Another Day in Paradise

Well today was great.. …2 weeks of training and learning to run the boats. My day started off in the morning getting the boats in and ready for the morning dives. Today we have the grand opening of the new Carnival Cruise Lines Terminal in Grand Turk. The day started off great sunny day, no wind, the ship passed right in front of my house approx. 730am. Grand Turk doesn’t have too many tourist walking around but on this day they had ship coming in the total population of the whole island is 3,500 people and just one ship has as many people. So I knew it was going to be a busy day but I didn’t expect what was about to happen. I woke up and grabbed a coffee and walk outside and sat on my porch. On the street theirs was a large group of 15 people on the street taking pictures of my house and me (at this time I’m sitting in my underwear drinking coffee half awake). So if you see any of these pictures from anyone in the future of pictures of me on the porch….. Just laugh I was tired.

Anyways we had a one boat going out at 9am then doing two dives and back by 12:30 with 9 divers. But today we got busy with the cruise coming in and we expected 3 divers in the afternoon and what turned up was 10 all together (ha hah). For a dive center like Mermaids in Thailand that has 4 boats a day with 20-30 people on them this might not seem like a lot. But for little Grand Turk and at a small dive center where I help pump the tanks and load the tanks and drive the boats.(some people call me a jack of all trades) it’s a lot of people. So we took our now 10 divers plus me and Carl(Dive master) took the divers to the first site and got them all in the water at a site called Rolling Hills. On the dive 20 mins into the 40 min dive I didn’t see anything really spectacular to show these new divers to the island…. So what comes out of no where 4 turtles wow… and 5 more mins in and I seen a big eagle ray. Well the divers came up in amazement over the dive and I knew the day was going to great now. The second dive was too Aquarium which is a great dive site for fish, fish and more fish and the coral is so colourful ( the site is like being in a fish bowl). After the day was over I sat down a said to myself and I really couldn’t believe ……. “ I get paid to do this everyday!!”. It finally sunk in people paid big dollars to come here and I get paid to dive here now…… I love it. O yeah I got some nice tip from those nice people on the boat 60 US dollars(2,500 baht tip for 2 dives)and Carl got some tips too. But yes I’m making it sound like such a great tip but it is really expensive to live here. A meal like burger and fries and a coke is 15.00 US(600baht) and a beer is about 4 dollars (200 baht). So it isn’t cheap. But it has some of the best diving I have ever seen.

Well every time the cruise ship comes in people are always asking me for tourist stuff and unlike Thailand nothing is here it’s a untapped market its hard to find even a post card. So I knew after being in Thailand, Mexico and around another place in the world people like there unique items. And one of the big things on the island is cooking conch “konk” like a large snail. But after they get the conch out of its shell they do nothing with these spectacular shells. So me and Eddie( pumps/dive master) decide to start our own little business selling people shells and also were making necklaces with shark teeth on them to make a bit of extra cash. So we went on our hunt to a place on the island called north creek ( you guessed it its on the north of the island) for shells. There was me a Eddie and Wendy we ended up coming back with probable 50 or more shells. So we cleaned them up and varnished them to make them shine. At the moment we sold a few beautiful shells but I still don’t know how much to charge ( I was thinking 15 dollars for large and 10 for med). So if any of you have any idea’s let me know or what I could charge for really nice big shells.

Well till next time…….here’s my previous blog for everyone that didn’t get the last one

http://www.travelblog.org/Central-America-Caribbean/Turks-and-Caicos-Islands/

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