Hello everyone. I feel I owe you the epilogue to this story. Although, I like to think of my life in terms of chapters, and that Thailand / Caribbean chapter has come to a close. It would have been easy for me to stay out in Thailand indefinitely living the dive life, working for 'free' at Mermaids, or somewhere similar. It would have also been easy for me to stay in the Caribbean. I had a work permit in the pipeline, although I wasn't making money (losing money more like), the sheer effort it took to relocate was enough of a reason to stay.
The truth is that I'm a free spirit, and distant horizons were calling me. I worked long hours, with an occasional day off here and there, but no guarantees of time off at all if a customer turned up last minute. I made more in tips than actual wages, and that wasn't enough either. I was sharing the home of the dive shop owner (a widower of about 55), and had no independence, or privacy. I even felt like he behaved inappropiately towards me.
Any daily routine can become tiresome, no matter where you are in the world, and I realised that I didn't want to hide myself away on a tiny poverty-stricken island; trapped without culture, social life or peers, and miss what wonders the world had to offer me. And, you know what else, I realised that scuba dive instruction isn't for me.
So I caught my ship before it sailed. Literally.
I jumped on a catarmaran with almost frightening spontaneity, and joined a French crew who were headed for Pacific Mexico via the Panama Canal. Never having sailed before, I learned - fast! And so I sailed away into the sunset and watched the island disappear. That's another chapter.
I don't regret anything. Thailand, and Mermaids, and the Caribbean was something I had to do, back then, and it made me stronger, wiser, and more confident, not to mention the wonderful life-long friends I have made in the process and the stories I can tell around campfires.
Everyone was right on this thread - absolutely spot on. To be an instructor you have to live and breathe diving - and not the kind of fun diving where you get to chill out and see the things that *you* want to see - but diving with people who are (usually) nervous, or excitable, or unpredictable, who all look to you as the final lifeline. Most of time is spent on skills in shallow water or swimming pools. If you want to actually go diving on a regular basis, consider working as a DM instead. Did I just say the word 'work' and 'DM' in the same sentence - hehe, I should have said 'volunteer' - of course there's no income from being a DM.
To be an instructor, you need to love diving more than anything in your whole life - not just, 'Oh, that's kind of fun.' But, LOVE it! You should be half human, half fish. It's the only way in which you could put up with the more challenging side effects, like living on the breadline, feeling physical exhaustion every day forever, no weekends off with friends, etc...
I had the choice. It was in my lap. But I picked the promise of what was beyond the next horizon, and I did it with a smile.
"What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us."
