Thursday, December 23, 2010

The people down here are hugely resourceful- especially the fishermen who live way out in the desert far from the availability of mechanics or replacement parts for their trucks and boats. Here's an example of that resourcefulness:

When we pulled into the Old Mill I noticed that there was a fisherman with a compressor and hookah rig on the deck of his boat tied up along the rock wall in front of the Old Mill.

The boat, the chamber and it's patient. You do what you have to with what little you have when you're a Baja fisherman.

The hookah rig is common down here. The local urchin and sea cucumber divers use them for gathering their product which is then shipped to Japan. Typically these guys dive offshore so it was surprising to see the line snaking over the side and into the harbor. It turns out that the diver at the other end was in a Baja hyperbaric chamber. That means that he was sitting at the bottom of the harbor recovering from decompression sickness he experienced during the day's dive. The story is that he started feeling the effects of the so-called Bends after a day of working under the water out on the reefs. Since there's no hyperbaric chamber for hundreds of miles the only thing they could do for the guy is send him back down to offgas slowly and the only spot they had was at the bottom of the murky bay. Resourceful- and smart; the guy came up two hours later feeling much better. Crazy, but that's Baja.

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