Something Different: One Boat, Two Tech Dives

There was a tech boat on Saturday, which had only me, Rob, Kevin, and Matt on it.  The new team kitty, I guess you could say.  Since we had the boat to ourselves, we could do pretty much whatever we wanted, and initially had intended to do a deeper (15/55 or 12/65) dive.  We debated what to do for the dive, and somehow we came up with this crazy idea of doing two dives in the 150-200' range instead of one deeper dive.  Because hey, we have rebreathers, so why the heck not?

For the first dive, we went to Mount Chamberlin, and dove on the north end of K2.  I really like that area, it has a lot of relief in a small space, and the gorgonians are awesome.  And most importantly, I haven't done that dive in quite some time.  Rob wanted to play around with video on his D800, I guess in preparation for possibly doing some video at Cordell.  So I got to play lighting assistant for Rob for once.  He usually does the lighting for me, and makes it look super easy.  And when I try to do lighting for myself, it never comes out as well (though that is at least in part because my arms aren't long enough; Rob has the benefit of having arms that aren't attached to my body).  So since he was playing with video, I had to play lighting assistant.  It was a bit of a pain, having to follow him around and guess where he wanted to shoot.  I'm definitely not as good at that as he is (and I definitely couldn't do it on the trigger, like Rob has on a few occasions).  I don't think Rob actually produced any video from the dive, since he was just playing around, so I don't really know how good of a job I did with the lighting in the end.  And as a result of Rob playing with video, there weren't any photos produced from the dive either :(  It was a nice dive, with all of the usual K2 creatures... tons of gorgonians, along the wall on the east side, a family of canary rockfish near the bottom on the north side, etc.

For the second dive, we went to Pinnacle Point Wall.  This dive was nearly non-existent.  A minute or so after we got down to the pinnacle, Matt had some sort of gear problem, so we thumbed the dive.  We basically got down there and had enough time to see that the viz was good, though it was dark.  I think we spent more time on the ascent than we did on the rest of the dive :)  Clearly we were not meant to draw outside of the lines with this two tech dives in one day silliness.