When Peggy Purdy from Blackbeard's called me and suggested I should consider a trip on their new boat, the Aqua Cat, it had been over two years since my last dive; and I believed it really had been my LAST DIVE. The call came early in 2001 and the new boat was due for delivery from Perth, Australia in a few months.
Bruce and Peggy Purdy have had a 65' catamaran, the Cat Ppalu, sailing out of Nassau for years. It is a bit roomier than the Sea Explorer, and offers a bit more in comfort and privacy, but Heidi and I had looked at it a few years earlier and saw it would be difficult for me to move around on it.
The new 102 ft. Cat offers luxury accommodations with a spacious main salon and eleven passenger cabins, some of the largest of any liveaboard in the world. The 14-knot cruising speed will get you to dive sites quickly while the 4 ft. draft and 35 ft. beam make for a very smooth ride. Looks like a steady deck with lots of flat areas more suited to a clumsy old man.
When I fell making those four or five steps across my livingroom on Father's Day in 1999, as soon as my vision cleared I looked at what I had done to my foot my first thought was, "There goes the Blackbeard's trip in August." Heidi and the kids made the trip that year without me. In the hours and days that followed I accepted that I had been falling a lot and I was very lucky only my toes were broken instead of a hip or femur. And I realized my diving days were over.
Since that time I've moved from limited walking and the use of a manual wheelchair into a powered, tilting wheelchair and a converted van with a ramp. So once we decided to try the trip I remained very concerned. Heidi would help, and my brother and friends who were going along could be depended on for help, but I am acutely aware of my own limitations. Added to the basically hazardous nature of the sport of scuba it would be foolish to approach such a trip without serious concerns.
But I knew from past experience that scuba is also very good for me physically as well as emotionally. I realized I had to try. The boat features three decks of passenger space along with two diving platforms at the stern.