Springtime in Southern California sees the swallows return to Capistrano, the grey whales migrate toward their northern summering grounds and the UCSB dive club invades Avalon on Catalina. The first year of the new century marked the 20^th anniversary of the event, of which I have attended half (if memory serves). Every year I conclude that it will probably be my last trip. A diver can see everything the underwater park at Casino Point has to offer in a half dozen random dives. While I haven’t kept accurate count, I have probably made between 50 and 60 such dives. Some years I have dived more on some trips and less on others. No particular reason for the variation, it just worked out that way. Except for visiting the deep wreck or for another singular purpose, all my dives have meandered through the park constrained only by the lettered square and depth that my body occupied on the dive table, and I now have a computer to compute that for me in real time.

Over the island’s Springs, I have been diving with many people. Some, like my brother Andy and friend Dave Porter, are familiar since they inhabit framed pictures scattered through my living space, serving as an antidote to fading memories. Each image captures me in a different wetsuit. Since purchasing my second suit, I have subscribed to the philosophy that a wetsuit can never be too black. So in the images my wetsuits get progressively blacker while I get larger, like an aging rubber tree adding an annual ring of neoprene. One thing that has remained constant, getting into a wetsuit is like trying to push a balloon through a keyhole. My regulator doesn’t change much. I have only had two in 17 years that have served me well in a millennium of dives. One thing I notice is that after the first trip all the images of me in my wetsuit have the hood up, perhaps a subconscious attempt to hide the thinning hair line. (thinning, hell, more like deforestation).

Brandon, I have no photo of you and I on the seawall at Casino Point, which is surprising considering the gallery is full of images from most of our dive escapades through the eastern North Pacific. For one reason or another, I recall others who shared the underwater space as leader or follower but seldom remember the details of a particular dive. They seem to have merged into an amalgam of one line entries in my dive log. I stop to wonder if many of these folks still dive. Does the constant exposure to demands of career, family, mortgage, crabgrass horticulture and other demands of an "adult" make one immune the child appeal of the underwater world? In my case, I hope never to be cured of the affliction.

A decidedly different mixture of divers made the trip this year. Students were in the minority, albeit a sizeable one, with the majority of the divers approaching the dreaded age when we start getting invitations to join AARP as part of the junk mail. But this intergenerational band was no less enthusiastic than in years past when at the age of 30, I was the elder diving aquafossil on the trip. I think it speaks for itself that people who have the means to jet off to distant islands that only a few decades ago were known only to captains of tramp steamers chose to join in the Catalina trip which is designed to fit within the budget of students.

We sailed to the island this year on Catalina Express, eschewing the more familiar big red boats of Catalina Cruises that has had the misfortune of finding itself bankrupt. The Express boats, as the name implies, are faster and a bit smaller than those of their now defunct competitors. The Express terminal at San Pedro serves as our point of departure. Not much difference in portals as the Port of Long Beach is largely indistinguishable from the Port of San Pedro, except the former has disguised oil derricks in the harbor as condominiums. In another break from tradition, Ed and I do not breakfast at the Grinders in Long Beach. (I have since discovered there is a Grinders only two blocks from the San Pedro terminal.) For years we would run to Long Beach to beat the Los Angeles traffic and stop in for a pre-departure meal. Parking rates are about the same, but I can’t help but think the owner of the parking garage across the driveway from the Long Beach terminal now faces a slight cash flow problem with the demise of Catalina Cruises. You may recall that at the Long Beach garage, a small colored dot was placed on your rear bumper to signify the day you parked. In the event of a lost ticket, the dot would tell the operator how many days you had occupied the space. Finding and removing the dot allowed you to claim a one day parking charge, a fact that seemed to pass from trip to trip between students. I have no idea what system Catalina Express uses.

The trip over to the island was unremarkable. One less-than-fond memory of past passages to the island was the constant agitation of hundreds of sixth graders heading to science camp at the Catalina Island Marine Institute. One could not walk without being run into by one of the urchins who would circle the decks like wayward spinning tops looking for animate or inanimate objects with which to collide, only to bounce off and continue their perpetual motion, stopping only to refuel with a candy bar and soda from the snack counter. Once we threatened to start a chum line with some of them if they didn’t stop running into us. Another pleasure on that trip was listening to the adults make fun of the kids who were seasick. In the sixth grade it is bad enough to stand out because of mal de mare without having the teasing of an adult add to your embarrassment. We never had a problem making fun of people in our party who was seasick. We have the photos to prove it.

One superior feature of Catalina Cruises was the built-in scuba tank racks which were far superior to the just kind of stack-it-at-the-back-of-the-boat system that Express employs. The arrangement makes for an interesting ballet as people rushing to get to the gangway at Avalon have to step over divers trying to get their tanks off the fantail. After trying and failing to establish some order to the offloading, I turned to see that the rush has created a passageway clogged by tanks, divers’ butts, and weight belts. My goodness, you would think the Captain had announced the boat was sinking mid-Channel and they forgot to pack the life rafts.

Avalon is a city that likes tourists in general and divers in particular. You want to wander into town in your wet suit farmer johns with the kelp sword dive knife strapped to your inside left calf? You don’t warrant a second glance. You want to push a hand cart through town loaded with dive gear? A local will probably offer to help or at least stop traffic to let you cross the street. You want to pay for that t-short or ice cream with soggy one dollar bills from your dive bag? Your currency is cheerfully accepted. You want to change under a towel at the Point? In other parts of LA it would warrant a ticket for public nudity. Not here, unless you are clumsy enough to drop the towel. The people in the town genuinely welcome us with one or two exceptions.

As we were unloading dive gear at the hotel inevitably blocking the sidewalk a woman in some kind of grounds keeper or junior ranger uniform (green slacks, tan shirt) was really snotty as she barged through our group with a muted snort and sarcastic "excuse me" in a tone that belies her status as the island’s chief officious twit. This was the first time I ever encountered that kind of hostility by a "local." She seemed upset that like we had come to her sandbox to play and she was going to have to share the pail and shovel. I couldn’t tell who she worked for, but she looked more like a parking ranger rather than a park ranger. Her haggard looked bespoke of someone who was not able to outrun that morning’s bison stampede or was tired from having led it. Perhaps she was suffering from one of the maladies contracted from overstaying one’s time on the atoll, such Island fever, Isthmus influenza, Toyon typhoid. The symptoms manifest as a type of neurotic megalomania that has the victim convinced that he or she is the only one who knows how to preserve the island and it the stupid people would just listen, all would be fine.

We switched hotels this year. The old place just doesn’t cut it anymore, her well deserved one star rating was revoked. We had a good run there, but even UCSB students on a budget accustomed to IV living have standards below which they will not sink. Someone half-jokingly mentioned that undocumented workers smuggled onto Catalina packed like sardines in cargo containers chose to continue to live in the containers given the choice of the metal box or the hotel rooms. At least the privy bucket in the container works and holds the crap, unlike the heads at the old place last time we stayed there.

When I first started on this annual pilgrimage/raindance a decade an a half ago, the old place was a decent, inexpensive hotel that catered to the idiosyncracies of divers, like a tendency to hang our exposure suits on a rack hoping they would dry overnight in the gentle breeze to full gale that caresses Avalon in the Spring or the need of secure storage for tons of gear that we haul over for a few minutes underwater. Expeditions have made it to the top of K2 with less gear per person. Face it, divers can be hard on hotels, especially the year when our boy divers took up with girls from the homely Swedish tourism authority for a night of partying and acrobatics.

At the old place, rack space was ample and locking under-deck storage for dive gear was generous. As long as the hotel’s perpetual renovation outpaced its constant deterioration, all was fine. But over 15 years, the battle was lost. Somewhere along the line the hostel became hostile. The spa was drained. The recreation area with ping pong table, a barbeque grille, and patio tables fell into disrepair and then became a holding pen for the building materials that could not be applied to the hotel’s rooms fast enough. After a while, you cooked on the grill at your own risk. Still, all of this would have been tolerable, except the bare essentials began to disappear. A room with a quality mattress (one not rejected by the Salvation Army) and that had glass in the window was considered a luxury suite. But when we were not able to secure our gear bags overnight, that was the last straw. One year an assortment of plumbing fixtures appeared in the storage compartments. Sinks and commodes that should have been installed and working all of a sudden were interred under the deck, displacing our dive gear.

Now, no matter how much the mattress sags, I tend to sleep a lot better knowing that $1,500 worth of gear is safely locked away instead of lying on the ground, exposed to the open night air and wandering bands of dive gear liberators. As they roamed the paths of Avalon at night, these folks would see dive gear strewn about and come to the conclusion that it deserved to be taken away from such uncaring abuse and given to a diver who would appreciate the gear, all for a very modest transfer fee. In any given week, the dive gear tonnage leaving Avalon approximates the amount arriving. And most of it leaves with the same people it arrived with a few days earlier. The town can be seen as one big dive gear transfer station.

But oh my friend, this year we stayed at a fine, well managed hotel, the Hermosa. The grand old lady sits two blocks over from the old place just up the street from the Vons grocery (which was Safeway when you were on the island). That Friday afternoon as I sat on the comfortable chair in the lobby reading my paper and sipping the complimentary coffee. I was content. I imagined that this is what a visit to the island must have been like in more genteel times. I was almost sorry I wasn’t wearing my high starched collar. The wonderful old Victorian, built before the turn of the century (19^th to 20^th ), still retains much of its architecture and charm. I almost expected to see Zane Grey walking down the street toward the Tuna Club. I had a private room this year with queen size bed (for my king size body). Unlike the previous digs, the mattress did not feel like it was stuffed with straw. While some rooms have private baths, mine relied on the European style bathroom on each floor, which was fine with me. The shower rooms on the first level looked like they retain the original fixtures. All was very clean and neat making these accommodations a winner. The only drawback is that it lacks a freshwater rinse area. Plenty of space in the storage locker. Neat staff, too. They went out of their way to make us feel at home. It is nice to be treated as a guest when you are paying to stay somewhere.