A Whale of a Good Time

I can't believe it, but a year of my life spent working on the PartyPoker.com Million III has come and gone. This event far exceeded our wildest expectations in more ways than I can count. PartyPoker.com and Card Player Cruises not only chartered an entire Holland America cruise ship and turned the top deck of the two-level formal dining room into the finest 40-table cardroom anywhere (with a 270-degree view of the ocean, who could argue with that biased opinion?), but hosted a record World Poker Tour event. Its $3.8 million prize pool was the largest limit hold'em tournament prize pool in history, and along with its 546 entrants, it was the largest WPT event to date. The event ran very smoothly, and everyone had a blast.

In addition to the great poker action, there was a lot of fun to be had away from the tables. One example was an excursion that 28 of my new and old friends and I took while we were in the port of La Paz, Mexico. I had arranged with a diving company to hire two boats to take certified scuba divers, novice divers who wanted to try scuba for the first time (called "Discover Scuba"), and snorkelers out to Los Isliotos. This is a sea lion preserve where you can swim, snorkel, and scuba dive with the seals! It is amazing. I had done this once before, and still have that first visual memory of the seals swimming out to the boat to greet us. Barking and slapping the water, they were an incredible sight to see. Well, this second trip was even more outstanding, and the excursion was great before we even got into the water. Let me explain.

The 29 of us dragged our sleepy poker butts out of bed at the unimaginable hour of 7 a.m. to meet the dive people on the pier at 7:30 a.m. We were driven to the dive shop, where we were outfitted in our wet suits and dive gear. With a water temperature of 69 degrees, a wet suit was needed, and we all pranced about claiming to be the amazing rubber man or woman. It was pretty funny, but maybe you had to be there to appreciate it. The dive site was an hour and 20 minutes away. Ten minutes into the ride, the head guy, Pedro, came to me and said he had just been radioed about a sighting of a bunch of dolphins and whales, and asked if we minded giving up our third scheduled dive to go a bit out of our way to see these creatures. Did we mind? "Floor it!" I said, and off we went.

We cruised around the back of one of the islands and saw some movement ahead in the water. As we approached, we couldn't believe our eyes. We were amid about 1,000 dolphins who were putting on jumping and diving shows for our two boats. Then, a mother whale and her calf surfaced right by our boat. They were within eight feet of us. The photo on this page was taken by Dan Taylor as the mother whale came toward the boat and then dove under it. This made our day, and we hadn't yet gotten wet!

Once we got to the dive site, things got even better. The seals swam out to greet us, and many of my friends got to enjoy scuba diving for the first time and fell in love with it. One member of our party, DeDe Coronado, was literally unzipped by a seal. Linda Johnson was wearing her waterproof safe in the water, and the seals were attracted to it and kept trying to grab it. In doing so, they pulled her through the water! I had a bright yellow tank on, and it seems that seals love the color yellow, so I got my share of direct connections, as well. One boat, with mostly snorkelers aboard, decided to head back to the ship early, and the rest of us went on to a different site for our second dive. There, we dove to a shipwreck in about 60 feet of water. It too was great. Although we were all thoroughly whipped after the second dive, we went back to the ship with smiles on our faces.

All in all, we had a whale of a good time! Class dismissed.

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