Bunny for a Day

It seemed like it had been ages since the last BAUE recreational boat (which I think was the July 4 boat, but I could be wrong...). Rob was out of town, so I was left to fend for myself. Team Bunny took pity on me, and since they were down a bunny (August was on trial for bad trim or something) they allowed me to play the part of Bunny #3. The bunnies have a bit of a reputation for being pretty hard core when it comes to long dives. So diving on the boat seemed a perfect opportunity to dive with them without the pressure of doing a 2 hour long death kick dive :) They even granted me permission to dive single tanks, though that didn't work out due to tank logistics (i.e. I was too lazy to get my tanks filled from the previous weekend).

Unfortunately conditions were once again not so stellar. It was really foggy out. At some point, we turned around due to the conditions, though I am honestly not sure where we were when that happened, since it was so foggy. When we pulled up to a dive site, I had absolutely no clue where we were :) Turns out we were at Aumentos. I have only dived this site once before, a couple years ago. So I didn't remember it terribly well, except for the depth range. But Steve was leading, so I figured that was okay :) It was pretty snotty on the surface. Gearing up was pretty unpleasant, and involved a lot of bracing for an incoming wave. We finally got into the water and found that there was a bit of a surface current dragging us away from the boat (perpendicular to the direction we were swimming). We finally made it to the line and headed down. It was pretty bright at the bottom, with decent viz. However, there was a lot of particulate in the water. It was also super surgy, surprise surprise. Once we got to the bottom, we basically just headed around the ridge that we landed on, going counterclockwise. On the opposite side from where we started, we were in a sand channel between that ridge and another. The channel was littered with dead/dying molas. So sad :( Once we got to the end of the sand channel, we turned around and retraced our path back to the anchor line. The one other notable critter siting (if you can call it that) of the dive was that there were a lot of cool kelpfish. It seems like a strange thing to report about a dive, but I just kept finding them!

For the second dive, we headed over to Shale Island. The bunnies had never been here before, but I told them that I thought we should be able to make it around the whole island based on the time/gas that we had. After about 15 minutes, though, I started to worry that we wouldn't make it around at our current pace. So I decided to be a very bad #2 and take over the lead to keep up the pace :) I was looking for an octopus, since I often see them there. I finally found one, a decent sized one at that. Then I realized that Kenn and Steve had no clue what my hand signal for octopus meant. But they finally got it. One other cool find was an Acanthadoris lutea. I made Kenn take some video, although I think he had no clue why I was so excited by a yellow dorid :) I was starting to get a little worried that we would make it back to the line with the gas that we had. I knew that Jim's usual anchorage for Shale Island was close to the big anchor, and since we hadn't passed it on the way back, I was waiting and waiting to find it. I was relieved when we finally found it! And not long after, we found our way back to the anchor line with a few hundred psi to spare.

The bunnies couldn't stick around for lunch (non-diving wives are such a drag!), so I headed over to the London Bridge Pub with a bunch of others from the boat. I really don't like that place very much. Since I was sticking around for the next day (back on the Escapade), I visited Cynthia in the afternoon and then we went to Susan's for dinner, and watched a very girly movie with Susan and Dionna (too girly, in fact, to admit to on the blog).