It's 5:00 AM and Bob's in town so, naturally, it's time to get moving.

We catch a 6:30 AM flight to Puerto Cabezas located on the northeast coast of Nicaragua.

Puerto Cabezas is the largest urban center in Nicragua's Moskito Coast region. It's a sprawling community of 30,000.

We immediately check into the Hotel Cortijo. There are two: Hotel Cortijo I almost on top of the town square and Hotel Cortijo II located around the corner, down the block and right on the beach. II is definitely the nicer location with sea breezes and private decks with beautiful hammocks. Then again, Cortijo I has a nice inner court and the rooms are air conditioned. Mark and Bob settled into II while Juan, Alex and I took rooms at Cortijo I.

With our gear dumped into our rooms, we headed for the hospital where we found the chamber in operation with two divers being treated inside. There was a third paralyzed diver practicing with a walker. As chance would have it, we also encountered Gary, the very first diver treated by the Puerto Cabezas chamber. Gary had initially arrived paralyzed from the waist down. After hyperbaric treatments, he'd recovered his ability to walk but complained of continuous vertigo. In spite of the original hit and its after affects, Gary went back to diving two years after being paralyzed in order to support his large extended family.

We stopped in to visit a Johnny, a 22 year old father of 3. Johnny was completely paralyzed from the waist down and was not responding to hyperbaric treatments. His father, grandmother and oldest son were visiting with him while we were there. Johnny also displayed some hideous skin ulcers at the base of his spine and on his legs. I thought they were bed sores but, later, learned that burning herbs on affected parts of the body is a folk treatment used by Moskito Indian healers.

Near the hospital, we visited a partially paralysed 40 year old diver diver undergoing daily treatment and therapy at the chamber. He was staying in a home near the hospital. Typical of their social structure, this individual has financial responsibility for an extended family: wives, children, parents. With his loss of income, the impact is multiplied by the number of people he'd been supporting. It wasn't uncommon to encounter divers responsible for supporting more than 20 "family" members.

Most of the crew headed off in a taxi to meet with another diver being treated by the hospital. The taxi was small and we were large so I opted to stay behind. As a result, I was enjoying a Coke Cola at a small cafeteria across from the hospital when Dr. Humberto Olayo arrived. Dr. Olayo is a Moskito Indian M.D. who's been trained in hyperbaric medicine. He operates the chamber in Puerto Cabezas. He and I had a chance to visit and exchange information while waiting for Bob et. al. to return.

Dr. Olayo reported treating 200 divers during 2002; the chamber is being used every day, two divers per day (they only have 2 oxygen masks installed in the chamber). He was clearly pained by the fact that, in seeing so many patients, it's hard for him not to fall into thinking of them as just another patient or chart.

I shared with Dr. Olayo some of the information we'd gathered so far. He was surprised to hear that George Morgan supposedly only handles trap-caught lobster because a paralyzed diver had just been admitted the day before off a boat owned by George Morgan.

When Bob returned, he spent some time with Dr. Olayo going over some new dive tables for use in hyperbaric treatments.

In the afternoon, we headed to the docks without Bob and with Juan staying in the background; neither of them wanted to be recognized and have the word get out that Sub Ocean Safety was back in town. After talking our way past security (the dock gates, unlike last summer, were closed to the general public), I counted 13 lobster dive boats tied up to the dock and preparing for a last outing before the season closed in March. It was quite a scene: 70' rust buckets loaded with people, SCUBA tanks and cayucas. We learned by talking to one captain that his boat had 68 people on board: 25 divers, 25 cayucaros and 18 crew (the captain, 2nd mate, mechanic, compressor mechanic, cook, cook's assistance, the guy who ices the lobster, his assistant, the guy who tails the lobster, on and on). Divers and crew were tightroping across to their boats, cayucas were being loaded onto the boats, kids were swimming around the boats and a clamourous mob of humanity waited just outside the gates. Wives and girlfriends of returning divers were waiting dockside to collect the "last dive" spoils to sell (read about my conversation with Kamil on this subject a few days later).

In addition to the lobster-diving boats, there were a couple of shrimpers and one or two lobster trapping boats. There was also the container ship being loaded with refrigerated containers and topped off with rough-cut lumber. Multiple inquires yielded the same destination: Miami. The ship, the Castor I, makes a bi-weekly stop at Puerto Cabezas on its way to Miami.

After the dock, we headed to the nearby "warehouse" to find the chamber George Morgan was supposed to have moved to Big Corn Island months earlier. In a skeleton of a warehouse, we found the chamber sitting exposed to the elements; it had not been moved since put there last summer by Juan Samuel. Divers had been dying on Big Corn Island while a chamber sat unused.

Kamil, the guy I'd met at the lawyer's office in Managua, had joined us about the time we headed over to check out the stored chamber. He was invited to join us for dinner, did and then became our evening guide to the three discos in Puerto Cabezas. With divers having returned to town earlier in the day, the discos promised to be hopping that night.

The first disco we checked out was Midnight. It ranks at the bottom of the social scale and is the place where fights can be expected pretty much every night. Nothing was happening when we stopped by; too early in the evening for them. So we moved on to the middle class disco: Atlantic. It was crowded, smokey and loud with an impossibly small dance floor. We were quickly fixed up with a table and female dance companions; those of us inclined to dance could do as much as we wanted. When, a bit later, we headed to the upscale Jumbo disco, we found about half of those at our table following along. You know that Jumbo is upscale because there's a cover charge ($C20) and they frisk you for knives (the Leatherman I had on my belt was enough to send me back to the hotel to get rid of it).

Sunday was quiet. I walked around the market in the morning only to find very little was happening. Read some, then walked down to the dock to see what might be going on. The activity of the day before was much diminished and there were only 2 or 3 boats still tied up to the dock; the others had long since departed. The Castor I was gone, heading off to Miami.

I did run into everyone else at the warehouse. Bob was working on stabilizing some of the corrosion using muratic acid and water based paint. When they were done, everyone except me and Kamil headed for the hospital. Kamil and I headed for some lunch.

Over lunch, I learn Kamil is a Pole who's family had emigrated to Denmark when he was young. He studies Project Engineering in Denmark and was in Nicragua completing an internship under Joe Ryan's direction. He'd been in Nicaragua since the preceding September and was making regular trips to Puerto Cabezas to collect information on the lobster industy. Initially, he'd been assigned to study how the divers might make better money. That idea was dumped when it became clear that the divers are already well paid ($1000/month) and more money would simply go toward buying more rum.

The project then switched to studying the economic losses to Nicaragua resulting from the "illegal" lobster market. One of the by-products of lobster collection is that many lobsters are too short or have tails holed by the diver's gaffs. Those lobsters have no value to international markets; they are, however, quite suitable for domestic consumption. There are wharfside buyers for these short lobsters that end up in local restaurants and in the markets of Managua. Additionally, there is a tradition on the Honduran boats that divers get to keep what they take on the last dive of the trip. When the boat arrives at the dock, the women of the divers are waiting to claim those "last dive" spoils that then enter Nicaragua's domestic lobster market by way of a bustling cottage industry dockside. The question being asked by the study turned up some unexpected impacts from the domestic market for lobster.

It turns out that the domestic markets for "illegal" and "last dive" lobsters have a proportionally greater impact on the local economy than the international-market lobster. This is because there are many more middlemen involved with the domestic market. By comparison, the international-market lobster provide high-margin profits for the processors with little trickling down to the local economy.

Later that evening, we meet with Elvis Dublon, a civil-rights leader for Indigneous Peoples of Nicaragua. He was interviewed by Mark and demonstrated an indepth understanding of the lobster diver issues. He's associated with Sub Ocean Safety in that he's supplied Juan with food and a place to stay when traveling to Puerto Cabezas.

Zero too early in the AM, everyone but Juan and I head back to Managua in preparation for the Monday meeting with the Vice-Minister.

Much later, I'm moving off to checkout the first ever diver course for lobster divers sponsored by the Ministry of Labor. I was curious to learn what materials they could possibly offer to help those divers. Along the way, we meet up with Kamil who's heading to the same place.

The class was in progress when we got there but it soon became apparent that an inordinate amount of time (the whole morning, as it turned out) was taken up by introductions and opening statements by the representatives of the groups attending. I did learn that the Ministry of Labor had reduced the number of divers who could attend and gave those seats to representatives of the lobster industry. The result was that we counted only 15 divers during rollcall. Of the company representatives expected in the class, 12 didn't show up. Most of the company representatives had no diving experience whatsoever.

A handout for the class listed the goals of the course:

• convey appropriate repetitive diving protocols and teach use of the PADI dive tables,
• learn prevention and first aid treatments based on the Red Cross First Aid course,
• convey Nicragua's labor laws and diver's rights,
• identify the government agences involved with commercial diving activities.

After a bit, we stepped out in the hall to talk and found national reporters interviewing the Vice-Minister of Labor. That soon changed and Juan was being interviewed which, in turn, led to my being interviewed. The next morning, I found I'd been quoted in LaPrensa, the major newpaper daily of Nicaragua. They got my name wrong (Rocky Donalds) but I did recognize something close to what I think I said. Plus, how many other Rocky's might have been interviewed in Puerto Cabezas that day? In addition to LaPrensa, coverage included national TV and the local radio station. Exposes on the diver situation had been putting a lot of pressure on the Ministry of Labor which explains the reason I was witnessing the first ever class on diving techniques presented to the divers of Nicaragua.

For the lunch break, Juan and I met Elvis Dublon and headed to his home where I'd been invited to enjoy a typical Moskito meal. The Dublon home is a nice, comfortable example of a typical home: small greeting room off the front, dining area moving toward the rear where the kitchen is located, two bedrooms off to each side, bath house behind the house and, farther back, an outhouse. The meal turned out to be a spicy turtle stew with the ubiquitous beans and boiled plantains. It was very good and it's surprising to learn that green turtle meat is cheaper than chicken in the region.

After lunch, it was back to the classroom where, finally, the instructor was doing his thing. I'd talked to the instructor, Humberto Berrios, in the morning and learned he's a PADI Master SCUBA Diver Trainer. His teaching technique verified that association (having experienced many PADI courses in the past) and he was clearly excellent at presenting the material. As he'd told me in the morning, he handled the incredulity and outrage of the divers by repeating that he was only conveying the information.

It was a tough sell. PADI dive tables require hours of rest between deep dives. The Moskito Coast divers spend as short a time as possible between dives, maybe 2 or 3 minutes. Working deeper and deeper waters, I encountered claims of burning up to 20 tanks a day. Those are credible reports based on how long a tank lasts at depth and assuming no rest between tanks. When the instructor gave an example of the an acceptable two-dive time sequence, the commercial divers emphatically dismissed the notion of surface intervals or rests between dives; they pointed out that any diver attempting to rest between dives would lose their jobs and soon wouldn't be able to get another. It took awhile to bring the discussion back under control.

The divers also had a hard time taking the PADI information seriously. PADI dive training leans heavily on the "don't do that or else" with the "or else" part clearly suggesting death or serious injury could be the result. That theme is pretty effective with beginning recreational divers; it didn't work as well with highly-experienced commercial divers who'd been violating PADI procedures, literally, for decades. That the divers had a hard time taking the woeful PADI warnings to heart was demonstrated when the instructor presented a situation where a diver ascends to fast from too deep. What, the instructor wanted to know, would happen? Two divers in the audience turned to each other, smiled and simultaneously responded "and then we die."

Two reasonable complaints about the course presentation was that it was entirely in Spanish (many divers only speak Moskito) and the condescending tone the PADI material comes across as to experienced divers. Indeed, one of the divers stopped the instructor's presentation to emphatically point out that he needed to remember he was talking to people who already are divers.

That evening, I'm in telephone contact with Bob who instructs us to meet them in Puerto Lempira tomorrow or the next day. The meeting with the Vice-Minister of Health was a roaring success and Bob is pumped. I learn later that he's gotten a commitment for funding the installation of the second Honduran chamber. The Vice-Minister was surprised to hear from Bob that he would donate the chamber in return for that funding. The only "concession" Bob made was that they will install the chamber in Bluefields (more voters?) rather than on Big Corn Island.