6/10/2006 - Gumby Moments
Some days my idiocy makes me want to put the reg in my mouth and bury my head under the waves and never, NEVER return. We have this beautiful word for divers who make dumb mistakes - a "Gumby Diver". Everyone suffers from gumby moments at one point or another. Inevitably, the newbies are Gumbies more often than not, but slowly you stop being a Gumby and move into the ranks of "Diver". This doesn't mean you stop having Gumby Moments.
I've had more Gumby Moments than I know what to do with - fairly stupid acts which my DMTs and friends never cease to let me forget. Amongst my more stellar Gumby moments include a day where we went out on a few exploratories, and rather than everyone getting the gear on to dive a site we had never tried before, I volunteered to free dive down and have a quick squiz and give an opinion.
I threw the weightbelt on quite eagerly (was very keen to get in), and jumped over board within two seconds. It took me about five kicks and a strange blurry vision for me to figure out that in my overeagerness to get in, I'd forgotten to put my mask and fins on....  Needless to say, that moment has been reminisced countless times over the last few years.
Another particularly brilliant day was during on OW course not so long ago. I'd been lecturing my DMT on the importance of being prepared [he'd been fairly lax on the last course, and I wasn't very impressed] with spares and gear and double checking everything. Of course, we'd no sooner arrived than things started to go wrong. First, my gear tub fell out of my car and I proceeded to smash my snorkel (don't ask, very complicated achievement but I managed to do it quite spectacularly). Then we started gearing up... only I'd forgotten to bring a wetsuit for a student AND my own reg set. And of course the site where we did our OW training was a good 40 minutes away from the dive lodge where all our gear is kept, so I had no hope of saving face without creating some very obvious delays.
Thankfully my DMT was a quick study and had not only packed a spare set of regs (with a drysuit inflator, bless his soul!) but he'd also grabbed a wetsuit of the exact same size we needed because it was 'too warm for a drysuit' (I don't believe it's ever too warm for a drysuit... well, maybe, but not where we dive!). So the day wasn't lost, but the mockage I endured for that (from both students AND DMT) has also suceeded in hanging around for a long, long time.
I know I'm not the only one who regularly has Gumby Moments, but unfortunately I'm female and sort-of-blond and so I tend to get picked on a lot more by the guys than any of the other Gumby moments they commit. Still, I've seen them commit some spectacularly stupid things - like forgetting to zip up drysuits, not turning on air, not putting on masks, forgetting their lights on a night dive... Attempting to take gear off without unclipping hoses and buckles and losing their tempers because "THE GEAR WON'T COME OFF, DAMN IT!"
So what are your Gumby moments? Any stellar acts of stupidity and silliness you'd like to share?
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