Produce Another Dumb Instructor

By John Triggerfish

John Triggerfish nearly wound up dead at the bottom of the Indian Ocean. Unfortunately for many women and large succulent fruit he survived, and decided to further his diving education. This is a story about doing the dreaded instructor development course in the wild Yucatan peninsular. This is a story about valiance, integrity, true diving grit, and downing vast quantities of cheap tequila while being taught all the diving skills one could ever wish to know by the demi gods of the diving world. This is a story about Bull sharks and life in Sin City, Playa del Carmen, Mexico. This is a story about eventually gaining meaningful employment in the diving industry and finally Living the Dream. And no matter where you finally end up working, you must always watch out for the terrorists. Or is that the tourists? ....

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jul 4, 2012
• ISBN: 9781471763915

Book preview

Produce Another Dumb Instructor

PRODUCE ANOTHER DUMB INSTRUCTOR.

A novel by John Triggerfish.

© 2012

All the characters in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

This is my opinion, and my opinion only, and in no way is this novel intended to disparage the PADI organisation. This is a work of fiction. God's truth.

The right of John Triggerfish to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988.

ISBN  9781471763915

PROLOGUE.

My eyes opened.

I woke up, blinking into existence like from a dream; with no boundaries or memory, staring into the meaningless depths of a deep blue sky.

There were faint wisps of cirrus clouds like brush strokes high up in the atmosphere, and a lonely circling bird vaguely reminiscent of a vulture.

This meant that I was probably lying on my back.

There were also the familiar sounds of waves lapping relentlessly against a fibreglass reinforced plastic hull, and the motion of a boat gently rolling from side to side.

My brain processed this information and informed me hesitantly that I was still at sea.

I heard the mutterances of a panicky boat captain chattering away madly in a foreign language, constantly jibbering, 'khap, khap, khap, khap,' in a loud, high pitched voice.

My brain processed some more information sluggishly and reliably informed me that because of this situation, I was probably still in the Kingdom of Thailand.

The skies clouded over.

Ballsy's ugly mush peered over my prostrate body. He seemed satisfied that I was still alive and nodded his head thoughtfully up and down. Strangely, he then proceeded to smack me violently in the gob twice with his humongous fists.

My teeth rattled.

A crown popped reluctantly onto the floor.

I saw a sudden variety of stars in the backdrop of the Indian Oceanic sky and wondered what the fuck that was all about.

Then it all came back to me what had happened.

Suddenly I felt no bigger than a plankton.

The sky darkened again.

Steve's gay facial features gave me the once over like I was something smelly on the bottom of his shoe. He turned up his nose, frowned, rocked back on his heels, then threw his forehead into my face like it was a football and he was just about to score the winning goal in the FA cup final!

Nice!

This admiringly produced quite a large fountain of blood from the burst capillaries in my now flattened nose, and an annoying crack as I felt an important crown-less front tooth drop into my throat.

I started to choke.

Luridly I wondered if this suicide thing was going to work after all, just not way I had planned it and possibly in a much more painful way.

'Wanker,' Steve muttered with an impressive sense of gravity and aplomb, standing back to display the international diving signal for the aggravated instructor:

Place cupped right hand next to genitals. Move back and forth rapidly.

I blinked some blood out of my eye and noticed that the Thai boat captain wasn't about to miss out on all the fun. With quite a nice run up he booted me in the gonads with his leather sandals. Swiftly I sat up and watched my two testicles disappear into my lower intestines.

What a few interesting moments!

I threw up.

'Wanker,' everybody repeated in unison.

I edged slowly to the side of the boat with the wonderful sting of acid puke dribbling down my stubbled, bloody chin. Surreptitiously as possible I managed to grab a weight belt with more than enough weight to take me down to resume my original masterplan. Fuck this unwelcome interlude for a game of Navy Seals. I was leaving this mortal coil right now.

I spat my tooth and a welt of blood into the sea, noticing dreamily how it expanded with the Brownian motion of the current.

Ballsy stood on my hand.

'Aargh, geroff!' I urged, so he stamped on it again.

I dropped the weight belt.

'What the fuck were you thinking pal?' he raged as I expected another right hook, but strangely he changed his mind, picked me up from the floor of the dive boat, and proceeded to give me the biggest hug of my life.

Fuck me I felt like crying.

Steve was also wiping a tear from his face.

The Thai boat master however was preparing for another run up. He'd produced a boat hook and looked very menacing as he brandished it over his head.

Steve ushered the captain to the rear of the vessel.

'Fucking English,' muttered the indigenous Thai guy, and wandered off to fix his four stroke and tie some knots in the fifty year old anchor line.

'What happened mate?' I asked, starting to feel a little embarrassed about the whole affair. Things could be getting a little bit complicated from now on.

Bugger.

Things were never easy in my life. I couldn't even get a good funeral together. It's not as if I wanted a headstone or anything. Just being fish food and joining the food chain from the bottom again wasn't too much to ask was it?

Steve came over and squeezed my shoulder.

That was it.

The waterworks were out.

I officially turned into a sobbing mess. In fact I was about to sink the boat with the flood pouring from my eyes when Steve filled me in, but not like the way he'd filled me in earlier.

'What were you doing way out there, mate?' he asked incredulously, 'Ballsy turned around and noticed you were no longer with us. We were following the Manta Ray. Luckily the vis was so good he noticed some bubbles coming from the deep, way over in the distance. He signaled me and I instantly got a bad vibe. We had to go down swift and just managed to get to you as you passed out and went limp.

'I punched the purge on your alternate to see if you were out of air. You were fucking totally out, and we were low too, so Ballsy stuffed his reg in your mouth and luckily it must have been your last breath of life or something because you started to breathe, even though you were totally fucking limp.

'Then I ran out of air, cos we were at sixty five metres on the sea bed, so I thought that was it. We were totally fucked. I had to breath-hold from the bottom and use the expanding air in my BCD on the way up just to get to the surface.'

Clever cunt, I thought.

He continued:

'So we dragged you out onto the boat, where you eventually came round. You've been out for at least five minutes here, but now that's not the problem. You might have done for us, because my arms are starting to tingle and I feel like I'm about to get bent. We've just done a rapid emergency ascent from seven atmospheres when we were saturated with nitrogen. I'm getting pains everywhere.'

'Don't be so soft,' I said.

Fortunately I said it with a smile and he didn't head butt me again. He just shook his head in disbelief and started to massage his arm. There was a vacant desperation lurking in his pretty blue eyes.

I heard a noise that sounded like an approaching inboard.

A large boat from another diving operation was motoring into view. The boat captain hailed them over and I looked at Ballsy. He too was rubbing his arm, definitely the first signs of decompression sickness (DCS).

Thinking about it, I was going to get it too because of the runaway ascent.

This very well may turn into one painful and agonisingly dreadful day to die.

At least it was forty degrees though, the Sun was out, and the view over Coral Island was amazing!

The Thai captain was rapidly conversing with the avidly interested tattooed Thai divemaster from the other boat. About sixteen tourists on a fun dive were stroking their chins and pondering what was going on, and why on Earth were the Thai boat masters suddenly passing cylinders hurriedly onto another boat?

I noticed a few large green and yellow labels. They had the fabulous words NITROX stamped across the dull sheen of the aluminium.

Bizarrely, it seemed that I was about to do my Nitrox Specialty then!

Far out!

What a day!

At least that was a decent specialty to get under my belt before I died of a nitrogen aneurism!

Hastily they attached Ballsy and Steve's first stages to the tanks, then Ballsy violently pulled me over the side not in the least worried that I didn't have a regulator in my mouth, a mask on, any weights or fins, or even a snorkel.

Then again, it was highly unlikely we were ever going to surface again so a snorkel was probably surplus to requirements. He had an armful of weights, about seventy kilos worth, and a BCD. He stuffed his alternate air source in my mouth savagely, removing  another secondary incisor as we bolted down into the deep blue. I casually wondered if there was a dental technician in Chalong.

In an instant we were at thirty metres. Ballsy filled the BCD with some air and we levelled out. He took his regulator out and mouthed the word 'wanker'. This was becoming a common occurrence.

Steve tapped me on the shoulder. He thoughtfully had brought another two tanks of Nitrox and a diving slate. He was massaging his arm but managed to write:

Getting bent fast.

Need underwater deco.

We won't make it to the decompression chamber in time.

Stay one hour here.

Breathe slow.

Save energy.

You are a Wanker.

I understood.

Thinking about it, my knees were starting to hurt and I was feeling a numbness and a tingling in my shoulders. My eyes were also starting to throb but this could be due to the fact that I wasn't wearing a mask. Steve had a spare one but it didn't look like he was about to give it to me anytime this week.

Punishment I suppose.

In-water deco then.

I understood that underwater decompression wasn't a good thing to attempt and was pretty much against all dive training rules and regulations, but there was nothing else we could do apart from sit on the boat and dream of a nice cozy chamber back on land whilst writhing in worsening agony awaiting certain death.

We had to redissolve the formed nitrogen bubbles racing around our body causing havoc with the nervous systems, bone, cartilage, fat, and muscle and hope to God none of the small bubbles of nitrogen formed larger bubbles big enough to block a major blood vessel, especially the carotid artery that supplies blood to the brain (though in Ballsy's case this wouldn't matter very much as his brain seemed to be permanently located in his penis).

Then we had to slowly decrease our depth and use the lower than normal particle pressure of nitrogen from the Nitrox to aid the nitrogen gas wash out from our lungs. All this had to be done without getting symptoms of oxygen toxicity from the extra percentage of oxygen in the Nitrox mix. Partial pressures of oxygen above 1.6 create problems, (pressure of oxygen at the surface is only 0.21) and breathing thirty six percent oxygen at forty metres, or five atmospheres, was breaking this law.

But I'm well up for breaking laws to see what happens and luckily I was nearly a divemaster and had recently studied this diving shit.

There was another small problem with in-water re- compression though, as Ballsy was starting to demonstrate.

He threw up through his regulator.

A few fish turned up for the undigested protein and carbs, the dirty buggers.

He started to convulse.

This was bad and also a recommendation of why not to try in-water re-compression.

Steve grabbed him.

I grabbed him.

We both squeezed him as I held the regulator in his mouth. Gradually the convulsions stopped and I realised for the first time in my life that I had witnessed a sub aqua epileptic fit and was therefore happily furthering my diving education in situ!

Worriedly I noticed that the tide had changed and we were now in a massive drift current due to the speedily moving seabed twenty metres below, and on top of this I was starting to get nitrogen narcosis.

We were alone in the ocean.

None of the Thai divemasters could be arsed to see how we were doing since they had paying customers and tips to procure. In fact they had probably gone. Thinking about it, our captain had probably gone, leaving the dumb diving farangs to the fate of the Buddha.

Steve wrote on his slate. We were ten minutes into the decompression. We had to stay an hour at least and in my state I was dumping more air than an American gas guzzling V8. There were two extra tanks but at this depth there was probably no chance of them lasting the length of the needed deco. Besides, I had absolutely no idea how to change regulators underwater and even wondered if it could possibly be done. I looked at Steve's slate.

It read:

We go to 20m.

Or we die.

Wanker.

I nodded and started to fin slowly upwards noticing that a massive Mako shark had appeared and was probably looking at its next meal. It started to circle us and its lateral fins were down, a definite sign that we were invading its territory. What a grand day out! I laughed into my regulator (a very strange noise) and wondered what it would be like to whip my cock out and see if I could achieve a boner in front of the lads.

Fucking bonkers!

Why not?

Slowly time passed.

Steve wrote on his slate:

''I am going to kill you...''

I put my cock away.

Forty minutes had gone. Ballsy had only lost consciousness two more times and we decided to take a gamble and end the deco at fifty minutes. Gradually we surfaced without the use of a surface marker buoy (bad role model behaviour!) and looked around. There was a huge swell and the dive boat was no where in sight. Thinking about it, neither was Coral island, unless it was that small small speck, way way in the distance. Steve threw his regulator at me.

It hit me in the eyeball.

'Hey, man!' I protested, then shrugged. 'Look on the bright side; at least we're positively buoyant!'

He burst out laughing, then started to cry; real sorrowful tears too.

Soft Liverpudlian twat, I thought.

Also he had a diving hood to prevent him from sunburn, the selfish git, always thinking of himself.

I squeezed his shoulder in a friendly manner and tried to use my emergency first response techniques for shock management, which were:

Try to calm the panic diver and mumble a few words of encouragement.

When that didn't work simply swim off at a distance so you didn't get hammered by a berserkingly mad diving instructor who thought he was imminently about to drown!

I thoughtfully placed Ballsy in the way; demonstrating good survival technique.

Both divers were losing it and Ballsy drifted idly on his back, in and out of consciousness.

Typical.

Again I had to sort the situation out.

Why hadn't they just let me fucking drown?

Look what trouble it had got them in.

I pulled out my whistle and wondered why I hadn't had the foresight to buy a good one. This one looked like it had come out of a Christmas cracker from the pound shop. I remembered the cunt Tim selling it to me. I blew it as hard as I could.

Hmm.

I'd heard louder, higher pitched bird farts.

Steve was now starting to bawl like a baby and repeatedly slap himself on the forehead, the wierdo.

Luckily I routed around in Ballsy's BCD for a while and found the equivalent of an air horn. Fantastic! At least he was well kitted out. I pressed the lever three times for three seconds and Steve had to cover his ears. They'd be able to hear that emergency blast back at PADI HQ in California!

It worked.

Seven minutes later we were back on the boat under the glare of the murderous looking Thai captain heading into Chalong.

RIGHT, I'LL BE OFF THEN.....

We sat in the Beach House on Nanai Rd.

I was covered in bruises and had a nice gap in my teeth, but at least my kit was all right. Everything was packed. I was ready to go and the eager taxi driver was waiting to drive me through poverty to the airport.

Ballsy pulled me towards him and gave me a massive hug. He then stuck his tongue down my throat.

That was interesting.

'I didn't know you were like that, mate,' I said.

People had backed away a little, looking puzzled.

'You just take care of yourself, pal,' he said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, 'and save up back home, then get back out here. Next time you're out I'll get the work permit and pay for it. You take care, you hear? Stay safe and try not to worry about money.'

Steve strode over and patted me on the back. Suddenly I was surrounded with all the friends I had made over the three months I had been here. Tim tried to shake my hand.

I promptly poked him in the eye