Sea Dancer Days

Although is was a non-stop job, I had a lot of fun working on the Sea Dancer. It was a 110' motor vessel outfitted to accomodate 18 passengers and 6 crew. It was a live aboard dive boat with onboard compressor, video, and slide film processing. I had several jobs that I did each day and the days were long.

Steve and I did two different tours together on the Sea Dancer. The first was when first I got on the boat in St. Martin and the other was after we had been living on Salt Cay for a couple of years. Steve actually began his Sea Dancer days in Salt Cay which is part of his story. He was there for four years before he left on Sea Dancer as a stowaway.

When I first arrived, the boat was taking passengers from St. Martin and going to Saba, St. Eustatius, and St. Kitts each week. The passengers were with us from Saturday to Saturday and we had no break in between. The only time off was when, by rare chance, the flights couldn't make it down due to snow or ice. Even when the boat remained in the shipyard for repairs and service we were onboard working even harder than usual but would get to enjoy a dinner on shore or other evening excursions.


My job title was the guest services crew member. I started each week by checking the guests dive certifications and experience. During this process I learned the names of each guest, where they were from and something interesting about them. I usually did this within the first couple of hours they came on board and would later introduce each one to the rest of crew and passengers. Everyone was amazed at my memory and one crew member liked to call me Creskin.

I had fun meeting new people each week and being their "get it" girl while on board. I handled many things, among them; I was their waitress, their housekeeper, their gift shop girl, their slide film developer, their hostess, their reef fish identification instructor, their all around crew person, their dive-master, deck hand, dive buddy, and their underwater photographer. By the end of each week I had taken several photos of each guest and made a delightful slide show and video as a souvenier of their trip. I laundered all the towels each day, cleaned the boat, stocked the cooler, assisted where needed, and kept the ship's log. I also kept the books, sales records, took the money, and divided the tips. They were pretty good too. We averaged around $400 + each week and got a fair salary and a place to live. We were able to save most all of our money (about 30k in 9 mos). Not a bad gig but hard work.

Steve and I shared his small cabin on the Sea Dancer when I first came on board. It was only the size of a twin bed with a small area to turn around in where the door opened. He had built a shelf on the wall over the bed and the wall at the end of the bed had a very small sink and mirror. Believe it or not, we smoked in this little room. We were both smoking when we met and most of the SD crew smoked too. It was disgusting. Some passengers commented but not many complained. Steve and I decided we didn't like it any more so quit together when we took a rare week off to vacation in Dominica.

I had always wanted to go there and when I told this to Steve he was amazed and delighted because he had always wanted to go there too. It was where he wanted to go the first chance he got and when he asked me where I wanted to go on vacation the first thing I said, without hesitation, was Dominica. He wanted to go there because he had heard there was a last remaining population of the Carib indians who once lived all over the Caribbean. I wanted to go because it was the setting of a romance novel I had read years before and I thought it sounded like a romantically dreamy place to go. I knew nothing about indians.

Dominica is a large and beautiful island where coconuts roll down the roads and bananas, papayas, and other tropicals grow wild, it seemed, and everyone there could easily have plenty to eat by just foraging. Sadly, there isn't much industry there, very little tourism, and the tobacco and cocoa business was not doing very well. The Carib community that we saw was a little scary. They appeared to be very poor and had that inbred look, strange looking people. We only drove through, peering at them from our car, and did not feel welcomed to stop or visit.

We drove all over the island and stayed in a different place each night. Our luggage never arrived (we learned that this was the norm there) so we had to buy some cheap clothes to wear. We staying in one old boarding house one night where the bed was so old in was sagging to the floor and mosquitos were coming in through a large hole in the screen and eating us alive. We enjoyed seeing the waterfalls and rainforests. We didn't climb the extinct volcano. I wish now that we had because it is the most famous landmark on the island. We just decided at the time that we didn't want to work that hard.

The very best part of working on the Sea Dancer was the diving. I did so much diving and saw so many things in the sea! We were very comfortable with the gear and being under water. Steve was an instructor and I became a dive master under him. We had to be tuned into each of our guests, their gear, experience level, fear/anxiety, and how well they watched after their own buddy in the water. We saw too many couples who, even though they traveled and dove together all the time, were not the best dive buddies to have looking after one another under water. Many were seen kicking their partners in the head as they went in another direction, oblivious to where or what condition their dive buddy was in. They would go on vacation and, many times, leave their intelligent thinking behind them. This cost one attorney his life and it was the worst week we ever had.

It was on Easter Sunday and the first day of diving for our new group. I had rented this man and his son diving computers the night before and instructed them on their use. He was tired and did not want to sit for my instructions, he said he was on vacation and didn't want to work that hard at learning something. I was concerned. His friends and son said they would help him and make sure he understood it. The computer was a useful tool for keeping up with how much time you had left at certain depths.



This group was from Brazil and seemed to be ready to have a lot of fun. We were really looking forward to the week. The attorney and his son were to be buddys but his son got into the water before him and stayed with another couple as his dad was on the surface for some time trying to relax and descend. He asked for extra weights which our dive instructor, Kimberly, gave him. I'm not sure how much or if it was too much but anyone who is overweighted on a dive will use more oxygen because they spend a lot more energy trying to keep from sinking too deep.



Anyway, this man told his son he was going back to the boat while they were on the dive. His son said he signaled to go with him but he made him stay with their friends. The father was not on the boat when the son returned and we all looked for him for an hour or so. Steve took the dingy down wind and around a corner of the island we were near and found his body. It was a terrible incident to have happen and reminded us of just how serious diving is and there is no room to be careless or foolish. This man was relatively innexperienced, nervous, tired, and he had left his intelligent, hard working mind at home when he went on vacation. Don't do this!



We had a lot of fun on Sea Dancer and very few incidents and only that one death. I really enjoyed working with the people in such an exciting environment. We were always sharing fun experiences together. I got to be the girl who informed everyone of what was going on, where to go and how to find it. I started each day with a chalkboard filled with the days agenda and it usually just read Eat, Dive, Dive, Eat, Dive, Dive, Eat, Dive, Sleep because that is really what we did but we had a lot of fun in between during our surface intervals too!



I became quite a chalk board artist during this time. I was creating beautiful fish and coral scenes. I enjoyed drawing a map of Saba because it is such a steep and jagged island jutting out of the sea and the lowest town, at elev 800' is called The Bottom. Saba had good diving, wild goats, friendly people, and a rain forest. We would take our guests there each week for a dinner on shore which everyone enjoyed.

We docked at Saba or tied up to another large boat which was docked there and crossed their deck to get on shore. When we went ashore at St. Eustacious or Stacia we had to achor out and take the dingy back and forth to deliver the people. Sometimes they would drink too much and it was very intertaining to see them get wet.

The only thing we didn't get much of on Sea Dancer was beach time. There weren't any on the St. Marting route and I only recall us going once while we were in Provo.

The St. Martin Sea Dancer days ended when the owner of the boat decided he was going to move it to the Turks and Caicos Islands and I was not to remain on board as crew. So, I got off the boat and stayed in St. Martin while Steve went with the boat to it's new destination but we were not happy to be seperated. We really didn't consider at the time that I could have traveled to Provo and found work there somewhere. We just knew that we wanted to be together and I was in St. Martin so he got off of the boat, quitting his job there, and returned to me in St. Martin.

We stayed there together for a few months just living in a rent free apartment owned by the hotel and spending what money we had saved. We started snorkeling out and collecting sea fan coral and making earrings out of it at this time. We enjoyed traveling around and exploring all the beaches and communities on the island. St. Martin is half French and half Dutch so it had two very distinct sides. The center of the island was rolling farmland and a beautiful country setting.

Steve called his friend in the states who had originally sent him to Salt Cay and asked what was going on and he wanted us to come to Oklahoma and prepare to open his place on Salt Cay as a bed and breakfast. So this is where we went and spent the next 4 or 5 months.