Groundhog's Day

I know I’ve been home for a month now but I did have a few last comments I wanted to make about my time on Wake, if only for the sake of closure. I have been on several different treadmills since I got back, and having a hard time sitting down to write.
I did get a couple of dives in the last week on Wake; I went with one of the rat team guys, Peter, who is a very experienced diver. He grew up in Rhode Island and worked diving for shellfish as a teen. We went out on the wreck of a tanker which sank just outside the marina about twenty years ago. (One of the standing jokes on the island is everyone wants to know whose idea it was to hire a tanker named the “Stoner”. the other has to do with hoping that the “Hooters” plane has an in flight emergency over the mid- Pacific.)
The wreck was pretty cool, the near end in about 40 feet of water and the far end in about 60-70. After we went around the wreck for a while we swam out about another 50 yards where the depth was 90 feet, and then we came to the edge where it drops precipitously; so close to vertical as makes no difference. You can look straight down over the edge and see nothing at all. It is a very eerie feeling. The Captain told me later that the Air Force has radar depth charts for all around the island. The contours go 20 feet, to 40 feet, 80, then 3000.
When we swam back in from the edge we were followed by a solo Bumphead Parrotfish. He seemed to be curious and just stayed behind us until we got to fairly shallow water. He posed well and I got some decent pictures.
Friday night the 26th we hung out at drifters; I had a few more beers than my usual two so that explains why I felt so crummy when I got up at 5am to check in for the flight to Honolulu. The plane arrived around 8 and we had a few hours to get the regular island doc and the new medic introduced and oriented/reoriented. The medic spent the last year at McMurdo (Antartica, for those of you who don’t recognize the name). I think he made a good move. I don’t know much about the beer supply or male/female ratio at the South Pole, but an increase of 100 degrees in the average temperature has to be good for your outlook on life.
The plane took off at 11am Saturday carrying me away from Wake and back to Hawaii where we landed at about 5 pm on Friday. I decided since I had another shot at it I wouldn’t have any beer on the Friday night repeat. I just went to bed early.
Thanks to some vacillation on the part of the Air Force with the biweekly flight schedule I missed my original flight from Hono to home and couldn’t get rescheduled until Sunday night the 27th, so Saturday and Sunday a small group of us who had just escaped from Wake did a little touring around the area. The local biologists took us for a hike into a nature preserve. They say that unless you hike up pretty high into the mountains you won’t see any native flora or fauna. We got up far enough to see a few things although the birds that we hoped to see eluded me. We also hoped to get out to Pearl Harbor but ran out of time.
I flew out of Hono Sunday night, arriving in Minneapolis on Monday morning, then a flight to BWI arriving around 3pm. The shuttle home was very welcome; I don’t think I could have driven myself. I was pretty exhausted but I guess the torture of the long flight did tire me out enough to spare me some of the jet lag. I was a little out of synch at first but got adjusted reasonably quickly. Good thing – I was off Tuesday and Wednesday, then on at Milford (local home hospital) at 7am on Thursday. Back to reality.