After I got all the vitriol out of my system with that rant about Whiskey Tango airlines, I sat back down and realized that I didn't have anything to watch on my laptop. I forgot to copy off season 2 of Two and a Half Men that I was watching earlier onto one of my portable hard drives, so I did a little digital spelunking and seeing what I had on my laptop to watch. I found porn! Woohoo! That was like finding a $20 bill in a pair of pants you haven't worn in awhile! :) I couldn't watch that on a plane though, that would just be inappropriate.

I kept digging around in the "Mark" folder (as opposed to the My Documents folder from XP) and in the folder called "videos" I found a video that I made back in 2001 with Adobe Premiere as a learning project. Gordy, Elspeth and Chris (the videochix) had put aside a few seconds here and there of all the staff that they shot in and around the dive shops, the busses, the dock, the boats and underwater and compiled them all onto a tape. I got a copy of the tape, made some titles, a few edits, added a soundtrack and saved it as an mpeg.

Knowing it was probably a bad idea to watch it right then, less than 24 hours after having left the Cayman Islands for good, I watched it anyway and turned the light off above my seat, just in case I got a little dust in my eye. 22 minutes of footage from 2000 and 2001 at Bob Soto's Diving, Ltd. (as opposed to Bob Soto's Reef Divers) People wearing the old white Staff shirts, the old crappy Lobster Pot that had all that character (and soft floors and a bajillion cockroaches), Holiday Diver, Reef Diver (the original and best), South Wall Diver, Cayman Bear, Easy Diver, Paradise Diver... Brad with a moustache (it looks so weird on him now, even though it looked weird when he shaved it at first) and all the old gang. I won't even try to list everyone here, because there were a few people who's names I don't remember. It did tear me up a little inside... those were the good ole days... up at 630, 700... riding bikes to work (no one could afford a car back then), hard work out in the sun all day, tearing it up at night and then doing it all over again for another five days before getting that one day off a week to not get out of bed and recover.

We worked hard, we played hard, we pretended to work and Ron pretended to pay us. It's hard to imagine that it was nearly 10 years ago, it seems like just yesterday. On the other hand... we all looked SO YOUNG! (I'm looking at you, Gordy!) So much has happened since then. Ron sold the company and it became Bob Soto's Reef Divers, we got new boats, we got a new Lobster Pot, a new dock, more staff came, most of them went... The management exodus happened and the dive shop started to tank (ha ha) and then just when it was at it's lowest, along came Hurricane Ivan and wiped it out. I still to this day think it was an absolutely short sighted, not to mention absolutely shitty thing to do to all the staff to cut everybody loose with their last paycheck in cash to fend for themselves/get off the island and go... somewhere but only if they signed a letter acknowledging that it was their final pay and canceling their work permits. No vacation pay, no pension/medical benefits, nothing. I place 100% of the blame on the (mis-)management of the people who were running the show in 2004.

I had a long chat with Chopper about a month ago or so on Facebook (oddly enough, Chopper pops up fairly frequently in the video... if you ever want to find him in a crowd, just aim a camera at it and he'll migrate right to the front and start dancing around making funny faces, probably wearing an oversized union jack fuzzy top hat. Like a moth to a flame, that boy. He was missing "the old days" and said that it was the best time of his life and was thinking about quitting his good job that he has now back in the UK and coming back down. I told him that was probably a dumb thing to do. He could spend the next 20 years hopping from island to island and dive shop to dive shop and he'd never recapture that combination of people and environment that he had down here pre-2004. With each hop and each disappointment it would just turn the knife a little more. He agreed with me and said I hit the nail right on the head.

That's not to say that he couldn't still do it and have fun.. Chopper's the kind of guy who makes his own fun, even if he's by himself (although he doesn't talk to himself very much anymore).

It really hit home while I was watching that video today how different things are now. I don't just mean that I'm older, have some gray hairs creeping in, can't fit into my old wetsuit anymore and have an office job... the island is growing up, too. Cayman has always been referred to in tourism literature as "the islands that time forgot'. While I would lay even money on someone who worked there in the 80s saying the exact same thing as the late 90s, early 00s as I'm saying now in 2008, the pace of change has been a lot quicker. Part of that is again because of Hurricane Ivan and all the damage it did. I suppose it's kind of like a forest fire clearing out all the deadwood and brush along the forest floor so that new trees can grow in their place.

90% of the people I spoke with before I left asked me if I would be back in a year when my "immigration penalty" is over. I'm not one to burn bridges (no, really!) and I'll always keep an open mind and never say never but I think the chances of going back for something other than a visit/vacation are pretty slim. I would have to come up with new justifications if I ever seriously thought about it. Re-living the "good ole days" wouldn't be a valid reason, because it would be impossible to attain.

If I ever feel nostalgic for those good ole days, I have hundreds, if not thousands of great memories and pictures and video to go along with it. Over the years, I did keep some notes on some "incidents" and other funny happenings and a lot of the guys used to prompt me to write a book about those times and some of the stories that have stood the test of time and re-telling. For starters, there's already a book out there written by one of the DMs from Little Cayman who took a bunch of the "urban legends" from the scuba diving community and spun it into a fictionalized account and the other thing is that it might have to be sold in a plain brown wrapper and not available to anyone under 18. Some of the stories are pretty unbelievable if you didn't know the people who did them/pulled them off. Rodney's 421' dive on air on his last day of work, Timbo's ability to sweat copiously just from the strenuous task of breathing, Jake's ability to sleep INSIDE video games when he was drunk, Mikey's grooming standards or Hank doing pretty much anything.. and that's keeping any stories about ME out of the limelight to protect those who can't protect themselves! Some of the stories are just about as bad as anything written by Tucker Max in "I hope they serve beer in hell".

The expatriate community in Cayman is rather unique and I don't think it's matched anywhere else in the world. The cross-section of industries who employ them and the union of where those generally distinct groups intersect can lead to some pretty outrageous situations, but at the end of the day everyone looked out for everyone else. There was always an extra seat available to pull up to the table or the bar and help the FNGs learn the ins, the outs, the what-have-yous of island life. That's part of what made Cayman special and probably why I stuck around so long. If I had to go back and do it all over again, I would do everything over exactly the same... except maybe that bit in Texas!