Spring Break is here, and a well earned rest is to be had, not!.  I decided to go to N. Myrtle Beach to Coastal Scuba and take a dive trip out to the wrecks off the coast.  Having only dived in the crystal clear waters of Coastal Queensland, Australia, I was not fully prepared for the Atlantic experience, but more of that later.

I found a motel at Little River which is just up the road from the marina where their dive boat is, and it worked out quite handy.  Across Highway 17 was a Greek pizza shop where one could buy a good meal, and be served by a very nice waitress to boot.  Then 100 yards up the road was an Irish Pub “Paddy & Mike’s” which makes for good relaxation.  I frequented said pub on the first evening and sampled the local night life.  The trip had started out so well that I was looking forward to the dive on Wednesday. 

The North Carolina Coast has the reputation of being the Graveyard of the Atlantic Ocean, or so I learned from the reading exercises I use in my classes at school go on about.  I went to a coastal town called Little River to test out the scuba diving trips available.  The cool thing is, the afore-mentioned marina is actually located in this little river that runs through the town, hey that’d be a good name for the town, wait a minute, it is.  Anyway.

Now, the Mate was a mighty sailing man, the Skipper brave and sure.  Actually, he resembled the skipper on Gilligan’s island quite a bit for sure, this didn’t do a lot to engender confidence in me.  So I asked this couple on board if they were in fact Yale educated millionaires.  But there was no movie star or cutesy farm girl on board so I relaxed.  Next we all crowded into the cabin to fill out and sign the dive release forms.  Now, these are the ones that promise not to sue in case you get the Bends or something, in case you are left out there and have to hitch a ride on the dorsal fin of Flipper the dolphin or whatever.  Well, I started thinking this way, a few years ago on the Great Barrier Reef, an American Diver went missing on a dive trip when he was inadvertently left behind after the boat returned.  I started thinking like this, I’m an Australian diver, what better opportunity for parochial revenge than this.  The American diver went missing in the Pacific, so the Aussie one can go missing in the Atlantic.  I eyed the skipper and the first mate suspiciously.  But after all that, I dismissed these musings as the ramblings of a paranoid dramatist, and suited up.