If you’ve been around these parts any time at all, you’ve seen the name Deb or Deb Weston and Dan or Diver Dan or Dan La Due thrown around a lot. Why? Well, Deb is one of the owners (along with Grady) and an instructor. Then there is Dan. While Dan is an assistant instructor and at most all events, especially the major events… Dan and the blogger (that’s me) have quite the friendship.
One day while he was at Extreme Sports SCUBA, he didn’t even acknowledge the fact I was sitting there so I gave him grief like you can’t believe. Well, that started the “Hi Nicole” war on Facebook for the next year. Every once in a while I got an in person hello or a text message, but most of it was a Hi on Facebook in some shape, size, or form.
Then, on Wednesday nights during the summer a group of us help Deb & Grady at 5 Mile Children’s Camp with the “Try SCUBA.” One Wednesday Dan just plum forgot. He forgot to go. He forgot it was Wednesday. He just got busy with work and totally forgot. So that started the “Hey Dan It’s Wednesday” bit in the form of call outs on the blog, Facebook, text messages, and even random people texting him to remind him so he wouldn’t forget.
Over the weekend, Carlene (that’s Dan’s wife) pointed out that our group of divers get along better than some families. We pick on each other, joke with each other, and are totally there for each other.
So why this story? Well, one it’s to say welcome to the family if you are new. Trust me, you’ll fit right in. But also… for those of you who know and those of you who don’t, Deb and Grady are remodeling their house. This has been an on-going process for the last year and a half or so. Here in the last few weeks much progress has been made. At one point, Grady said it was like he and Deb were camping right in their own bedroom.
Again, where am I going with this? So glad you asked. Well, Deb and Grady finally got to the point they were required to move out of their bedroom (it’s being turned into a closet). In the process of cleaning out their bedroom, Deb ran across her dive log. She kept a handwritten dive log up through 1,000 dives, then allowed her Galileo SOL computer to log the rest for her dives.
Deb and Grady started reading through the dive log and found where Deb certified Dan (and his daughter Danielle) and he completed his open water classes right there at Beaver Lake, where a lot if not most of you/us have completed our open water check-out dives.
We learned in Dan’s Assistant Instructor interview many moons ago that he was certified in August 2003. I bring this up because he still has this “thing” going… which I’m not going to lie is pretty darn sweet, that he hasn’t missed diving a month since he was certified. That makes it that he’s dove 154 times, right? Haha…. Okay fine… I think they said he’s logged a few more dives than that.
Take away message:
So, if you were to save your dive log for 10, 15, 20+ years, can you just imagine what it might say and show? This is a really good reason to make sure you keep those dive logs up-to-date. Who has another cool one I can feature?