric shapes, those of which can never be found in nature; the owners of the resort seem to like them though. It just goes to show, it’s always worth it to pretend that you know what you’re talking about, it might turn out that you actually do.

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