When we went to the Rivera Yacht Club yesterday, we found that they had a dive club, and the owner would take us out for $40 a dive. We hadn't planned on doing any scuba diving on this trip, but we decided to go out anyway. So we took a cab to the Riviera this morning and spent the whole day underwater.
The dive shop rented all of our equipment to us. I rented a 'shorty' wetsuit and grabbed a weight belt and weights. I told the divemaster that I wore 6 kilograms of weights when I wore a fullsuit, so she told me to wear 5 for the shorty. What she didn't tell me was that we were diving on steel tanks.
For those who don't dive, let me explain. Most of the world uses aluminum tanks. Aluminum tanks are lighter and less dense than steel. They sink slowly when they're full, and they float when they're empty. I was trained using aluminum tanks.
Steel tanks are heavier and denser. They can take more wear and tear, but they're more expensive. They sink fast when they're full, and they never float. When you go from aluminum tanks to steel tanks, you have to remove three to five kilograms of weight from your weight belt. But I didn't know that we were using steel tanks.
So I loaded up my five kilo's of weight and my big steel tank and walked to the edge of the dock and jumped in. I went under the water, bobbed up for about two seconds, and then sank like a rock. Just before I went down, I heard Keith say, “Where you goin', man?” I looked up from ten feet and saw the divemaster at the surface thumbing upward, telling me to get back up there. I inflated my BCD all the way, but that just made me float underwater. I kicked up as hard as I could, and only with constant kicking could I keep my head above the surface. I told the divemaster I was overweight, and she helped me get most of the weights off. I asked her why I could maintain buoyancy in the Persian Gulf with 6 kilo's, but I sank like a shipwreck in the Mediterranean with only 5. She checked all my gear and said she was a little confused about it, too. After the dive, I asked her, “These are aluminum tanks, right?” “No,” she said, “In Lebanon, we use steel tanks.” We both smiled.
“You must be a good swimmer,” she said.
“Why do you say that?”
“Because you were overwieghted by ten pounds, and you managed to stay off the bottom.”
Most of Lebanon's dive sites are deeper than 20 meters. Keith and I aren't certified to go that deep yet, so we had to dive the shallow sites close to shore. We walked down a dock near some tide pools and jumped in the water from there. A cute German instructor led us around in front of the club. We passed some huge rock formations and slipped through several short tunnels that were barely wide enough for us. In the tunnels, I felt my way along the bottom with my fingers, and I banged my tank against the top whenever I inhaled. The first tunnel came out under a rock overhang so big that at first I thought it was a cave. I flipped on my back and watched my bubbles gather on the bottom of the rock. We didn't see much life. We heard lots of boat traffic above us, and we guessed that must have scared the fish into hiding.
The second dive was better. An Egyptian freighter named the Macedonia sank close to Pigeon Rocks during World War II and settled in fifteen meters of water. This was my first wreck dive. We took a little boat out around the Corniche a few hundred meters out to sea. The wind had picked up and three foot swells ran past the boat. The swells shook the boat, but things calmed down once we got underwater. The freighter was broken into several pieces, and the divemaster led us around the bottom while we swam through broken steel plates and loose cables. When we reached the middle part of the ship, where it came to rest on its side, we swam just a few feet over the hull. We couldn't see the bottom or any life, just riveted steel plate spread out as far as we could see. It was surreal.
On the boat, we met Ingrid, a cute European girl who was a part-time instructor at the club. When we got back to shore, we invited her for a drink and walked toward the bar. She waved us back and said, “No, no, no. Don't sit over there. Nobody important ever sits over there. The divemasters all sit up here. Come on over. We'll get some drinks.” So we left the bar and took over the executive seating.
Ingrid's background was hard to pin down. I asked her where she was from. She pulled a cigarette out of her purse and lit it, and as I was about to ask again, she said, “My father is from Holland, but I was born in Turkey. Is that good enough for you?” I'd never been chided for asking someone's nationality before. I mumbled a quick yes and looked around for a waiter and a beer. We all sat in awkward silence until Ingrid's buddy Anwar showed up with a backgammon set and challenged her to a game. I asked if they would teach me how to play, and they explained the rules while they set up the board.
I learned that the first rule of backgammon is that you have to play at lightning speed. It's the opposite of chess. You never pause. You never examine the board. You roll your dice and move your chips and get out of the way while your opponent rolls his dice and moves his chips and gets out of your way. If you're too slow, sometimes your opponent gets impatient and rolls his dice again and gets a free turn. There's more to backgammon than that, but the prime rule is just to play as fast as you can and hope nobody notices when you break the rules.
Ingrid beat Anwar ten games to two, and I took on the champion. I was quite proud when I won two games to one before she got bored with the whole thing. I found out that Anwar had lived in Los Angeles for five years, and we all started talking about southern California. I told stories about surfing San Diego on chilly November mornings. Anwar told me about the Lebanese expat community in central LA. Keith had grown up in New York and dismissed all of southern California as “too dangerous.” That set off the East Coast/West Coast debate that you get anytime you put Americans from different coasts in the same room. Anwar and I talked about Hollywood and Orange County. Keith talked about the Oakland earthquakes and the LA riots. We argued back and forth about Compton and Queens and Kosher delis and California burritos. In the end, I won the argument when I said I wore flip-flops and tank tops in January. Score one for SoCal.
Ingrid asked us what plans we had for the evening. We said we didn't know where to go. Somewhere the conversation had turned to Mexican food, and Anwar told me there was a great Mexican restaurant on Monot Street. It was named Pacifico, and he said it served the best Mexican food in Lebanon. And it was right in the middle of a bunch of really fun clubs. Ingrid wrinkled her nose when Anwar mentioned Monot Street, but we all agreed to meet at Pacifico later that night.
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