Cold Water Kitty

Fiji Trip: Summary

2012-01-25T23:13:00.000-08:00

At long last, I have posted my Fiji trip report! Rob and I spent a week in Fiji, at Koro Sun Resort near Savusavu. The trip was organized by Anywater Sports, and was our first ever shop trip. The diving was nice, and some of it was super awesome. We did a total of 15 dives over 6 days, which of course was not enough diving for Rob. I thought that the amount of diving was in principle okay, but that the amount of time/effort spent diving versus the amount of diving was not really ideal. It seemed like we spent nearly all day everyday diving, or walking back and forth between our room and the dive boat. If I were to go back to Fiji (which I'm sure I will someday), I would do a few things differently. I would definitely do it as a liveaboard -- both so I could do more diving (or the same amount, with more time to lay around and read), and because I imagine that on a liveaboard, a higher proportion of the dives would be of the super awesome variety. I wanted to do something land-based because I wanted to see Fiji and its terrestrial creatures. But I didn't really have a lot of time to chase butterflies anyway, so I think a better way to do it would be a liveaboard with a few non-dive days tacked on at the end. So that's how I'd do it next time! Also, unless I was taking a longer trip, I would try to go somewhere that does not require a flight within Fiji (and this may apply elsewhere as well). We blew almost a day on each end with the travel from Nadi to Savusavu. Assuming there's equally good diving to be done on the same island that you fly into, I would try to do that.

Since this was our first shop trip, here are my thoughts on that. There were certainly both pros and cons to traveling with a group. It was very nice to have someone else do all of the haggling with the airline, especially when they cancelled our flights! On the other hand, our group was definitely too large for the dive shop to handle, and I suspect the diving experience would have been more efficient with a smaller group. Or maybe it would have been exactly the same, but we would have had to deal with all the other crap ourselves. I thought it was fun travelling with the shop, but it would have been a lot more fun with a much smaller group. So I will probably stick to smaller group trips in the future.

Air Pacific is a pretty ghetto airline. I didn't find the flight experience to be as good as I have on other recent transoceanic flights. I guess you don't have that many other options though. To be fair, I heard that the planes we flew on were about to be retired (like within a week's time), so perhaps the new planes are better? I thought the resort was fine; it wasn't particularly luxurious but it was perfectly nice. However, it is definitely a resort with some diving, and not a dive resort. All of the people we interacted with at the resort were very friendly, and some of them gave really excellent service (like the bartender, who knew my name before I'd even visited the bar). The dive shop clearly could not deal with so many divers. They did their best to keep us happy, but I think we would have been a lot happier if there were fewer divers around while we were there. They were perfectly happy to let us wander off on our own, and did not (practically speaking) limit our dive time, which I liked. And Colin really wanted to find good subjects for Rob to photograph (despite Rob's rather stubborn refusal to follow a DM of any sort :P).

So that's the summary. Here are the reports day by day:

Fiji Trip: Getting to Fiji
Fiji Day 1: Hammerheads (or not) and Al50s
Fiji Day 2: Turtle Turtle
Fiji Day 3: Namena Marine Reserve
Fiji Day 4: Macro Day!
Fiji Day 5: Somosomo Strait
Fiji Day 6: The Elusive Hammerhead
Fiji Trip: Going Home

I have included a lot of Rob's pictures in this report, but there are even more and they can all be found here.

And the winner is...

2012-01-22T14:13:00.000-08:00

I held off briefly on selecting a winner for the 2012 Calendar Giveaway, since I wanted to leave the Big Sur Banks post at the top of the blog for a few more days :) But, I wouldn't want the winner to miss out on the January page completely, so the winner is... Doug (the author of the eighth comment)! How convenient for me; since Doug is local, I can hand deliver the calendar.

Big Sur Banks in January!

2012-01-14T21:13:00.000-08:00

As the weekend approached, we were watching the forecast closely. It looked like it should be alright on Saturday but not so good by Monday (Sunday didn't really matter, since we weren't diving on that day!). But the forecast was really volatile. Every time there was an update, things looked different. But Saturday looked like it would be at least pretty good. On Friday, Kevin mumbled something about Sur 19, to which I silently replied "Kevin, you're a moron". But as we headed out of Monterey Bay, the water was flat. Jim asked where we wanted to go, and said that the GPS was currently set to GPS. Okay, I take it back, Kevin is not a moron, or at least not as it regards this one small issue :) Considering the blatantly flat conditions, we decided to have a little fun with Rob, who was asleep, and when he woke up, we told him we were going to head to Lunaticos, because it seemed a bit too rough to continue. Since, as Rob says, I am a very bad liar, the jig was quickly up. On the way down the coast, we saw a couple of gray whales, but we didn't stop to say hello -- there was a dive to do! We also noticed the water color improving as we drove further south. Woohoo.

When we pulled up to Sur 19, the conditions were great! It was a nice calm day to get geared up and into the water. I was the first to splash, and found very little surface current. I'd almost say that there was no surface current, but I was technically slowly moving away from the boat. I corralled the boys and we headed down the line. The line was fairly vertical near the top, and then flattened out as we approached the bottom, because there was some bottom current. The viz was excellent. I think it was the second best viz I've ever had at Big Sur Banks. But since the best viz I've ever had there is basically unbeatable, I think second is pretty good :) I noticed an annoying noise as I was scootering down the line, and I eventually determined it was bubbles from my right post. It wasn't that noisy, but somehow the combination of the sound of my scooter and the sound of the bubbles was surprisingly distressing. It was like someone was whining behind my ear. So I asked Rob to take a look and he made an effort to fix it. That effort failed, so I just had to live with the noise. But I remembered to do my flow check!

We agreed to do a little loop around the base of the pinnacle, looking for GPOs and wolf eels and the like. We did not find any such critters, though I saw a surprising number of lingcod. The school of rockfish that is usually around was not on the main pinnacle. But I found a pretty big group of blues and olives on a little pinnaclet off to the side. I was looking at them, trying to get Rob to come over to take some pictures, but he was not interested. So we headed back to the main pinnacle and spent most of the dive drooling over the hydrocoral. I found a lingcod guarding his nest, so Rob spent a while trying to get a shot of that. The lingcod was really not very cooperative. He was more interested in trying to scoot us away from his nest than posing for a picture. So there was a lot of waiting for him to settle back down by the eggs. Once Rob gave up on that, we spent the rest of the dive on the very top of the pinnacle. The current seemed to have picked up by this time, so posing for pictures (and I imagine shooting them) was quite a pain. Take one shot, get swept across the pinnacle, then scooter back and repeat. But who can complain about having to drift across the top of Sur 19 over and over again?

The deco was pretty uneventful. There were some jelly critters to look at, but not a ton. Early in our deco, a sea lion made a very brief appearance. I whipped out my hero cam in case he came back, but of course he did not. When we got to the surface, we were the first team up, oddly. The surface conditions were so placid that I was lollygagging at the ladder while getting my fins off, and let go of the ladder without either of my fins on. The very mild surface current managed to drag me just beyond reach of the ladder. After attempting to paddle back with my fins on my arms, I gave up and started to put them back on my feet, when Rob swooped by on his scooter and towed me back to the ladder. I felt like a total moron. Rob gave me some good advice about not letting go of the ladder this time :) After we retrieved the rest of the divers, we headed back toward shore and discussed a second dive. Woohoo, my sad little 32% stage has seen so many tech charters without getting in the water lately! We wanted to go to Lobos Rocks, but by the time we got there, it was pretty ugly there. There was much discussion about whether to go, and Jim seemed pretty negative about it. Since I am a bigger wimp than Jim (by a very small margin, let me assure you), I decided that if Jim didn't think it was prudent to dive, we probably shouldn't dive. So I was the first to say I was happy to dive elsewhere. Someone (Jim I guess) rattled off some other options, one of which was MacDonald's. So I seconded that, since Rob had never been there, and I was thinking with this viz, the arches would be great.

Neither Rob nor Kevin had been to MacD's before, and they were both pretty sullen about not diving at Lobos Rocks. So I was responsible for navigating and showing them a good time. I believe I pretty much failed in both respects. The last time I dove there, the anchor was practically on top of one of the arches. I knew if I could find that one, that I could definitely find the other from it. When we got down to the pinnacle, I had not very much of a clue where we were. The viz was not nearly as good as it had been at Big Sur -- it was stirred up in various places, but pretty good in others. Overall it was good but not great. But the water was also a lot more green than it had been at Sur 19. We dropped down one side of the pinnacle, and I saw another pinnacle very close to us. I didn't remember there being another pinnacle this close on this side, and I thought I recognized a spot on that other pinnacle. So I thought we might be one pinnacle over from the arches. After a meander around the other pinnacle, I realized this was wrong, and continued around the first pinnacle we'd dropped on. And found the first arch in very short order. The last time I dove this site, the viz was quite spectacular. In this viz, the site just wasn't quite what I remembered. The swimthroughs were still fun, though. We posed for some pictures, and then headed off to the other one. I totally overshot it, I guess because last time I was swimming and hence we passed it in about one-third the time. Once I realized I overshot, we turned around, and I found the second arch on the way back. We posed for more pictures (quite a lot of pictures, considering only one made the cut and ended up in the BAUE album!) and then headed back to the main pinnacle. We landed near the downline, and I asked the boys if they wanted to thumb it, and they agreed. So we headed up. The conditions had definitely deteriorated a bit throughout the day. It was still not very rough, but not super calm like the first dive.

Still calm enough to lay down on the deck for the ride home. I was looking forward to laying down in the sun, but the sun was low enough in the sky that that didn't really work out too well. I was frosty cold by the time we got back to the dock.

2012 Calendar Giveaway

2012-01-12T21:30:00.000-08:00

Since last year's calendar giveaway was a smashing success, I'm doing it again this year! Here's a thumbnail of the photos in this year's calendar:

Some might say it's too cave heavy, and others will say it's too octopus heavy. Well, if you don't like it, don't enter to win. I'm pretty happy with how the calendar turned out, considering that when I thought back over the year, it didn't seem like it was exactly an epic year for diving. Or for photography. For various reasons, far too many of my posts in the past year have been photo-less. I told Rob that my new year's resolution is to have more pictures on my blog. Sadly that is not really within my control, but maybe that will inspire/pressure Rob.

So, if you want a shot at the calendar, leave a comment by Tuesday, January 17 at 11:59 pm (Pacific time) saying what the coolest dive you did last year was. Mine was definitely my birthday dive at Birthday Wall. Close seconds would have to be the two other dives I did at that site, and the best octopus encounter ever.

Once again this year, I decided to do some data crunching for the past year (and once again I was left wondering why the heck I did it in Excel, instead of a relational database). I "only" did 88 dives this year, which is much lower than last year, but I think I should get extra credit for those 3 or 4 hour cave dives :) I also didn't include any dives in classes or assisting with classes, which by my count took another 20 days.

This year I dove with 15 distinct dive buddies, also down quite a bit from last year. I guess I'm becoming a dive snob. The top 5 buddies by dive count has changed a bit, but no surprises here:

Rob	73
Kevin	14
Matt	9
Clinton	7
Ted	3
Antonio	3

I guess that's technically 6, but there was a tie for 5th. But if I counted all those C2 class dives, Antonio clearly would have kicked Ted's butt.

And the numbers by certification are:

Rec	27
R3	2
T1	8
T2	20
C1	9
C2	21

The count for rec dives might seem surprisingly high, but that's just because I haven't posted my Fiji trip report yet. It's coming soon!

Happy New Year!

Is this dive site getting old? No!

2012-01-08T21:20:00.000-08:00

The weather for the weekend was looking not so good, with Saturday looking really bad and then it calming down a little for Sunday. Rob, Matt and I were planning to go out with Phil on Sunday. Matt also had Phil on Saturday, and Ted and Rob were joining. I decided to sit that one out, and wait to hear on a conditions report. Rob claimed that the conditions were not as bad as expected considering the dire predictions, and that Phil didn't seem concerned about Sunday. Our goal was to hit Birthday Wall, which Matt had never been to before. The downside of planning such a dive is that if we can't make it to Yankee Point due to weather, there aren't that many other options for sites to go to with 12/65. But it turned out to settle down quite a bit by Sunday, and getting to Yankee Point was not a problem at all. In fact, I would describe the conditions as "calm". It was a delightful day to get geared up in the RIB and have oodles of bottles clipped to you. The only problem we encountered was a current that looked to be, umm, what's the word, ripping. It was one of the few times that I really wasn't sure we were going to be able to make it to the site (or to the front of the boat, for that matter) even with scooters. Somehow I was the unlucky one to be volunteered to roll in first. I rolled in, and held on to the line on the side of the boat while Phil got my scooter for me. He handed me my scooter, and said "don't let go, don't let go". Then I was faced with the question of how to hold my scooter, hold the boat, and clip my scooter. I'm nearly certain that requires three hands! In the past when we've deployed in such current, Phil has held the nose of the scooter while I clip it on (which I remembered AFTER the dive). So, alas, I let go. I figured that if my scooter could not get me back to the boat, then it wouldn't get me to the line at the front of the boat anyway. Once clipped on, I hit the trigger, went up to 5, and kicked a little, and made it to the front of the boat. I had told the boys that I was going to go down the line and wait at 20 feet. The 20 feet part may have been slightly mumbled.

I went down to about 25 feet, because that's where the current seemed to let up just a bit, and I held onto the line, occasionally hitting the trigger to relieve my arm. Matt appeared behind me on the line after a minute. I waited a minute more and then asked if 3 was good and could we head down. Apparently the communication was botched; I guess Matt thought I could see Rob, and I thought he could see Rob, so he gave me the okay to go. We headed down the line, and were scootering for what seemed like hours. In fact, it was more like 7 minutes. Somewhere on the way down, Matt passed me, so I figured it was not my responsibility to keep tabs on Rob. So I turned to look back for him, and he wasn't there. So I stopped and looked around some more, and then I saw a tiny beam of light. Apparently we had completely ditched Rob (who was delayed while getting his camera). Oops. He caught up and we eventually made it to the pinnacle (7 minutes in). We switched to backgas, and then headed down the wall. The viz at the top of the pinnacle was quite good; the water was sort of a milky green color, but you could see far, and it was very bright. As we got down deeper, the viz deteriorated, and it was night dark. I guess the big weather from the past days had really stirred up the bottom. There were just a lot of particles in the water. I would still call it at least 30 foot viz, but chunky and very dark. We headed out to the deep area, near where we'd seen all those ratfish last time. We were moving kind of slowly, due to the not so hot viz. Rob found a flag rockfish in the same area where we'd seen one before. So I guess he is a resident -- yay! I have dubbed him "Flaggie". I know, I'm so imaginative. Rob was shooting wide angle, and managed to get only a not very in-focus shot that proved we saw a flag rockfish, before the fish scattered. Wide-angle really isn't the right lens for this site!

As usual, there were quite a lot of juvenile rockfish. I always look at the schools, and find that they all look sort of the same and hard to describe, and hence hard to ID. But today I actually noticed some very distinctive looking fish. I saw quite a few that had a reddish "smear" on the sides of their bodies. Like if you dipped a finger in red paint and poked the side of the fish and then smeared it horizontally along its side. Then later on, as we were heading back toward the shallower area (but still relatively deep), I saw some other interesting looking ones that were sort of a mottled red and white on top, with a yellow underside. Pretty bright yellow. Since these fish were distinctive enough for me to actually described without too much wishy washiness, I was on a mission -- I was going to ID these fish! After doing a bit of research (looking at other juvenile fish pics that Rob had had ID'd from this site before), I thought that the ones with the red smear may be pygmies... though in Rob's earlier picture, the line wasn't nearly as distinct. So I emailed Tom Laidig with my descriptions, and my pygmy theory, and he told me that yes, the first fish sounded like a pygmy. And so did the second. Apparently they can look different depending on where they are -- on the bottom versus in the water column. He sent along a picture for me to look at of the second variety. And it looked just like the fishies I saw. I was very proud of myself for noticing enough details about some juveniles to actually ID them (without a picture!).

Anyhoo, we headed shallower and ended back at the pinnacle we started on. We tried a new profile today, with a deep segment for 20 minutes and a shallower segment for up to 20 minutes (or until we hit gas). Previously we've done a three-level profile, but it seems much more onerous to keep to the schedule with the shorter segments. I definitely prefer the two-level dive. When we got back to the pinnacle, Rob took a few shots of us there. There is always a bit of a swirly current around the pinnacle, and while it wasn't super high current today, it was still enough to make posing for pictures a bit of a pain. Eventually we thumbed it on gas and started an uneventful deco. I felt pretty uncomfortable for most of the deco. I just could not get in trim and comfortable... my isolator was sticking in my head if I was in trim. And if I was out of trim, well, I just wasn't comfortable! I felt like I was finning all of deco. I'm sure it wasn't as bad as it seemed to me, but I was definitely sculling A LOT. I'm sure it was highly annoying for Rob and Matt. However, I didn't need any assistance with my bottle rotation this time, so that was good! I actually remembered to move my shoulder D-ring a bit after my epic fail last time. Okay, I guess it's not an epic fail if you don't actually drop a bottle. Anyhoo, I finally managed to get comfortable for the last 10 minutes of our O2 stop :) I think I just found an out-of-trim position that was comfortable. Rob said that he thought my tanks looked way too high on me. But he always says that, so I wasn't really sure what to make of that.

The surface conditions seemed even better on the way home than they were on the way out. It turned out to be a great day on the boat. It just goes to show you can't always believe the forecasts!

By the way, Rob has dubbed the little boulder pile with the flag rockfish "Flaggle Rock". I think this is an adorable name, since I've always been a HUGE Fraggle Rock fan (and I make frequent references to it to Rob, which he finds rather odd).

Sadly, I have no pictures to post for today. Rob claimed none of the pictures were good enough to post, even though I disagree. He's not being very supportive of my new year's goal! But don't worry (SPOILER ALERT), there are some awesome pics from this site coming soon :)

Update: After much whining, Rob offered up this one picture from the dive. So now you have the privilege of looking at Matt, sporting his analogous color scheme, shooting a bag.

Madison

2012-01-02T14:51:00.000-08:00

On Monday, we went to Madison. The temperature must have dropped like 20 degrees from the day before -- it was pretty freakin' cold while we were setting up! So, Rob has apparently decided that the only dive worth doing at Madison is Rocky Horror (or rather past Rocky Horror). On our last trip, he and Kevin dove there (without me) and I guess he thought it was super awesome. So he decided, without really asking my opinion, that that's what we would do today, and so we would double stage so we could bask in the full glory of the awesomeness past Rocky Horror. I was not too convinced, first because I wasn't totally thrilled to double stage it, and second, because I am in mortal fear of Rocky Horror :P So I warned him that I might wimp out, but agreed to at least go down there and check it out. Rob also wanted to go in at Martz, which I know nothing about. We pulled in to the parking lot, and I really really had to go to the bathroom, and he told me I had to decide *right then* where I wanted to enter (so he could decide where to park). So I told him to just park by the main entrance. I think that was the wrong answer, but that's what he gets when he asks for a snap decision when I am under duress!

There were two other teams there, and we chatted a bit with the guys getting geared up next to us. I guess Rob had chatted with the other team, who was entering at Martz, and no one was planning to dive Rocky Horror. So we didn't have to worry about that. We setup our bottles (brrrr) and loaded them all into the water, and then got geared up and into the water. After clipping on all those bottles, we headed in, with me leading. The viz was not too stellar in the early part. It was pretty green and relatively murky until just past the Martz jump. Then it was crystal clear. A bit after that, we saw a team coming out ahead of us. The tunnel was not terribly wide at this point, so I found a spot to tuck into the side, and waited for them to pass. Just as I was about to get going again, I saw a light ahead. The other team was coming out too. They were a little ways down the passage, but I decided to just wait where we were for them to pass. Then we got going again, and dropped our stages before the half-hitch. When we got to the jump, I installed the spool, and we headed down the tunnel and I dropped my second stage just a few minutes before hitting the checkin sign. By the time we got there, I had already decided I didn't want to do Rocky Horror, but I had been thinking I'd at least go to the end of Potter's Delight. But then when we got to the sign, I figured it would be easier to just turn it there, rather than having a big conversation about it in Potter's Delight. So much to Rob's dismay, we turned around.

We headed back out and when we got back to the mainline, I asked Rob if he wanted to head back up the mainline. He shrugged so I took that to mean yes, so I dropped my stage and headed right. From there we just followed the mainline for a while. We got just a few minutes further than I have ever been. Eventually I turned the dive because it was getting silty (actually it had been silty for a while) and twisty turny and a bit smaller, and I got tired of threading myself around while trying not to stir up silt. As soon as I turned it, Rob sort of took off, I guess to demonstrate to me just how slowly I had been going on the way in. I got back to my stage, and picked it up and switched onto it. While the flow was down, it was definitely there, and we made much better time on the way out. When I got to my second stage, I still had a ton of gas in the stage I was breathing so I just picked it up and never even went back onto it on the way out. Just a bit after that, I got to a spot where the cave went from about 60 feet to about 65 feet, and I could not clear my right ear. It was like it had half-cleared, and every time I swallowed, I could hear it click, and it was very uncomfortable. Meanwhile, Rob was swimming really fast and I was barely keeping up with him. I was a bit worried that when we came over the hill right before (after) the Martz jump, that I wouldn't be able to clear coming back down. But actually coming up shallower in that spot let me finally clear. Then I suddenly realized, that I had dropped a cookie on the way in, at the jump to Martz (because someone else had installed a line there), and I had neither noticed it nor picked it up on the way out. Doh! I guess I was a bit distracted trying to clear my ear and keep up. So I had to stop Rob and turn us around to go and get that. Once that was taken care of, we exited without incident.

When I got to my O2 bottle, I picked it up and rotated one of my stages back, as I continued swimming through the cavern zone. I was thinking... why can't it be this easy to rotate bottles at home!?! When I mentioned this to Rob, I said it was probably because I didn't have gloves on (well, fingerless gloves) and my hands weren't cold. He suggested that it was probably psychological, because I wasn't afraid of dropping the bottle (and watching it plummet to the bottom, 1 foot below me :P). True. We got out to the basin and negotiated a little bit of deco -- 10 or 12 minutes I think. As we walked up the path back to the car, we were greeted by a stiff breeze. Brrr.

Ginnie, with Pictures!

2011-12-30T20:23:00.000-08:00

After last year's successful New Year's trip in cave country, we decided to do it again. We flew out on Thursday night, on the redeye. I think I got about 2 hours of sleep between the two flights, plus I had a horrible cold (so bad in fact, that I even verbally questioned to Rob whether I could make the trip). When we got to High Springs, I promptly collapsed in bed and declared my need for a nap. Rob disappeared to EE and the storage place to get tanks and such, and just under 2 hours later, he started to make it known to me that he would really like me to get up soon. Grumble. So I dragged myself out of bed and we headed to Ginnie. I finally convinced Rob to bring his camera to Florida, so I suggested we just do a not too ambitious dive at Ginnie, and he could bring his camera. So the plan ended up being to head up the Hill 400 line to wherever, just taking it slowly so Rob could get some pictures.

I volunteered to lead the dive. It has been a long time since I have run the line at Ginnie. Since there seems to be a constant escalation in the amount of gear schlepped along on such dives, I have been making Rob run the reel there a lot lately. So I figured it was time to suck it up and do it myself, plus with "only" one stage, now was a good time to do it. Well, a stage and a deco bottle, but that doesn't really count. I think we finally got to Ginnie around 3. I was delighted to find that Rob had already setup my doubles for me. I should nap more often! We got geared up and into the water, and we were off. I was sad to find that someone else had already run their line pretty much the way I like to run it. After negotiating that and running the line down to the 30 foot room, I found a pair of divers loitering in there, and had to make my way around them. We dropped our O2 bottles and then I headed to the sign. At this point, I found that the existing line started on the right side, then moved over to the left. I crossed under it so I could start on the left and then couldn't figure out what to do next, without having to cross back under it again halfway down the restriction. So, naturally, I gave up and handed the reel to Rob and told him he was captain :) After some eye rolling, Rob headed down the chute, and pretty much ran the line in the only mediocre way that I could come up with to run it. Once we got to the mainline, I took the lead again.

It was a pretty crowded day at Ginnie. We passed another team (or maybe it was a singleton, Rob said after the dive that he thought it was) in the gallery, and then a team of 4 just past the lips. We would eventually pass another team on the way in as we were headed out. Anyhoo, we got through all of the annoying parts and dropped our stages just a bit before the Hill 400 jump. As planned, once we got to the jump, we switched order, so Rob could stop and direct me where to pose for pictures. After we installed the jump, he made me go back to the mainline to pose for some pictures of me entering the hill 400 tunnel. After that, we slowly ambled up the tunnel, stopping now and then for pictures. We eventually made it to the bats and then I turned it. We swam back most of the way, and stopped a couple of times for more pictures once we were almost back to the mainline. And then of course, Rob had to get some pictures of me pulling the spool. He loves those action shots, but I always feel like I am being judged. However, I do think the pictures right at the jump are some of the best... I like how you can see the two tunnels diverging. As we approached our stages, I just knew he wouldn't be able to help himself, so I posed as I approached mine, and sure enough, he had whipped out his camera for some pictures. We got back onto our stages, and continued out. As we approached the park bench, he was signalling and pointing, and I thought he wanted to go up that line. I didn't want to, because my sinuses would bothering me. But then I realized he just wanted me to pose for some pictures, so I obliged. Then he stowed his camera for the ride out.

When we got back to our reel, Rob asked if I was going to get the reel. I was like "no thanks, you can do it". I could tell he was miffed by this. I headed up to the 50 foot room and waited for him. When he got there, he was clearly annoyed with me for sticking him with the reel :) I headed up the restriction, got my O2 bottle and waited for him. The ascent was bothering my sinuses, so by the time we got to 20 feet, I had a wicked sinus headache. I thought my eyeballs might pop out of my head during deco, but they did not, phew. I took my favorite spot on the ledge, and Rob was just hanging out in front of me. I asked him several times if he wanted the spot next to me on the ledge, but he did not. I guess he was really annoyed about my reel shenanigans! I think he was a bit unhappy that we didn't go anywhere too exciting on this dive, but I think the pictures turn out pretty nicely, so I thought it was a good way to spend the dive.

All of the pictures from the dive are here.

K2

2011-12-18T20:18:00.000-08:00

Sunday we were on the Escapade, diving with Kevin. Even though the forecast had originally looked best for Sunday, in the end there was a pretty big swell. But it was very long period, and there was very little wind, so it was a pretty comfortable ride. The breakers near Point Pinos were pretty impressive, however. On the way down, somewhere between Pinos and Cypress Point, we encountered whales. There were orcas! I've never seen orcas before, so I was pretty excited. In fact, this was the best part of the day (which probably spoils the rest of this report :P). We eventually made it down to Yankee Point, and after some discussion, we decided to go to K2. I was recently looking at a picture from a previous dive near K2 of this super cool crack/canyon that we found. So I wanted to try to find that again (though we have tried on other occasions, and not yet made it back). So this was the plan -- head north and try to find that spot. That area is always pretty cool, even aside from that exact spot.

We dropped in and found not so good viz, and a wee bit of surge. Actually there was an insane amount of surge near the top of the pinnacle -- gotta love that long period swell. There was the usual school of blue rockfish at the top of the pinnacle, but we pretty much just headed past them and down the east side wall. I couldn't believe how much the viz had deteriorated since Friday! It was green and quite crappy today. We headed north, and well, I was just following Rob. At some point I realized that I really didn't know where we were. We headed out and then at some point turned around and I thought we would be in the sand channel to the east of K2. But I quickly established (based on depth, etc.) that that's not where we were :) We eventually ended up in an area that was much deeper than we usually end up when we dive the north side of K2 -- the bottom was at least 230 feet. I guess we were further west than usual (though I didn't put this together during the dive).

I saw two things of note on this dive. First, I saw a basket star -- pretty standard for the north side of K2 :) It was on a gorgonion that was fluttering in the surge. Poor little basket star looked like he was having a wild ride. Later when we were in the deep are, we saw *the* cool critter of the dive. Rob signaled me and I looked up to see a BIG mola. It was like a diver-sized mola (in length... Rob pointed out he doesn't know any divers shaped like that). It was definitely the biggest mola I've seen underwater, though I've seen one about that size on the surface before. Sadly, it had a chunk missing from its bottom fin. However, it was still able to swim, so maybe there is hope for him. It was so dark and green that I didn't even bother trying to get any video of it (and Rob didn't bother trying to get a picture). In hindsight, I'm not sure why... it was a cool siting, even crappy evidence would have been better than none!

We eventually attempted to head to a shallow area, and ended up spending like 10 minutes trying to find the peak. We came to a spot topping in about 140 feet, and hung out there for a bit, then went off looking for the peak. We gave up and came back to the same spot. Then after a few more minutes, I suggested we start our ascent (early, because that little barren peak was pretty boring). Rob suggested looking around for just another minute, and this time he got it right, and we found the peak. As we approached it, we realized it was surgy as hell, and decided to keep our distance from the reef. Other teams apparently did not have such a realization until they ended up tasting rock :P From a safe distance from the reef, Kevin put up the bag and we started our ascent. The deco was pretty uneventful.

On the ride back, not too far from Point Pinos, we encountered more whales -- greys this time. We spent a while watching them; we had some pretty near-boat encounters. After they lost interest in us, we headed home.

Even though both Rob and Clinton were on the boat, neither took a single picture. I guess that says a lot about the quality of the dive!

A Rec 3 Scooter Dive

2011-12-17T16:22:00.000-08:00

Since our boat plans for Saturday were cancelled, we decided to do a rec 3 scooter dive at Lobos. It was me, Rob, Leah, and Matt. Despite the forecast calling for bigger seas, it was in fact calmer than it had been on Friday. Monastery looked quite nice in fact. It was cold and gray when we got there though. We decided to go to the Road to Twin Peaks for a bit and then the Sisters for a bit longer. Then we would optionally hang out in the 50 to 70 foot range around Lone Metridium/Hole in the Wall for a while (after switching to our 32% "ascent gas"). That's right, we were actually doing the 32% ascent gas thing... So a real rec 3 dive (actually our back gas was 18/45 but details details...). Leah proposed a deco plan which I knew would clear with 18/45 too. I'd been playing around on DecoPlanner with the 18/45, 32% combination earlier in the week, because who knows how to plan a dive with that gas combination :). Leah didn't want to lead since she'd never been to the road before. So I volunteered. Strange, I know.

The tide was a little low, but coming up. Getting in was not a problem as long as you timed it right. There was a small but very long period swell which occasionally churned things up. You know what that means for the surge :P. We scooted out on the surface over what looked like pretty clear water. We dropped just past the worm patch. It turned out that the clear water was a layer on top. On the bottom it was really murky. I did a quick flow check since I was using foreign tanks (Ted's Worthington 85s, gag) and then we headed out along the sand channel. The murk persisted until we got to about 45 or 50 feet and it abruptly opened up. Yay. It was not epic but it was nice viz. We headed around HitW and over to Lone Metridium, then over the sand. As is often the case, we ran into s column of rockfish in about 70 or so feet -- blues and a few olives. We stopped to appreciate them for a minute and then continued on to the first sister (which as usual I was relieved to actually find). We paused at the second sister so Rob could deal with some bottle shenanigans; for gas logistics reasons he was diving a stage of 18/45 (okay perhaps I can't really claim this was a Rec 3 dive :P). Then we headed down the road a couple of minutes to the first spot with big vertical structure. We all agreed to kick around there for a while. The barnacles are out on the road though many are dead. There were also a bunch of the barnacle-eating slugs around (pretty dense in spots on the sisters). I was looking for slugs, hoping to find a Kitty slug to show to Leah, since we were in the right area, but no one found any. I did see another Aldisa albomarginata... they must be "in bloom".

After about 10 minutes there, we headed back to the second and third sisters. In addition to the carpet of Onchidoris bilamellata, I saw a bunch of clown nudis and some Hiltons. Eventually we headed back toward the Lone Metridium area and switched to our 32 bottles. We spent a while there and then headed over to Hole in the Wall and looked around. Eventually I was starting to get kind of cold and bored so suggested we head in. We scootered in to the worm patch and Leah shot a bag and we did our deco and ascended there. When we surfaced, the sun had come out and it was still quite calm on the surface. The tide had come in during the dive, making the exit quite simple. After packing up our gear, we headed to RG for lunch.

Rob didn't bring his camera, because yesterday's stuck button problem drained the battery (and he didn't bring a charger :( ). So no pics today! I did bring my hero cam but since I am iPad blogging on the road, that will have to wait.

Back to Cold Water

2011-12-16T22:44:00.000-08:00

It seems like I didn't do a lot of diving in November, so somehow I agreed to a three day weekend of diving this weekend. Three days of diving is always nice, though considering it was wedged between the weekend that we got back form Fiji, and the weekend of Christmas, it was in hindsight a bit crazy :) We had plans for a Team Kitty dive on Phil's boat on Friday, then diving with Matt and Leah on Phil's boat on Saturday, and a BAUE tech charter on the Escapade on Sunday. Rob really wanted to shoot for Birthday Wall. After our first dive there, I told Rob we needed to go back with deeper gas, so we planned a 12/65 dive. The forecast was calling for pretty calm seas on Friday that were getting progressively bigger through the weekend. When we arrived at Lobos, conditions looked a little bigger than expected, just from watching the water over by Granite Point. But without much discussion of conditions or where we could go, we launched the boat, and Rob headed south. As we were coming around Point Lobos, it was actually quite snotty -- lots of wind chop. I wasn't feeling too positive about making it to Yankee Point. But once we got around Point Lobos, the wind calmed down. There were still very large swells -- much bigger than forecast -- but I find those more tolerable than wind chop. On the other hand, I was a bit nervous with Rob driving; he drove all the way to the site, and then handed the wheel over to Phil when it was time to find the spot and drop the anchor. After a bit of driving around, we eventually found a spot in the 150s, and we dropped the anchor there. Conditions were not too bad as we got geared up; there were big swells but they were long period so it didn't feel too bad.

After we rolled in and headed down the line, we found that the viz was pretty good, though not epic. The water had a greenish tinge to it, and it got darker as we got deeper. But despite the darkness, the horizontal viz was good all the way to the bottom. We passed the spire on the way down, and paused at the little plateau, then headed down the wall. As we approached the edge of the wall, we found a HUGE school of juvenile rockfish. It was so dense that we couldn't really see through it, and it was probably at least 30 feet high and 100 feet wide. It was like those super dense groups of anthia you see in the tropics, but it went on and on. I have never seen such a large group of juveniles before. Rob tried to get some pictures, but was having some camera problems. So after playing around in the school, we continued down the wall, and headed to the north/west. We followed the wall, pretty close to the bottom, for a minute or so, and then Rob headed out over the sand and sort of cut the corner where the reef juts out to the left from the main wall. So we landed on that section of the reef, but further out than I think I have been on it (I guess, since the bottom was quite a bit deeper). As we were over the sand, I noticed that the max depth on my gauge read 297 feet, and I decided that that would be no way to end a dive. So I descended a little and then jammed my arm below me so it would surely read 300. Unfortunately it came back reading 301. I really like round numbers, so it was a bit of a disappointment :P Rob caught me in the act of sticking my gauge below me and just gave me a disapproving look. Anyhoo, as we were approaching the reef, we ran into a ratfish. It was swimming along, bumping into the reef on occasion. Once we approached it, it turned and looked at Rob, and swam straight at him, and then bumped his scooter, before veering away. It was a great ratfish encounter. Rob whipped out his camera, but had some sort of problem with it. Apparently he has finally found out the depth at which the buttons don't function :) So the camera was a bust for the whole dive, hence the lack of pics in this report (boohoo).

After that we were just kicking around near that spot, I was checking out a couple of bocaccio just off of the structure, when I got a signal from Rob and looked below to see him pointing his light at a flag rockfish. Woohoo! A minute or two after that, I got a signal from Kevin, and then he swung his light around and lit up a group of silver, very reflective fish. I couldn't figure out what they were until I swam over toward him, and saw that they were ratfish! There were 10 or 12 of them swimming along in formation! It was awesome. I excitedly signaled Rob, and he came over to take a look. Stupid stupid camera! It was just about time to head shallower, but not before Rob and Kevin found a wolf eel too. They gave me the signal, and I was like "very nice, time to go" :) If it had been a GPO, maybe I would have stayed to check it out. So we headed up and back toward the anchor line, meandering along around 200 or so feet until we got back to the spire. Then we came up a bit shallower so we could switch onto our 190 bottles. I noticed that there was the same little swirling current around the spire as the last time, though this time it was pretty insignificant. After switching to our bottles, we wiled away the time on the top of the spire, looking for nudibranchs :) Rob found an Aldisa albomarginata, which I haven't seen in a while. Once he pointed one out, I saw at least one more.

Once it was time to go, we started our ascent, not moving too much from the structure. Kevin put up a bag and we were on our merry way. When we got to 70' and I switched onto my bottle, I got a mouth full of water. I went back onto my backgas reg, hack hack hack. My first thought was that the valve was closed (but the line was pressurized, since gas came out when I purged it), but I checked and it was in fact open. I was thinking to myself "I am NOT sharing gas for the next 45 minutes" (not that I would have needed to, since we conveniently had a bunch of 190 regs no longer of use to us). After a bit of futzing with it and purging it, and confirming that gas really did come out of it, I tentatively put it back in my mouth and took a small breath; it was a little wet but definitely breathable. It seemed to improve after a few more breaths. After all of the excitement, we just hung out for a few minutes, and then Rob rotated his bottles. On deco, we always go around and report our max depth. They each reported theirs, and then when it was my turn, I saw a little flinch from Kevin :) I never go deeper than the boys, except for that one time when my wing failed on the bottom :P

At 60 feet, Kevin rotated his bottles, and I decided to just wait until the next stop. I guess that was a good choice, considering the shenanigans that would ensue. We got to 50 feet, and I signaled that I was going to rotate my bottles. I brought my leash forward and moved my 190 bottle to it. Then I took my O2 bottle and went to clip it to my chest D-ring. I kept thinking that I needed to aim low, since I remembered that that pesky D-ring is a bit too low. But I just couldn't find the D-ring. I kept going for it and not being able to find it. I think it was pulled even lower than usual because I had an 80 of 50% (whereas I usually lame out and bring a 40 when I'm diving 3 bottles). So I finally decided to move the 190 bottle back first, to free up both hands to deal with the O2 bottle. And then I couldn't get IT clipped! I finally gave up and handed it to Kevin while I dealt with the O2 bottle. Then, with two hands free, I tried to pull the 50% bottle out of the way, and get that bad boy clipped. But it just wasn't happening, and my hand was starting to feel cramped up holding onto the clip, and all I could think of was my O2 bottle plummeting to the bottom of the ocean. So I told Rob to come and clip it for me. Hehehe. It was terribly embarrassing, and I signaled as much as soon as he finished it. Then I turned back to Kevin and gave him the "give me that bottle" signal. He was like "no, don't worry about it" and then I was like "give me my freakin' bottle" and he handed it over :) I think he thought I was too frazzled to be trusted with it :P I guess that is what we call a "team bottle rotation"!

After that, deco was pretty uneventful. There were tons of deco critters; lots and lots of salps from about 40 feet up. When we ascended to 30 feet, we went through like a layer of salp chains and then at the stop we were looking down at tons and tons of them. Aside from that there was the usual menagerie of unnameable jelly creatures. No deco mola today :P We surfaced to biggish swell but still not really much wind. The ride back actually seemed calmer than the ride down, though it was still a bit dicey coming around Point Lobos. Once we got back to Whalers, we noted the good viz in the cove, and then hurried to get packed up and out of there in time to get to Siamese Bay for lunch. Yum!

Phil broke the news to us that he had to cancel for Saturday, so we were left to ponder the plan for the next day. But to soften the blow, Phil let us stop by in the afternoon to meet his million-toed cat :)

Fiji Trip: Going Home

2011-12-10T20:04:00.000-08:00

Beach across the street

On Saturday it was time to go. Our luggage was picked up from our room around 8, and then we went to breakfast, wandered around taking some last pictures (like of this beach, which I never actually went to during our stay), and got on the bus for Labasa a little after 9. We were on a woefully under-provisioned bus. We were barely making any progress going up the hills. This bus made the bus that we rode on the way in seem great! At some point, on the way up a hill, there was a guy on a horse, carrying a machete, and he was making it up the hill faster than we were. The driver kept telling us that we would make it to the airport in time. First we would be there by noon. Then just a bit before noon, we passed a sign saying that Labasa was another 40 kilometers. Hmmm. Then about 8 kilometers from the airport, the bus broke down. Ginny told the bus driver to call cabs for us NOW. He got on his cell phone and we all de-bussed. The guys on the bus quickly unloaded all of our luggage from the bus. We had broken down right in front of a gas station, which was convenient, because there was a place we could stand in the shade. However, their phone was not working, so we were at the mercy of the bus driver (for some reason, no one was having success calling the resort to ask them to arrange taxis for us).

Broken down bus

Eventually a taxi just happened to show up, to get gas. Ginny and a couple of others got in and went to the airport, so that they could arrange for more taxis to come and pick us up. A couple minutes later, another taxi showed up, and agreed to take some people to the airport, for 25 FJD. Rob and I invited ourselves along in that car. It was a small pickup truck with a front and back seat. Three of us (the Waltons and I) rode up front, and the three young men (including Rob) sat in the bed, with our bags. There was a canopy over the truck bed, which kept out the sun. On the way to the airport, it began to rain and then to pour. Apparently the canopy didn't keep water out, but the driver pulled over and put a tarp over it, and then it kept the rain out. But in the meantime, the guys got pretty wet. We got to the airport, and only as we were about to pay the guy, did we find out that we weren't actually in a taxi, just some guy's car :) There was some discussion about how the bus company was going to pay the taxi drivers, but since this wasn't a real taxi, they might not pay him. We happily paid the guy anyway, since we were just glad that someone got us to the airport! I hope the guy managed to get some more money from the bus company!

Our ride to the airport

It turns out that our flight was running a bit late anyway, and they didn't seem to mind waiting a bit longer until everyone made it to the airport since we had like 36 of the 40 seats on the plane (I'm not convinced the plane would have taken off any sooner anyway). On this leg of the trip, they actually did weigh my carry-on, which was way below the weight limit. They didn't weigh Rob's bag, I think because he carried it like it was really light (while I carried my much lighter bag like it was really heavy!). Once we got to Nadi, we had an epic long layover (like 7 hours I think), which was super boring. I had originally been thinking we could go into town to do a little shopping, but it was raining really hard when we arrived. So I decided to do my shopping at the airport instead :) There is a cafe there that has comfy couches to sit in, and lots of outlets to charge laptops, iPads, etc., so a bunch of us passed several hours there. We managed to score exit row seats again, but not on the upper deck :( I slept for most of the flight back, woohoo. When we got back to LAX, we had like another 5 hours until our flight to SFO. We confirmed that that really was the soonest flight to SFO, and though there was an earlier flight to San Jose, it was already overbooked. So we didn't bother standing by on it, and instead headed to the Admirals Club, where I had the best shower ever (or so it seemed). Ahhh, to be clean after that trip!

We finally made it back to SF around 6:30 and in a show of super-human endurance, we raced home, changed, and then drove to Santa Cruz to go to Jim's annual Christmas party; and still made it in plenty of time for the gift exchange! Here's what I contributed to this year's gift exchange.

Yes, that's a teaser. More on that topic later.

Fiji Day 6: The Elusive Hammerhead

2011-12-09T22:55:00.000-08:00

Our trip included the first five days of diving, but there were a few of us that were not too excited about spending the last day not diving. So we put a boat together for the last day, but there were only like 7 or 8 people on it. I think this was a way more reasonable number of people to have on the boat (the Bligh Explorer). The original idea was to go dive some "other sites" that they don't typically dive, just to check them out. We'd already been to all of the best local sites, some of them multiple times, so we were happy to do something new. But on the way out, we stopped at Purple Gardens, because Colin really really wanted to try to retrieve Rob's lost canister (actually it was my lost canister, but it was the one that Rob lost). We told him like a million times that we really didn't want him doing a deep air dive on a single tank on our account, but he didn't listen. So in he went, for a bounce to the bottom. He returned about 10 minutes later, having retrieved the canister, the weight that Rob had stashed behind the canister on his waist strap, and Rob's lost mask. Not bad :) Rob wanted to know where the plastic buckle was ;) He also reported that the bottom was "only" 160-some feet, not the 210' that we expected.

Purple Gardens is pretty close to Dreamscape, and after we pulled anchor there, the DMs noted that the currents looked favorable to see hammerheads. So we had a last minute change of heart and decided to make one last attempt. Our hope was that with fewer people in the water, we may be less likely to scare the sharks away. Rob was, once again, shooting macro, so we also thought that would help our odds of seeing sharks :P We headed out into the blue, not really seeing much for a while, and just when we had sort of given up, we saw exactly one hammerhead. Woohoo! It swam by us, close enough to get a good look. Then it swam off. A minute or two later, there was another sighting, presumably of the same shark (but who knows). Well, now I have officially seen a hammerhead :) We eventually made it back to the reef where we spent the rest of the dive looking for nudibranchs and such. Someone (a DM I think) found a scorpionfish really close to the anchor line, which was pretty neat. I guess Rob didn't get a publish-able shot though.

For the second dive, we went back to Turtle Alley, sort of. Apparently if you go one direction from the anchorage, it is Turtle Alley, and if you go the other way, there is another site (I think with some swim-throughs). Since Rob was shooting macro, Colin really wanted him to see the juvenile rock-mover wrasse that is a resident near Turtle Alley (which we didn't see on our previous dive). So he convinced Rob to "follow the DM" for the first few minutes of the dive, so he could show him that, and then we could do our thing. I'm glad that Colin insisted, because that is one cute little fish! We hung out with him for probably like 10 minutes, watching him dance around. From there, we headed out along the wall, in the Turtle Alley direction, just moving along slowly looking for critters. We found some more of the same kinds of slugs we'd seen on previous dives, plus Rob found a *really* tiny slug that wasn't in their ID book. Rob didn't think the picture was too great, but I convinced him to post it, since I thought it was such a great find!

One of the waterfalls by the spa

In the afternoon, I went to the Rainforest Spa to get wrapped in a banana leaf. This may come as a surprise, but I'm not exactly a big spa person, but everyone was talking about the banana leaf treatment. Even Kevin Barry was raving about it! So I figured if people as diverse as Kevin Barry and many of the middle-aged ladies on the trip liked it, well I should give it a try. Heading up to the spa (which is up the hill in the "rainforest"... they drive you up there in a little van) was a good chance to see the rest of the resort grounds, since I'd mostly just been walking from our bungalow to the boat dock all week. There are a lot of nice flowering trees and shrubs (which I guess they get the flowers for around the resort from) and many fruit trees (where they get the fruits that they serve). On the way up, we stopped by the stream where there were some guys tending to the food buried in the earth that we would be eating for dinner that night. The lady who would be doing my treatment (who was riding up to the spa with me) hopped out of the van and collected some big banana leaves from those guys, who had apparently been tasked with picking some big banana leaves for the spa.

Getting wrapped in a banana leaf was pretty fun, and I smelled like a coconut afterward. Here I am, all wrapped up.

Fiji Day 5: Somosomo Strait

2011-12-08T22:52:00.000-08:00

Today we went to Somosomo Strait, which I thought would be the best dives of the trip, since this area is so famous. But actually I think that Namena was better (though Somosomo was certainly the second best). The sea conditions were super good for the trip, so it actually took less than 90 minutes, even though it usually takes a bit longer. First we did White Wall, which is so named because the wall is thickly covered with tons of white (or blue white, really) soft corals that are so thick that when you look down the wall, it looks white. It was neat but would have been neater a bit deeper :) We dropped into a sand bowl on top and inside of the wall, and then swam though a swimthrough that leads you to the outside of the wall. You pop out on the wall and swim against the current halfway, and then the wall curves around at some point and you drift back with the current. We went a bit deeper than most of the people, I guess because this was discouraged by the DMs during the dive briefing :) But once you were at 90', the soft corals were thicker, and looking down, it just got better. Sadly we did not break 100'.

There was a good bit of current when we got in, but it was certainly manageable. We went around the wall twice, and the current was noticeably stronger the second time around. By the end of the dive, the current was absolutely ripping, and all of the divers were stacked on the downline hanging on like flags. I had to hand-walk over all of the people on the line, then when I got to the top, I let go, drifted swiftly to the back of the boat and popped up just behind the ladder and grabbed the current line. If I had missed the current line, or let go of it, there was no way I would have made it back to the boat under my own power :) It was quite amazing considering how little current there was when we got in.

We slowly meandered down the strait, killing time during the surface interval, and eventually ended up at Rainbow Reef for the second dive. It was a fun dive, but I didn't think it was epic (which is weird, since it is such a famous site). We started on top of a wall (maybe more of a slope), holding on against the current, watching a reef shark, some Napoleon wrasses and lots of other fish swim by. I wasn't really sure what we were waiting for, so eventually Rob and I headed down the slope. There were a bunch of outcroppings with all different colored soft corals on them. There was a bit of current, making it sort of a pain to line up for pictures. Anyway, after Rob got a bunch of pictures, we found that the rest of the herd was gone, but there was one DM who hung back with us. I couldn't figure out if this was intentional or a coincidence, but he shadowed us for the rest of the dive, so I guess it was intentional.

There were lots of nudibranchs, tons of all different colored fish (mostly on the reef top), many different colors of soft coral, and more wrasse and shark action. I liked the shallows a lot because there were tons of anthias. We eventually thumbed it, shot a bag, and headed up. We were pretty far from the boat. I guess we didn't cover nearly as much ground as the rest of the divers. They got to see blue ribbon eels. I guess that's what we get for straying. Eventually the boat came and picked us up, and we made it back to the hotel surprisingly fast.

Fiji Day 4: Macro Day!

2011-12-07T22:49:00.000-08:00

Rob was finally shooting macro today, which made me happy, since I wanted to search for nudibranchs :) Today we had the option to go back to try to find the hammerheads at Dreamscape or not to. We waffled about it but eventually decided to go for the hammerheads (strange, I know, since Rob was shooting macro). Because of this decision, we were on the other boat today. This boat was smaller, slower, and didn't have as many good places to lounge while the boat was underway. But it had a much better tank-retaining system (it was very sophisticated, and consisted of some bungee loops tied onto the rail behind the tanks), and I preferred its ladder. So I guess there were pros and cons. Also, the Namale Pearls is nice and shiny and those upholstered seats are nice and cushy now, but probably won't be for very long.

When we got to the site, it was determined that the current was unfavorable, so we'd come back in the afternoon. Instead we headed back to Dungeons and Dragons. Since Rob was shooting macro, we covered very little ground. We saw two morays, an octopus, several nudibranchs, popcorn shrimp, lots of clownfish, and a cool flatworm, Pseudoceros zebra, out for all to see, crawling across a coral. Not a bad bunch of sightings for a macro dive. Frank was on our boat today, and like us, he was not staying with the herd, so was often not far from us, and whenever he found something good, he would yell through his regulator to get our attention, which I found highly amusing. So he was actually responsible for several of the sightings. When we surfaced and got back on the boat, we were seemingly the last divers in the water.

We were live-boating, so the boat got underway as they did the roll call. During the roll call, we found that one diver was missing. The boat stopped (I guess it really should not have been underway in the first place, BEFORE the roll call was finished), and after about 5 minutes of discussion, we learned the following. One of the divers (who shall remain nameless) had, very early in the dive, gone through a swim-through that came out shallow, really shallow, like in the whitewater. He got sucked to the surface, and his (loose) buddies followed. He was in the shallows above the drop off "standing on the reef", gave them an okay and said he wasn't going back down. Then he proceeded to walk into shore, walk across the beach, and into the jungle, after giving the boat captain an okay signal. After this information came out, the crew called the resort to ask them to send a car for the diver, but he had already in this time made it back to the resort on foot (with all his gear!). When we went back to the shop for the surface interval, we found him sitting in a lounge chair waiting to go out for the next dive. Needless to say, this was a very strange situation, and the diver was dubbed "the reefwalker".

We headed back to Dreamscape for the second dive. We were of course not successful at finding the hammerheads. There was less current, though I had a failing fin (the bungee strap was overstretched on one, so it kept slipping off of my heel when I flutter kicked with much force), so the swim was still pretty annoying. We saw less stuff in general out in the blue, but I saw some reef sharks below us. I think there were some tuna out there too. The dive guide had to surface to figure out which was to go to get us back from the blue, which I found a bit lame. Back on the reef, Rob wanted to go to 100' to "look down". I followed him down and when I got to 100', he was quite a bit below me. Bad Bob. He was shooting macro, so we spent the rest of the dive looking at clownfish and nudibranchs (which we found a few of).

After lunch, we went back out on the small boat with Ginny, who was testing out the DUI 30/30 drysuit for the first time. We went back to Purple Gardens, since the other boat had found a scorpionfish there on one of their dives. Since scorpionfish apparently tend to stay in the same place throughout the day, Colin thought there was an excellent chance that it would still be there, so we decided to go there. Colin also promised us some purple aeolids, Cuthona sibogae. It's funny, for the first several days of the trip, I'd been looking for slugs on every hydroid I saw. But I never found any, and started to wonder if Fiji's hydroids actually host slugs. So Colin described a hydroid where you can find these aeolids, and said he'd jump in the water with us to show us the scorpionfish and some slugs. The scorpionfish was not to be found, but Colin found some slugs for us, and once we saw the hydroids they live on, we had no trouble finding more... they seemed to be everywhere! And they were very pretty. Colin also showed us the next reef over, which had a cool swimthrough (I guess the swimthrough we had missed on the first dive there, because we didn't follow the DMs). We found more nudis, and another cool flatworm, Thysanozoon nigropapillosum, which was black with yellow speckles. There were also two Napoleon wrasses cruising around over by the second pinnacle. We managed to get ourselves back on the boat without any more gear losses :)

Fiji Day 3: Namena Marine Reserve

2011-12-06T22:42:00.000-08:00

Today we went to Namena Marive Reserve to dive. I had never heard of Namena, so really had no preconceptions about what the diving would be like. All I knew was that it was not "local". Somehow Rob and I both were under the impression that it was a 45 minute boat ride, but it was actually closer to 90 minutes (on the Namale Pearl... it took longer for the other boat). We got going late because we were waiting for the boat ladder, which was having 2 extra rungs welded on (and was en route back from whoever in town does welding). This was good news in my book, since my previous experience getting huge bruises while being thrashed around on the ladder was a direct result of the ladder not having enough rungs. One more was really necessary, and two was quite luxurious :)

The first dive site was Chimneys (aka Thumbs Up). The site briefing described two pinnacles starting in 15 feet, which, when viz is good (which it was) you can see from one to the next. It turns out that there were a few smaller, deeper, flatter coral heads too. The site name is an excellent name, since the two main pinnacles are very tall and skinny. Improbably so, in fact. They look like they should fall over. This site was amazing; it was, hands down, my favorite dive of the trip. It was like what they show in the Fiji brochures! There were all different colored soft corals (not all open though), some really nice sea fans, lots of different-colored crinoids (oooh) and zillions of very colorful little fish, plus some cool bigger fish. There were a bunch of unicornfish, which I have never seen (or heard of) before, but I thought were super cool looking. The top of one of the pinnacles had a ton of anemones with clownfish. The fish life in general was just insane.

There was a decent amount of current on the site, so I imagine that if you want to see the site with all of the soft corals open, there were be a ton of current. But even without all of the soft corals open, the reef was very colorful. After the dive, I told Rob that I thought it was the only dive I've done where the amount of color on the reef compares to Carmel. A bunch of people on the trip looked at me very quizzically when I said this, but really, of all of the Caribbean diving I've done, the reef is just never as colorful as, for instance, Big Sur Banks, Outer Pinnacles, Mt. Chamberlain, etc. We spent most of the time near the top of the pinnacles, where the huge schools of anthias were (which Rob complained kept getting in the way of his shots :P). We did take a quick foray down to one of the wider, flatter coral heads on the bottom, which had a very entertaining trumpet fish cruising around. There were also some garden eels on the bottom, which I guess were apparently pretty cooperative for at least some of the people taking pictures/video. However, we didn't bother to go down to look at them.

At the end of the dive, I found the new addition to the ladder to be very convenient. We went to a spot off of a deserted island (which you aren't allowed to land on, I think) for lunch, and did a little swimming and snorkeling.

After a surface interval, we headed to the second site, Grand Central Station. The site is so named because apparently lots of pelagics are always coming and going past this big sandy spot, right next to a dropoff to deep water. At the start of the dive, we were on a wall from about 20' to infinity. It was SO vertical, it was really quite cool. But the fun part of the dive was still to come. We got to a sandy area, which is where you are supposed to see all the pelagics. We saw reef sharks, schools of jacks and barracudas, and one turtle. Every time we came upon a school of fish, I kept swimming along with the school while videoing them, giving myself a raging CO2 headache each time (but continuing to do it, because it was fun :P). This dive was not a terribly photogenic experience, but I thought it was really fun. Eventually we left the big sandy area for some bommies, where we finished up. We saw two reasonably big eels there, some nudibranchs, and I found a crown of thorns. I know that these critters are evil, and bad for the reef, but I had never seen one before and thought it was quite interesting to look at. Overall it was a really fun dive, though apparently if the dive had been timed "better" with the tides, we would have seen even more pelagics come in over the sand.

In the afternoon we relaxed in the pool, which was strangely deserted.

Fiji Day 2: Turtle Turtle

2011-12-05T19:39:00.000-08:00

We arrived at the boat a little early since we had not left our gear with the shop, and after dealing with some not-quite-full-tank shenanigans, we finally got going, and headed to a local site called "Purple Gardens". This site had several pinnacles near each other with lots of purple soft corals (and some pinks, whites, and yellows too). I really liked this site. The only problem with it was that there were too many dang divers around :) Our strategy was to get in the water first, scope out and get some pics of the area near the downline, then let the throngs of divers go by, take some more pictures on that pinnacle, and then when they came back, we moved along to the next pinnacle. There were apparently some swimthroughs too, which we didn't see, because we weren't following a DM. Depending on where we were on the pinnacles, the soft corals varied from completely open to not quite as open. But the vast majority of them were completely open while we were there.

In addition to the soft corals, there were some HUGE sea fans. And near the end of the dive, a turtle swooped by. I looked around thinking there must be some other divers around to show it to (other than Rob), but no, it was just us. So of course I had to chase it with my hero cam... that's why they invented those things, right? I was obviously pretty excited, but Rob was kind of "whatever".

For the next dive we went to Turtle Alley. I guess there is an area that is supposed to be good for turtle sightings. But I thought the dive was pretty freakin' cool regardless of turtleness. It was a wall from like 20' to infinity (well as far as I could see). There were allegedly some swim-throughs too, but we just stuck to the outside of the wall for the most part. It had just generally nice coral. A DM pointed out a nudi to us, which was white with some black lines and bumps on its back (a Phyllidiella pustulosa, I believe). I also saw a big freakin' wrasse cruising the wall below us, which I thought was a Napoleon wrasse, but it wasn't as huge as the pictures I have seen, so I wasn't sure. I later found out that these fish were humphead wrasses, and then still later found out that that's actually the same thing as a Napoleon wrasse (hey, I'll freely admit I am a fish moron). I think that the turtles were supposed to be near the far part of the dive, but we didn't see any there. When we got back near the boat, we came up into the shallows, where we saw a school (!) of parrotfish zipping around. I had some fun trying to keep up with them with the hero cam. Right near the end of the dive, I saw a turtle meander by. I don't think anyone else besides Rob and I saw it (or any other turtles on the dive).

On the way back to the dock, Rob sweet talked Janine about taking us out for a dive in the small boat in the afternoon; and Janine in turn sweet-talked Colin, so he told us to come back around 3 to go out. We headed to lunch and killed a bit of time before returning, with Sergio and Bruce. We headed back to Purple Gardens, since we liked it the first time, and it was close. We went out in the small boat, which involves a back roll in. Rob went in first, and his mask flew off of his face, and was lost to the ocean. Doh! Luckily Rob is a dork, and carries a backup mask on all dives, so he whipped that out and was good to go. The soft corals were more closed in some areas, I guess because the current had died down. The new things that we saw this time included a pair of triggerfish doing a dance, I suppose some sort of territorial thing. We watched that for quite a while because, well, it was freakin' cool. I also found about a dozen nudibranchs that were cream with purple lining (Chromodoris lochi).

When we surfaced, we started to remove our rigs, since that was the protocol. While I was dealing with that, I heard some exclamations behind me, and turned to see Rob and Sergio looking down at "something" that had fallen off of Rob's rig. Turns out when he jacked up his wing, it pushed on his light canister, which popped the buckle in front of it (it was a crappy plastic buckle). So then the canister slid off of the strap and since it had an EO cord, the cord disconnected and the canister plummeted to the bottom of the ocean. Doh! Colin reported that the last time someone dropped something off the back of the boat at this site, he he went to retrieve it and the bottom was 210 feet. Doh! Rob had the plastic buckle because he was using a backplate that he normally just keeps around for students to borrow, and he couldn't find a normal buckle when he as provisioning it -- that was an expensive mistake! So don't use a plastic buckle to hold your can light on.

Fiji Day 1: Hammerheads (or not) and Al50s

2011-12-04T22:17:00.000-08:00

After breakfast we headed down to the dock, where we had been told to meet at 8:15. We were told that we would get started a little late today, since it is Sunday, and apparently the locals actually like to go to church on Sunday. We got there a bit before 8:15, so we could snag some good spots on the boat, right by the entry (at the rear of the boat). We were diving off of the Namale Pearl, which is a nice new 40-ish foot boat that belongs to the resort next door (Namale). Since we had such a big group, bigger than the dive shop's boat could handle, they rented the Namale Pearl, and half of us were on that boat. It was a much nicer and faster boat than the Koro Sun Dive boat (the Bligh Explorer), though the tank racks left a little to be desired. It was basically not possible to put your BC on the tank and snap it into the rack (at least not if your BC has two straps). After much bumbling around, all of the crew finally showed up, and we finally got going a bit after 9. I thought it was pretty lame (and unprofessional) to have a boat full of customers who were polite enough to show up roughly on time, waiting around for the crew to show up. At the time it may have seemed like it was just the first day kinks being worked out, but this was pretty much typical throughout the trip. We weren't always literally waiting for the crew to show up, but we were generally waiting for something before we could get going.

For the first dive, we went to a site that can have hammerheads out in the blue water near a pinnacle. We were warned that there would be some current on the way out. As we were approaching the site, I went to zip up my suit and the tail on the zipper fell off in my hand. I asked Rob to take a look (thinking it was just the little fabric thingy that had pulled off), but he determined that the zipper was "busted", must have been damaged in transit, and was not fixable. So I just velcroed my suit at the top and put my vest on over it (instead of the usual under it. That actually worked fine. Rob and I dropped down first, and after dropping a couple of feet, I reached back to vent a bit more gas from my wing, and felt my OPV come off in my hand. Doh! I looked at it, and didn't think it looked like the good kind of OPV-falling-off-in-your-hand failure, where you could screw it back on. What is it with pieces of my gear falling off in my hand!?! I pointed this out to Rob and we agreed to debug it on the bottom. We got to the bottom of the line, I gave him the OPV and he agreed with my assessment that it was not fixable -- the plastic part had actually sheared off. Oh well. Luckily I have a lot of experience diving out of trim, so I can dive with a missing OPV.

We looked around and saw a bit of soft coral. I posed for some pictures and once enough people showed up, we were herded off of the pinnacle. Our boat had 18 people on it, with 3 DMs. Ginny had quite carefully assigned us into groups of 6 before the trip, but this was completely disregarded (both the group assignments, and the concept of even splitting up the group of 18 into smaller groups). The current was pretty significant and we swam like hell for a while. Flutter kick for the win (thank you, David Rhea). We didn't see any hammerheads, but did see a few reef sharks in the distance (before we even left the reef) and some schools of barracuda and jacks. Those schools were actually pretty cool, but a bit of a let down when looking for hammerheads (and not necessarily worth the swim like hell against the current). Eventually we gave up and somehow we had to swim at least partially against the current on the way back. Yikes. Once back, we had a few minutes on the reef, but overall it was a pretty crappy dive.

We went back to the dock for a surface interval, which seemed lengthier than necessary, then headed back out. The second site (Dungeons and Dragons) had a bunch of swim-throughs -- I guess that was the main attraction. We sort of did our own thing though, and skipped all but two of the swim-throughs. The swim-through thing just isn't that exciting to me, since there isn't much life down there. [Snooty-cave-diver]Plus if I want caverns, I'll go to Florida or Mexico [/Snooty-cave-diver] We thought the reef on top was much nicer than the swim-throughs we went through. The highlight for me was that we saw a ton of anemones with clownfish (which I'd never seen before). They were so cute! Near the end of the dive, Sergio saw a reef shark and announced it by yelling through his reg. I also found my first nudi of the trip, a black with white speckles dorid. We did a pretty long dive, and when we finished, we just swam off of the reef and ascended, since we were live boating. One great thing about the dive op was that they didn't care how long we stayed in the water. We were pretty much always the first in the water, so that we could do long dives without people having to wait too long for us to come up at the end. One day we did a dive that was like 75 or 80 minutes, and the next day, when we pulled up to a site that was quite shallow, they asked that we limit our dive to 90 minutes... which I think is quite generous :) While I was climbing back on the boat, I got totally smacked around at the ladder (not really sure what happened) and ended up with some epic big bruises on my leg!

After lunch, we sent Kevin Barry to negotiate with Colin for afternoon diving. Rob had been a bit loud about his displeasure at our first dive, so he didn't seem like the right person to do the negotiating :) Kevin returned and said there were 4 Al63s we could use with the kayaks. After offering the other two tanks to some others, it ended up being me, Rob, and Kevin. Like Team Kitty, but with a stand-in Kevin. When we showed up for the tanks, we found that they were actually Al50s. Hehehe. They had two-person kayaks, so we took two of them. Rob and I rode in one with one of our rigs, and Kevin rode in one with the other two rigs. We kayaked down the boat channel for a while, I'd say 20 to 30 minutes. There is a fringing reef around the island, which is where you want to do your diving. But at the point where the reef drops off, there are (as you'd expect) breakers. In order to get out to the other side of the reef, there is a channel dredged from the dive shop dock to the reef. As we were approaching the dropoff, we were a bit intimidated by the breakers on either side of the channel, so we started discussing how we should approach it. Someone had the idea that we could gear up, get back in our kayaks and then head down the channel the rest of the way. I wasn't too impressed with this idea, so I suggested that we kayak out of the channel, so we were in the shallows, stand up and get our gear on there, and then walk to the drop off at the channel and descend in the channel. So this is what we ended up doing. The plan was to tow the kayaks. We lashed them together, and Rob tied a spool to them. We tip-toed to the edge of the dropoff, and I went to put my first fin on when I "slipped" off of the ledge and ended up bobbing on top of the deeper water in the channel. It was no big deal, as my BC was inflated and and I think I had a reg in my mouth (or I did in short order). But I was flailing around a bit to try to get my fins on. Just then, Kevin said "shark!" and while I thought he was kidding, then he said there was a reef shark below me. I stuck my face in the water and was like "ooh la la, cool" and finished putting my fins on. I was disappointed that he was gone by the time I was ready to descend. Later, Kevin told me that he wasn't too happy with me flailing around on top of a shark :) Ooops.

We dropped down and it was quite murky. There was a pretty significant current pushing us out the channel, but we did not think it would be a problem to make it back up the channel on the way in. Eventually the water got much clearer, much colder, and then we popped out of the channel. There was no current here. We headed left. I think that was an arbitrary choice. We saw more clownfish, which were more Nemo-like than the ones we saw earlier in the day. There were also several BIG grouper swimming about on the top of the dropoff, which was pretty neat. Rob found a nudi, which was black with white stripes, and I found at least one more of the kind that I had seen earlier in the day. We eventually turned the dive and made our way back to the end of the channel. There was a bit of a miscommunication about everyone's gas situation, and then there was confusion, so I just called the dive. We headed up into the murk up the channel, and boy was there some current. Rob was towing the kayaks (the plan had been to "take turns" but Rob never turned the spool over to anyone else) and he was getting worked making progress against the current. Luckily there was dead coral rubble on the bottom of the channel, so we could actually pull and glide up the channel. We saw a few lionfish hiding under some of the rubble in the channel. We eventually thumbed it on (Rob's) gas. We basically all had the same amount of gas when we started up the channel, but since he was towing the kayaks, he used about twice as much as we did on the way in! When we surfaced, we were further up the channel than we started. We came up the channel wall and then up into the shallow part and stood up there.

We took our rigs off and were getting back into the kayaks, discussing the likelihood of someone flipping the kayak. Rob was already in our kayak when I attempted to get in. I can't remember the exact sequence of events, but he had the idea to use Kevin's yak to stabilize ours, which was great, until the noise of Kevin's ended up UNDER ours and ours flipped, as I was attempting to get in. Doh. The gear that was not clipped in (e.g. Rob's fins) scattered, but since we were in like 3 feet of water, it was not a problem to retrieve it. Once we all managed to get in our kayaks, we headed up the channel. It seemed like we were barely moving, while Kevin was having no trouble making progress. Rob made the astute observation that while we were towing a rig, Kevin had both rigs actually in his kayak. So we stopped and moved the towed rig up front, between my legs. Oh man did that make a difference! It was so much easier and we were moving so much faster! So there, towing your rig behind the kayak is dumb. Don't do it.

So that was our afternoon dive. The diving was fine, but I think the fact that it was a bit of an adventure was the best part! When we appeared at the bar for happy hour, it was like we'd returned with tails of travel on the high seas :)

Frank managed to fix both my OPV and my wetsuit zipper. The fix for my wetsuit zipper involved a needle and thread. I must admit I felt a bit lame standing over Frank watching him sew a zipper up for me... after all of the sewing projects I've done that include instructions on shortening a zipper, I really should have been able to figure this out myself! But this is one of the benefits of traveling with Frank!

Fiji Trip: Getting to Fiji

2011-12-03T21:38:00.000-08:00

View from our cottage

Welcome to my Fiji trip report :) We spent a week at Koro Sun Resort near Savusavu. The trip was organized by Anywater Sports, and was our first ever shop trip (I don't think Channel Islands trips count). We ended up going on this trip because we were thinking about a trip, and had a short list, which included the Philippines. Since Anywater frequently runs trips there, I inquired with them about a trip this year, and Ginny said she wasn't sure since they had a bunch of other trips planned, and mentioned that they had just announced a Fiji trip. Since that was on the short list, and the idea of not having to research and arrange the trip myself seemed great, we decided to go for it. We booked our own flights, since we were using miles, but other than that, the planning was all Ginny. Apparently there had been a lot of back and forth about whether we would fly to Savusavu, which has a small airstrip that only handles small planes (carrying 12 or 13 people), or Labasa, which can handle a larger aircraft (which would hold the entire group of 36 or so people). In the end, we were to fly into Savusavu on 3 separate flights, and out of Labasa.

Boat dock at Koro Sun Dive

We had an afternoon flight down to LA with a several hour layover before our night-time Air Pacific flight to Fiji. When we checked in at the AA counter in San Francisco, we were given boarding passes for both legs. So when we got to LAX, after schlepping to the international terminal, and presenting ourselves at the security line, we were told that we couldn't use these boarding passes (WTF) and had to go wait in line at the Air Pacific counter for new boarding passes. The line wasn't too terribly long, but it was a pretty annoying experience, if you aren't used to having to wait in line with the hoi polloi :P Apparently the AA-Air Pacific partnership does not extend to use of the Business Class line. When we finally got to the counter, we had a very friendly agent, who, when we inquired about exit row seats, happily reported that there were some available. We got through security quickly and found a pretty ghetto terminal, with basically nothing to eat except a greasy snack bar and, most importantly, a bar. This is when I realized... I've never flown an international flight from LAX. I've always thought that LAX is basically the armpit of the universe, and the international terminal is no exception. I guess some sort of big reconstruction project is underway, and it looks like it is about time. We headed to the bar forthwith and passed the time there. While we were waiting in the departure lounge, I for some reason was doodling around on the Air Pacific website on my phone, and happened to look at an aircraft map; this is when I discovered that our seats were on the upper deck. I'd never been on the upper deck of a 747 before -- yippy! I guess the seats up there are considered a minor "upgrade" though I didn't know this at the time, and didn't particularly notice it.

The Rainforest Spa

The nice thing about exit row seats on a 747 is that the door is so freakin' big, you have a million miles of legroom. I slept surprisingly well, and for surprisingly long, on the flight. When we got into Fiji, we were luckily some of the first people in line for immigration and got through fairly quickly. As we were in line there, we noticed that all of the flights to Savusavu had been cancelled, but there was a flight to Labasa at 11. I assumed this would be our flight, and this was indeed the case. We made our way through customs and over to the domestic terminal, and waited around while they got everything together and gave us our boarding passes. There had been warnings that Air Pacific would be very strict on luggage weight (including for carry-ons). Rob's camera backpack was definitely overweight, but we had a contingency plan wherein his lenses and maybe some strobes would be moved to my "purse" (which is a re-purposed REI day-pack). Luckily no such shuffling was required, since they did not weigh any of our carry-ons. We had several hours to kill before our flight, so we went across the street to Raffles hotel and had breakfast there, which was reasonably tasty. After playing some penny poker with Sergio and Brian, it was finally time to head to the gate, where we waited some more (because our flight was not exactly on time) and then finally headed to Labasa. I guess the little planes could not fly to Savusavu because of wind. But the flight to Labasa was perfectly calm. When we arrived there, we were met by a bus driver, who was to take us to the resort. We had been previously led to believe that the ride was about an hour (since we'd have to go back to Labasa at the end of the trip), but the driver told us two and a half hours. It was actually a bit less, but still over two. The bus was not air conditioned, but once it was going, with the windows open, it was not bad. But then it started to rain and then it started to pour, so then we had to choose between being drenched with rain or hot and steamy. Or both, since even with the windows closed, rain was leaking in all over the seats and floor.

Our room

We finally got to the resort and all of the staff was waiting by the roadside to sing and greet us, and there was some sort of welcome meeting (and coconut waters, mmm) in the lobby. When that was finally complete, we headed to our room, and I finally got to take a shower :) The room, which was actually a cottage, was cute, but nothing extraordinary. My only significant complaint about it is that aside from a one-person seat (and some chairs outside), there was no place to sit but the bed. The room had an outdoor shower, which is cool in principle, but in practice, I think it is a source of mosquitoes (though it is all screened in, I don't think the screens are 100% effective). After that, we headed to lunch, and then went to poke around by the dive shop, to see if there was any possibility of diving today. The dive shop was deserted, so we just hung around that afternoon, then went to happy hour and attended a dive briefing before dinner. During the dive briefing, Colin (owner of the dive op) laid out to us what days we would do local diving and what days we would go to Namena and Somosomo. There was no mention of the possibility of dives in the afternoon, which we had been told leading up to the trip could be "arranged after we arrived". Rob harassed Colin about this a bit after the meeting, and he said he would see what he could do.

The Bligh Explorer

After this, we headed to dinner. I had a fish curry, which was very nicely presented in a half coconut shell. I think this was one of the tastiest dishes that I had all week. And while we are on the topic of meals, here's how that worked. Everyday at dinner, we were given a menu for the next day, and we were to select our meals for the next day. For each meal, there were usually two starter options and two or three entree options, and dessert (yes, dessert with lunch and dinner, everyday!). I had heard from people on a prior trip that there was not much variety, but I thought it was fine. I think that I had fish about a third of the time, chicken about a third of the time, and beef about a third of the time (actually there was a vegetarian meal or two in there as well). I thought that the fish dishes were generally quite tasty. For breakfast, there was a "continental" buffet, with cereal, muffins, and fruit, plus a menu to order off of. I don't generally like to eat very heavy foods before diving, so I felt like I sort of missed out on the breakfast options on the menu. I liked the cereal very much though :) On the final day, I got the "wavos" which was roti with eggs and way too much cheese (which I just picked off of it) and that super tasty sweet chili sauce. I think anything tastes good with that chili sauce on it.

Back to Birthday Wall

2011-11-27T23:04:00.000-08:00

I have been wanting to get back to Birthday Wall ever since our first dive there, but weather and boat availability has conspired against us to prevent that. There was a last minute cancellation on Sunday's tech boat, and the forecast was looking really good, so I jumped on the boat, with the hope that we could make it there. Rob was entertaining visiting relatives so he could not make it unfortunately. I dove with Kevin and Susan. The conditions were, as forecast, super flat. It was incredibly flat for this time of year. I'm sure we could have made it to Big Sur Banks if we had wanted to. So with our choice of any dive site, and gas for a 250 foot dive, we finally made it back to Birthday Wall! After the previous weekend's deco sea lion, I was hell-bent on bringing my hero cam along on this dive; but of course I realized as we pulled up to the site that I'd left it in the car, grumble. Once we got the downline in and got geared up, we practically dilly-dallied getting into the water with all of our gear, because in addition to there being no wind or swell to speak of, there was no surface current either! The awesome viz from the week before was still around as well.

The downline was in a slightly different position, further toward the deep end of the wall. The ball was actually sitting in a sort of precarious location; I was surprised that it was holding where it was, but it was. We headed down the wall, and headed toward the deeper spot. I was leading -- can you believe it!?! I guess I was being too pushy about the dive plan on the boat, so I was punished with having to lead. Luckily this site is pretty easy to navigate :) We pretty quickly made it to the "crack" where the wall meets a spit of reef protruding out to the left. We looked around in crack when we first got there, and then we headed out to the left. The viz was amazing. With crazy good viz, bright blue water, and an abundance of little fishies (juvey rockfish) hanging just above the reef, it really had a tropical feel -- except that it was freakin' cold. Actually it wasn't that bad, my gauge said 51 degrees on the bottom. We poked around on that little spit of reef. I mostly stayed on top of it, keeping the bottom segment relatively shallow compared to the dive plan. The highlight of the dive was really just the insane viz and awesome structure. But we saw plenty of lingcod, though not as many as the last dive, and lots of big vermilions. I also found a nice big yelloweye, which for the first time ever, I was SURE was a yelloweye the moment I saw it... usually there are a few moments of "is that a yelloweye?" There were also lots of juvenile yelloweyes -- they're so pretty.

Eventually when the time came, I suggested turning around and heading back toward the downline and up the wall. There was a brief moment of confusion as we rounded up the team, because the other team had by then appeared in the vicinity. Once we all got together, we headed up along the wall. We came back to spire, and I must say I felt like a bit of an idiot, because despite my best efforts, I was just not able to make progress up the wall. I couldn't figure out why I was having buoyancy problems, until I finally realized that there was a raging downcurrent right around the spire. The geometry of it is basically there is a spire with a little canyon on each side of it, and the current was shooting through those canyons and then down the wall. This meant two things. First, it was freakin' hard to get up the wall (though eventually I just pointed my scooter up and went for it), and second, once up the spire, there was like a spiraling death current that would shoot us around the spire. Once we figured out the lay of the land, we headed upcurrent to the back side of the spire, and tried to hide there while switching to our 190 bottles. This was relatively protected, though we were pushed around the spire a bit in the meantime. Once we were all on our bottles we wiled away the time on the top of the peak. But it was really quite annoying to basically scooter up to the peak, have a little look around, then get sucked out by the current, and repeat. After about 10 minutes of our planned 15 minutes on the shallow segment, I suggested we thumb it, since it was getting a bit old. Everyone agreed; apparently the reg on Susan's deco bottle was breathing rather poorly, so she was happy to thumb it.

We headed up off the pinnacle and on the way up during our deep stops, we put the bag up. It was really strange. The current sort of shot us off of the wall, and I was expecting to just keeping going, but after we were like 50 or so feet off of the wall, we just stopped, and weren't really moving at all. I guess the current is all to do with the shape of the reef there, and once you are off of it, it dies down. So we could clearly see the reef for quite a while as we ascended. The first couple of deco stops were not too eventful. The water was super clear, which mean not much in terms of deco critters. My bottle rotation did not suck too much, though I was reminded that my left D-ring seems to have shimmied around a bit and is now too low (or more likely, the webbing slipped through the tri-glide at the bottom of the plate, which made the D-ring move). I keep discovering this and then not remembering to fix it after the dive! Then at 50 feet, we met a friendly mola. It was probably my best mola encounter yet, considering that the viz was so good. I was cursing the fact that I didn't have my hero cam. These were the *perfect* conditions for hero cam-ing! Hmph. Other than that, we didn't see much on deco. Though at 20 feet, we saw the boat. It was like right next to our bag, which I guess works when there is no swell, wind, or current :) We looked up and saw Luke waving to us from the side of the boat -- and we waved back.

The boat was there until we hit the surface, so we just had to swim like 8 feet to get to the swimstep, and then could have spent all the time in the world passing our gear up to the boat. It was definitely a nice day to be doing a dive with a ton of gear! After retrieving the other team, we headed north and encountered a pod of Risso's after turning into the bay. We hung out with them for a while, and then eventually headed back to K-dock. Sadly there are no pictures from this dive, since Rob wasn't on the dive. Boohoohoo.

Through the Tempest

2011-11-20T19:27:00.000-08:00

Rob and I were diving on the tech boat on Sunday. The forecast for the entire weekend was looking pretty terrible, so there was much checking the forecast and wondering whether the boat would go. I guess by Saturday night, the weather appeared to be calming down, despite the still-dire forecast, so it was on. Once we got going, the water was pretty calm in the bay, but we could that just beyond Point Pinos it looked like, well, sort of like Armageddon. It was very gray and stormy looking over there. Indeed, once we were out around there, it got really freakin' snotty. There were whitecaps everywhere, and we were getting a bit tossed around, but once we made it past Cypress Point, it calmed down a bit. Looking back toward Cypress Point, it looked pretty cool. It was a nice sunny day where we were, but the sky was a deep blue beyond the point. We made it down the Lobos area, and it was decided by someone from above (in the wheelhouse, that is) that we would go to Deep E3. Down there, the conditions were quite placid.

I was the first into the water, and was greeted by incredible viz. There was a bit of surface current, which made the entry into the water a bit of a cluster, but once that was all resolved, we headed down the line. The water was so clear and blue; I would guess the (horizontal) viz was in the 80 foot range. It's been a while since I've dived this site, and a long long while since I've dived it in really good viz. So this was quite a treat. We hit the pinnacle on the south side, I think, and headed around the western tip. I spied a quillback rockfish, sitting out on a little ledge. Sweet! I showed it to Rob, and as he was looking at it, Beto and Sue were signalling us from below, because they had found the purple sea fan (not that it's hard to find in that kind of viz!). Rob started to head there, but I suggested he get some shots of the fish, since it might swim away, whereas I was pretty sure the sea fan would not. Rob tells me that the fish was in the same spot where he and Clinton saw a quillback rockfish on this site a while ago, so I guess he is a permanent fixture. Eventually the rockfish retreated into a crack (which had some juvenile yelloweyes in it), so we headed to the sea fan. This is the first time I've seen the sea fan here, but I've seen its cousin at Mount Chamberlain (I just noticed we saw a quillback rockfish on that dive too; maybe that's a trend).

Not far from there, Rob spied a crinoid -- yay! And then a vase sponge or three. We headed off of the main structure to look at some of the big boulders on the rubble patch and smaller structures across it. We saw more crinoids and vase sponges over there. Eventually we headed back to the main pinnacle, and then swung around to E3. We spent just a few minutes there, before Rob pointed out into the blue and suggested we head there. I wasn't precisely sure what he was attempting, but I had a feeling that he wanted to hop over to D3, and this was indeed his plan. And he actually succeeded at it! When we got over there, there was a nice school of blue rockfish on top of the pinnacle. Rob took a few pictures of the reef there, and then I suggested we should head back to E3. We were there for just a few more minutes before we started our ascent. The deco was pretty uneventful, until we got to 20 feet and up, when a curious sea lion appeared, and kept dive bombing us. I was so mad I didn't have my hero cam! Bright blue water, in less than 20 feet with a dive bombing sea lion. Hmph!

For some strange reason, we didn't do a second dive. I think there may have been time constraints or something. So we headed back to the dock and then to lunch.

All of the day's pictures (from Rob and Clinton) are here.

Friday Diving with a Special Guest

2011-10-28T21:15:00.000-07:00

Rob was teaching a class starting on Friday, which I was to help with on Saturday and Sunday. I decided that if Rob didn't have to go to work on Friday, I didn't want to either! So I emailed Beto and Jim early in the week to see if they had anything planned for Friday. The forecast was looking good, and Jim said if that didn't change, he was all set with crew. Woohoo. That afternoon at the gym, Rob was complaining about what a traitor I was for going diving without him, and I suggested that Ted come along... just to be extra mean to Rob. I always try to get Ted to come diving with us during the week, but he never does. He's obviously more hard working than me, or maybe just committed to using his vacation days for family time. But he happened to have a comp day coming to him this very week, and after getting permission from the boss (err, wife), it was a go! We carpooled down to Monterey, and I even drove. I owe Ted like 500 rides home from the gym, so I figure each time I drive us to Monterey, that should wipe like 10 or 15 rides from my debt.

We met to board the boat at the very civilized hour of 9 AM. Jim said that the wind was supposed to pick up in the afternoon. On the way out, there were whitecaps in the bay (!) which was pretty discouraging, but once we were out of the bay it was calmer. Go figure. The ride down, once around Point Pinos, was pretty nice actually. We made it down to Mount Chamberlain, and after a bit of negotiation, we anchored on K2. Ted said he had been to K2 at most once, so I didn't see the point in doing some long south-wall-to-K2 scooter run. So we planned to drop on the east side, head north, check out some of the deeper areas, and then come back up shallower and possibly south of the peak a bit. The crew warned us there was some current before dropping us one team at a time. Our team went second, since we had a 5 minute shorter bottom time planned. When we got in, the current was obvious, but it was not problematic. We headed down the line into pretty good viz. At 80 feet, the line suddenly flattened out and we scootered and scootered and eventually came to the pinnacle. The ball had landed right on top of the pinnacle, so the 180 feet of line (or whatever) that they put out was not necessary.

When we first arrived at the pinnacle, there was a nice looking school of blue rockfish, as there often is. We pretty much passed right by them -- I figured we could visit on the way up. We dropped down the east side and headed north, pausing every now and then to look at stuff. I saw a couple of starry rockfish, and a cute muppet fish in a crack. Those were the highlights of the beginning of the dive. Eventually we came around the north tip, and stopped there. I was thinking of heading across the sand to the little pinnacles to the north, but the viz wasn't that good (not good enough to see those structures), so I figured we could just stay put. I found a nice little flat spot at like 150' that had a really lush gorgonian garden. I spent several minutes there, mostly just looking at the gorgonians, as the current dragged me across, then scootering back across, and repeating. When it came time to go a bit shallower, we turned around and cruised back the way we came, only headed up the wall a bit shallower. So, I am sad to report that there are barnacles all the way down to 160 feet on K2. This is relatively new -- the last time I was there, they seemed to only be on the shallower parts (from maybe 120 feet up). Also, I found a bunch of heads of hydrocoral that were covered with the little bastards :(

We made our way back to the peak, and after doing a thorough GPO inspection, I suggested we head further south to the little gorgonian canyon. We scootered down it, against the current, and then when we got to the end, we just drifted back and enjoyed the scenery. The viz seemed a little bit better here than it was on the north side. More blue, less green. We got back to the peak and meandered around there. Eventually the HUGE school of rockfish found us. I couldn't believe how thick with fish the water was, so I got out my hero cam. We were at like 80 feet, so I hoped for at least some decent video just to show how dense the school of rockfish was. It was really neat hanging out in the midst of all of those fish. After wiling away the rest of our "bottom" time on top of the peak, I pulled my bag and we moved over to the west side of the pinnacle to put up the bag. And that is when the fun started. The idea was that we would be a bit further from the (copious quantity of) line. I put up the bag, as a giant sheephead swam by, and as soon as the bag was up, I felt like I was flying a kite, or rather I was a kite, being flown by the bag :) There was quite a bit of current, so once we left the pinnacle, we were really moving. But I think there was also some wind tugging on the bag.

We got to 70 feet, and Ted started to switch to his bottle, as the line came into view. I pointed out to him that we were drifting toward the line, and we kind of pushed away from it. I handed the bag off and switched onto my bottle. We were happily deco'ing, or at least I was, when about two minutes in, I realized that Ted was still holding the bag. Just as I noticed this, he motioned for me to take it. Okay. He handed me the bag, and about 10 seconds later, I was suddenly snapped up to 62 feet, and I felt like my arm was going to be pulled out of its socket. I may have actually ended up shallower than 62 feet, but that was the last number I saw on my gauge before I realized what was going on. The bag was entangled in the downline. Or, the way my arm felt, maybe the boat :) I was kicking like hell to keep my hand on the bag, but once I realized what was going on, I had to let the bag go. I dropped it and returned back to 70 feet to Ted, and showed him I had no bag. He gave me this "WTF" look. I tried to signal to him that it must be tangled in the boat's line. So Ted pulled his bag and put that up. In hindsight, we probably should have waited a minute, to drift past any further entanglement opportunities. But I was probably not thinking that clearly right at that moment -- I was breathing pretty hard and I could feel my heart pounding from the excitement. Once the second bag was up, we managed to not get snagged again.

Ted was acting a little odd on the deco. At some point he took one of my scout lights. I thought he took it to turn it off (though unclipping someone's light on deco, over deep water, wouldn't be my choice of how to turn it off). Then later he was pointing at my left D-ring and telling me to give him something. I had no idea what he wanted... I wasn't giving him my deco bottle :) I could tell he was a little light, by his exaggerated moves to try to vent gas from his wing. But I never put it all together and figured out what he was doing (because it was completely non-sensical!). He was slightly underweighted, because he was using a set of Rob's tanks, and he underestimated the amount of extra weight he would need. He was trying to take gear from me that would weight him down. But a scout light? Really? I had some double-enders he could take too :) Aside from this slightly odd behavior, the deco went by without much of interest. We had been hoping for some jellyfish love, but all we got were tiny deco critters. Those are still entertaining to stare at, but I was hoping for some pretty nettles after the previous weekend's dive. On our 6-minute ascent, around like 11 feet, we were suddenly in completely bubbly, agitated water. It wasn't whitewater white water, but it was white water, if you know what I mean. It was totally disorienting. One minute we could clearly see each other, and the next we had to be in touch contact to keep track of each other. I'm still not sure what that was... perhaps the boat has driven over that patch of water and stirred it up?

When we surfaced, the crew told me they had caught my other bag. There was a bit more to the story. My bag got tangled around the ball, after flirting with it for a while. Ted confessed that the reason he handed me the bag was that his buoyancy was all screwed up and he wanted me to take the bag while he dealt with that. I guess the bag had snagged then unsnagged the line a couple of times (hence Ted's problems) before finally completely wrapping around the ball, without any hope of unsnagging it. Sean got in the water to free the bag (which at that point we'd abandoned), and then Beto and Jim's bag tangled with my bag. Meanwhile Ted put up our second bag, and it briefly tangled with the ball, but Sean freed it. Yikes. What a mess. In the end, everyone and their bag made it back on the boat. Ted and I hit the cup o' noodles while we waited for Jim and Beto to return, and then we headed back to the dock. We had a quick lunch at La Tortuga and then headed home via Anywater Sports.

Afternoon Boat in the Bay

2011-10-23T21:12:00.000-07:00

Leah was finishing up her GUE Rec3 class on Sunday, and Matt, Rob, and I had scored an invitation to share the boat. The plan was a light Tech dive at Kawika's Garden, followed by a recreational dive somewhere in the bay. Since the class was, well, having class, in the morning, and since we have a big van, Rob and I were tasked with picking up some gas from Bamboo Reef. I had been planning on hanging out and then getting dressed for the boat before heading to K-dock, but with the gas pickup and the rather hot weather, I decided to just toss all of my drysuit underthings into my bag and change in the van at K-dock. We got everything we need at Bamboo Reef and headed to K-dock. Because it was noon, the parking situation sucked, so we had to park pretty far away (in line with the building with the pub). The boat was similarly parked in a bad spot, basically right out in front of the pub. So it was a bit of a schlep with the doubles. But not really that bad; I suppose that is the benefit of diving 104s regularly; it makes the 85s easier to walk around in.

We got our gear on the boat pretty quickly. And when I saw "we" I mean everyone at K-dock. I only had two bottles, but somehow it took Luke, one of the crew from the Monterey Express, and Chris (from AWS, who wasn't even working) to get them down to the boat. Turns out if you just stand at the top of the ramp with something heavy, batting your eyelashes, you won't have to carry it to the boat yourself. I'll have to remember that one. I went back to the van to change, and realized I'd left my bag at Beto's. Doh! Luckily I keep a spare pair of socks in the van, and I just happened to have my base layer top (or second from base layer, since I usually wear a poly-pro tank top under it) in the van. So I could make do, even though I had a minor meltdown when I first discovered this. It was really hot, but since we had a short ride out, I figured I should don my drysuit before we got going. And we were out at Kawika's in no time! We hopped into the water and swam (can you believe it?) to do the downline. I was a bit annoyed when I got to the ball and turned back to give my team the signal to descend, and found that they had already both descended without any sort of signal. Hmph.

The viz was really good for the bay, but nothing epic. I have had better viz at Kawika's, but not for a long time. It was also reasonably bright at the bottom, which was nice -- on some of the best viz days that I have had there, it has been dark as night. It was a nice dive, though the best part was on deco from 20 feet up, so forgive me if I speed through the bottom portion. We pretty much saw the usual suspects for the site -- lots of gorgonians, lots of Spanish shawls and Tritonia festivas, lots of canary rockfish, some really big vermilions, and a couple of jumbo lingcods. We also found some squid eggs on the sand. I was keeping my eyes peeled for a Tochuina, but didn't see any; turns out the other team saw one though. I also saw a few juvenile yelloweyes, including what I would describe as a "large" juvenile. Much bigger than the ones I usually see, but still with the juvenile coloration. Matt also saw a large juvenile yelloweye (could have been the same one, but it was across the reef from where I saw one). So maybe we will start seeing some adult yelloweyes soon :) It was a relatively short dive, so deco flew by. There were a lot of sea nettles on the ascent. They weren't scary-dense, but they were there. There were some realllly looooong ones. The were so cool to look at. I know that sea nettles are the devil, but I think they are so pretty! I don't know why I didn't get some video of them :(

At 20 feet, Rob pointed past me and I turned to see a mola. No, two molas! And not the dinner-plate-sized Breakwater molas, but bigger ones (not the gigantor obese aquarium molas either, but a respectable size). I happened to be running the bag (because, as Rob explained on the boat, I "need to work on my bag shoot"... eye roll). As soon as I saw the mola, I went for the hero-cam (which I conveniently had clipped off), pushed the bag toward Rob and dropped it. I knew he would know what to do. Then I proceeded to swim along videoing the closer of the two molas, as the second one occasionally swam into the frame. I was glad to not be decoing on O2, since it meant I could be a bit more, hmmm, lenient with my buoyancy window :) At one point, Rob reached his hand out for the mola, and it actually swam up and rubbed its face along his arm. Matt was watching as Rob reached out, looking sort of like "yea like that's going to happen". Then as soon as the mola came by and rubbed Rob, Matt stuck his had out too :) But the mola had lost interested and headed a bit shallower. We caught up with him again on our 6 minute ascent (with very patchy bad viz). It was totally fun having them their on deco -- I think it was my best mola encounter yet!

We headed back to the fuel dock for our surface interval, and Rob procured some snacks from the Breakwater deli while we waited. Then we headed back out to Shale island. The boat was anchored, but we were instructed to shoot bags and ascend wherever. I was a bit confused about this, but you know Jim's temper, you don't want to question him on these things (hehehe). We brought 32% stage bottles for the dive. As we headed down the line, I realized that Rob's bottle had my initials on it. So obviously my bottle must have Rob's initials on it. I was a bit horrified that I had let the crew clip the wrong bottle to me. I had checked the MOD sticker, and the analysis tag (which had my initials on it, since I frequently analyze Rob's bottles and vice versa), so I guess it's not surprising that I could end up with Rob's bottle. I suppose as long as the bottle has the gas I am expecting, and I analyzed it, it doesn't really matter. But I was bothered by it in principle.

Anyhoo, Rob was leading the dive, whether intentionally or not, and he headed clockwise around the island. I was in the back for most of the dive. I was convinced that I could will an Acanthodoris rhodoceras to appear before me on the reef, but it turns out my powers of nudibranch-willing are not up to snuff. So I really wasn't too productive in my critter finding on this dive. Luckily, Matt and Rob made up for that, and found 3 octopi, all sort of reasonably sized. I tried to get one of them to crawl on my hand, but he was not interested. When Matt found the first octopus, I couldn't figure out what he was pointing at. I kept looking and looking and trying not to scare whatever it was with my light. But I guess since I had no idea where I was to be looking, I did move my light in the wrong place, and all of a sudden a plume of ink appeared in the water. Once the ink appeared, I knew exactly where to look, and saw the octopus. I don't think I've ever seen an octopus ink before (squid yes, but not an octopus). That was neat! Probably not so neat for the octopus, if he felt the need to ink me. Other than that, it was a pretty standard Shale island dive, but with really good viz!

We surfaced like 20 feet from the bow of the boat even though we ascended off of the anchor on a bag. I complained that the boat did not come to pick us up :) We had a quick trip back to the dock, and then headed to RG Burger for dinner (again).

Everywhere at Lobos

2011-10-22T23:06:00.000-07:00

I was feeling very wishy-washy about diving this weekend, or which day to dive, probably because the viz was such crap the previous weekend. After rejecting a couple of offers to dive on Saturday (and Lobos tickets), eventually Kevin asked if I wanted to dive, so I decided to. And I managed to cash in those offers of Lobos tickets, and brought along Clinton and Matt (who had been planning a Breakwater dive). So we were a happy foursome, with no particular plans except to do something with 32%, and maybe O2. I had been mumbling about maybe going to Great Pinnacle, which I haven't scootered to in ages, especially with 32%. I've visited it a few times via Twin Peaks. I proposed this once everyone had arrived, and eventually we settled on going to Shortcut Reef, and if the viz was really good, we could hop over to Great Pinnacle or Marco's Pinnacle.

The viz was good in the cove, but probably not as good as it had been the previous weekend. But the viz everywhere else was WAY better. Some might even call it epic. It was so clear and blue; it was the best viz I've had at Lobos in a really long time. It was definitely the perfect day to do a long scooter dive to the far reaches. We took the shallow route out to the Lone Metridium area, peeling off from the sand channel at about 30'. I don't know if that little path has a name. The viz was unbelievable back there! I realized too late into the ride out that I should really get my Hero cam out, since shallow water with great viz is perfect for that. But I didn't feel like dealing with it on the way out, and figured I could get it on the way back in. Eventually we popped out from the shallow path in the vicinity of Lone Metridium (or maybe one ridge over) and made our way out to the Sisters, and then over to Shortcut Reef. We stopped there and kicked around for a bit. Clinton was shooting macro, so I attempted to find some critters for him. I wasn't very successful at that; I think all the nudibranchs went away because of the barnacles :( There were a lot of them out there. I was successful at scaring away a warbonnet that Clinton found; or so he says -- I never actually saw it, and he didn't get a picture (that's what he gets for being a good buddy and showing it to me before taking a picture).

Eventually it was suggested that we head out to Great Pinnacle, since the viz definitely met the "really good" criteria. We headed out there, pausing briefly to visit a jellyfish, but pretty much scootering straight to the pinnacle. When we arrived, we were greeted by a nice big school of blue rockfish (with a few olives -- there are always a few of those hanging around, pretending to be blues). I spent a few minutes getting video of them, since these were pretty much the best conditions I could imagine for that. There was also a smaller school of perch swimming just on top of the tallest peak. It was, in general, a very fish day. I also found a nice big lingcod hanging out on a little ledge, and pestered him with the Hero-cam. Then I chased a kelp greenling for a bit. After I was done annoying all of the fish of Great Pinnacle, I decided it would be fun to scooter down the face of the pinnacle until I either hit the bottom (not likely) or hit the MOD of my gas (more likely). I told Kevin to follow me over there -- he had no idea what I had in mind -- and I pointed my scooter down, and down we went. It was pretty fun. Clinton and Matt appeared a moment later, presumably wondering where we'd wandered off to, and we joined back up with them and scootered around the pinnacle.

Kevin then suggested heading to Marco's Pinnacle. I haven't been there in ages. I don't know why -- it's so pretty! Kevin led us straight to the "good side" of the pinnacle. There was lots of hydrocoral, and it was much less barnacled than similarly shallow areas of Lobos. In fact, that is probably why I thought it looked particularly pretty -- it was very colorful without the barnacles. Also, there's a lot of nice hydrocoral there. I also saw several cabezons (at least one of whom was harassed by the hero-cam) and lots of kelp rockfish. Clinton found something really interesting -- white hydrocoral! It may technically have been very very pale pink hydrocoral. But it really looked bright white. And it was tucked between a patch of pink and a patch of purple hydrocoral, which looked really cool. It appeared to be perfectly healthy, other than its abnormal color. It was pretty cool looking -- too bad Clinton was shooting macro (though he did a very nice job of capturing it with what he had). Eventually we headed in; I think I suggested that because I was getting cold.

On the way in, we were scootering pretty far above the bottom, over boulder after boulder covered in barnacles. So I was keeping an eye out for Onchidoris bilamellata, and I was not disappointed. I found one boulder completely covered in them. I dropped down to look at it (without alerting my team, oops). They eventually noticed my unpresence and stopped to see what was going on. I don't think they were particularly amused with me for dropping out of sight without a signal. Bad kitty! We got going again and eventually made it back to the sand channel, where the general fishiness of the dive continued. First there was a school of tubesnouts off to the right. After we passed them, I was thinking we might see senoritas as we got shallower. So I left my hero cam running, just in case. I was waiting and waiting and finally saw a measly two senoritas in the cove, but then a moment later we saw a school. Woohoo. We eventually stopped to switch onto our deco bottles. I suggested we do 8 minutes at 20 feet, which was generous -- the dive really barely called for deco. Since I guess I was technically deco captain (or rather, the only person on the dive who knows how to plan deco for such profiles), Kevin made me lead. Great... I have to lead us back through the one part of the navigation I can never pull off... the cove. I ended up surfacing us like 30 feet from the ramp; not bad. In those last few feet as we surface scootered to the ramp, my scooter started making the "I'm about to die" noise. Good timing.

I've become a bit of a one-dive wonder of late, but considering the epic viz, I couldn't pass up a second dive. And Clinton never passes up a dive, so I didn't have to worry about a buddy. Kevin and Matt decided to pass on a second dive (LAME). Clinton and I had both left our stage bottles behind on the first dive (while Kevin and Matt brought them), because really, making a nearly-"recreational" dive into a two-bottle affair is just silly. So we schlepped those out to the float, and after not that long of a surface interval (where Ben shared some delicious apples with me), we got back in. We left the scooters behind despite many many offers of spare batteries and scooters with burn time (thanks everyone for offering). It's good practice to kick every now and then. Even with a stage bottle :P Clinton suggested going out to the left side of the sand channel near the beginning of the sand channel. I haven't done a dive there in a while, and it was really nice on the way out on the first dive. I tossed my hero cam in the car (Matt's car, since he was my designated carpool buddy for the afternoon... while Rob and Leah were carpooling elsewhere), and Clinton pointed out that there is often a little school of blue rockfish that hangs out over there. The battery was nearly dead, but I figured I might as well bring it.

We kicked out and dropped not very far out, since I destination was not very far out, and the viz was awesome. The conditions were still very nice, and we just slowly kicked around looking for critters. I saw some Hopkin's roses and a couple of Limacias (haven't seen one of those in a while). But what really struck me about this dive was how colorful that area is -- it really hasn't been taken over by the barnacles at all. During the dive, I kept thinking to myself "this is what shallow Lobos is supposed to look like!". Near the end of the dive, I looked over toward the sand channel and saw a school of fish, which I thought were perch. I told Clinton I was going to go over to video them, and as I swam closer, I realized they were blue rockfish that Clinton had promised. Those fish were definitely on the smaller side, but the shallow, super clear water made for some nice video. I think it's the best blue rockfish footage I have! Shortly after that I called the dive on being cold. This "dive until we suck our stage bottles dry" thing doesn't really work in such shallow water. Unless you are much less of a cold weenie than me I guess.

We headed in and were happy to see a still relatively high tide, and managed to get ourselves out without a problem. After cleaning up, we made contact with Matt, and agreed to meet at the Monterey RG for lunch.

Granite Point by Braille

2011-10-15T22:11:00.000-07:00

There was a BAUE Lobos day on Saturday, which Rob and I attended. Rob got home late Friday night, we got a slightly late start. Lucky for him, his lovely wife setup his gear for him while pining for him on Friday afternoon. We didn't have any very concrete plans for what we were going to do, but I think we somehow settled on Granite Point. Turns out Clinton and John were going to Granite Point too, so we decided to all dive together. As we were loading gear onto the float, I realized that this could be my opportunity for some Gavin lessons. I recently acquired a Gavin scooter (but it lives in Florida), so I've been meaning to borrow one locally to learn to drive it. Hehe. So I proposed a swapperoo with John and he agreed. He gave me some tips and then we all got geared up. Rob and I managed to get into the water first, and were greeted to epic viz by the ramp. I couldn't believe how good the viz was! While we were waiting for John and Clinton, I did a little test drive on the surface with John's scooter.

Once we were all in the water, we scootered out on the surface and dropped down a bit before the worm patch. I think we ended up in the little sand channel-lette just to the left of the real sand channel, so we made our way to the sand channel. But I really can't be sure for two reasons: a) the viz was pretty bad, b) I was distracted dealing with the beast, err, the Gavin. Yes, that's right, the viz at the ramp was epic, but at the start of the sand channel, it was not too good. And it just got worse from there -- I couldn't believe it! The trip out to Granite Point is all a bit of a blur. I was a bit distracted dealing with the scooter, and trying to keep up with the team. When we were still in the sand channel, at maybe 35 feet, I was scootering right on the edge of the kelp forest, and encountered a stalk of kelp that was laying out horizontally in front of me. My scooter and arm went under it, but my body was about to go over it. So I stopped, and attempted to pull the scooter back and over the kelp.

Lesson #1 on driving a Gavin: You do not move the scooter; the scooter moves you.

Yes, that's right. I couldn't pull the freaking scooter back out from under the kelp just by the handle. I had to grab the shroud with both hands. In the meantime, the guys just kept on going. Luckily John noticed that I had fallen behind and he waited for me. The trip across the sand on the way to Granite Point proceeded likewise. I had pitched the scooter down, because John said I would need to match the speed of the X's. But apparently I pitched it down too far. So on the way across the sand, I was falling behind. But I knew if I stopped to pitch the scooter up, I would fall even further behind. And with the crap viz, I wouldn't have to fall much further behind to lose the team. Luckily John was hanging back keeping track of me. I'm fairly certain if he hadn't been, I would have been left in the dust. Rob denies that however :) We stopped partway across the sand because I guess Rob saw a squid, but I didn't see it. Just Rob signalling that he saw a squid. Then we finished crossing the sand, and found the first wall. We headed further north from there, stopping along the way every now and then. I was actually rather surprised that we made it as far as we did, considering the viz. My hand was killing me on the scoot out, and I eventually came to the conclusion that it was because the tow cord was a bit too long, so I was stretching my hand to reach the trigger. But adjusting the tow cord fixed that.

There really isn't too much to report from the dive, in terms of interesting sightings or anything. The viz was so bad that it took basically all of my concentration just to keep track of the team, or even one person from the team. We would pretty much stop at a spot, swim around a bit, then Rob would suggest getting on the trigger and we'd go a bit further, and repeat. It really wasn't a very fun dive. Eventually we turned around and headed back south until we got to the main wall. We actually had to stop and look around to be sure that that's where we were, before heading back over the sand. When we finally made it back to the end of middle reef, I think there was a collective sigh of relief that we had made it back in that viz :P We headed in along middle reef, and stopped to visit our friendly residents, the transect 4 warbonnet (who we couldn't find the last time we stopped there, so I was glad to see he's still there), and then the wolf eel -- there was one very big wolf eel in the usual spot. By the time that we got back to the worm patch, the viz was clearing up, and then once we got into the cove, the viz was awesome! We should have just dived in the cove!

On the way in, Clinton found a pipefish, which was really neat. I got out my hero cam and took a little bit of footage (which is good, since Clinton and Rob collectively took 0 pictures on the dive!). It's a bit small for the hero cam, but at least I got a little something to post. When we got close to the ramp, we surfaced, and Rob suggested that we go check out "the rock" near the ramp. You know, the one that sticks out of the water in the middle of the cove, near the beach with the seals. What a great idea! I've never gone over there before, but this was definitely the day to go... awesome viz and dead still water. We went over there and spent maybe 15 minutes swimming around and looking at stuff. There were zillions of Hilton's nudibranchs, a surprising number of fish, and Rob found a Triopha maculata! After the dive, we all agreed it was not worth a second dive, so we adjourned to RG for snacks and then to Gary's house for a little BAUE get-together.

Kitty vs. Burn Test

2011-09-28T21:52:00.000-07:00

I once read on Wikipedia that cow cats are known to love water. Seems they may have been onto something (though that claim has since been removed).

Not at all related to the burn test, but awfully cute:

Long Weekend in FL: Ginnie Springs River Intrusion Tunnel

2011-09-23T21:01:00.000-07:00

After years of talking about it, we finally convinced Ted to go with us for a long weekend in cave country. We flew in on Friday morning and stayed through Monday evening. Kevin met us too, though he did not arrive until Saturday. Ted spent the first day with Mark M. doing some sort of cave refresher/intro to Florida caves. So on Friday, it was just Rob and me. Rob had lofty ideas of getting to Ginnie Springs by noon, which of course was folly. By the time we got our gear from storage, got all of our fills squared away at EE, and got some lunch, it was after 2 by the time that we got there. We were slightly delayed because the last time we were in FL, I bought a new backplate to keep there, but hadn't gotten around to webbing it. I hate webbing backplates, and came up with some complicated scheme involving taking my normal backplate with us, so I could match up the sizing. But recognizing the silliness of this scheme, Rob offered to just do it for me. I was a bit doubtful of his ability to size my harness on the spot, but he claimed he could :P So we had to take care of that, and there were a couple of webbing misfires before we got it quite right :) Of course we finally got to Ginnie just in time to get a text message from Ted saying that they were heading back to EE for lunch, but would be back at Ginnie later. While we were at EE, we were asking Doug about ideas for where to go at Ginnie, since it seemed like we'd been to pretty much all of the places we could get with a single stage. We showed him where we had been and he pretty much agreed. So then he gave us a suggestion if we double staged, the river intrusion tunnel, though we were undecided if we wanted to do a double-stage dive. Or more like I was undecided about it, since I was feeling kind of tired from the flight, and I've never double-staged at Ginnie before and it seemed vaguely scary.

When we got to Ginnie, I told Rob we could double stage if he ran the reel. I didn't want to have to deal with pushing two stages through the eye and dealing with the reel. Rob agreed to that. But I did want to lead the dive, so he agreed to let me lead once the reel was tied in to the mainline. He's so good to me. Since I hate the mainline, or at least the flow on the mainline, I proposed that we go up the roller coaster line, then to the Hillier tunnel, then back to the mainline (at the dome room line) and then to the river intrusion tunnel. So that was the plan. When we got to Ginnie, we still had to setup our rigs, but that went reasonably quickly. We counted up the number of spools we needed, and added one or two just in case we miscounted :) We weren't entirely sure if we could jump from the Hillier tunnel right back to the mainline or if we would have to jump to the dome room tunnel then to the mainline (neither of us remembered it being that far, but couldn't remember just how far it was). We put our bottles into the water, got into our suits and went for a little cool off swim before getting geared up and back into the water. I dropped down and did a valve drill first, since I was still dubious about my cold-webbed harness. But I could indeed reach my valves. We got our bottles and headed into the eye. Getting through there with two bottles was not too bad, but I was glad I wasn't running the reel :) It was really only a pain in the one spot that's a pain with one bottle; and it didn't seem to be that much more geometrically challenging with two versus one bottles. When we got to the mainline, Rob let me go ahead of him.

I quickly made my way up to the top left of the gallery, and found a nice spot where I could dodge the flow quite nicely. Rob has taught me well. Or maybe the flow was just down :P The double stage experience was not too bad, once we were to the mainline. I was a little nervous about going through the lips, so I took an extended pause right before the lips before starting through. Again, not really that big of a deal -- you aren't actually any taller with two bottles, the tall part is just a little wider. So it was just as ungraceful as usual, but not more, getting through the lips. As we approached the hill 400 jump, I spied a good spot to drop our bottles, so I suggested we drop them there. Ahhh, phew. I've only done the roller coaster jump twice before, I think, so I was quite paranoid about swimming past it -- would I recognize it? I knew it was somewhere in the vicinity of 700-800' in, but I wasn't really sure. To make matters worse, before the dive, Rob had asked me if the jump was before or after the little low part where the center of the passage has a bump running through it. I told him I thought the jump was before it. So then when we passed that area and I still hadn't seen the jump, I was a bit worried. Then a moment later we came to the jump and of course it was quite recognizable. I put in the jump and we headed through there. That's a fun passage; certainly a lot more fun than taking the mainline :P When we got to the end, I started to install the jump when a team of scooter divers appeared out of the tunnel we had just come from. Rob and I were embroiled in a discussion of where to drop our stages (since the Hillier tunnel didn't seem like a good place to drop them), so I tried to get out of their way. They disappeared from my visual field and my consciousness. I wasn't sure where they went, but I thought the mainline. We found a nice little rock to leave our bottles on, and then finished installing the jump. We headed up the line, which we thought, at that moment, was the Hillier tunnel line.

Then the line ended after like a minute. This is not what we were expecting. But we could see another line that this line effectively T'd into (except not, it was a jump). I knew that right was the right way to go based on a) basic geometry and b) the direction that the arrows were pointing on that line (to the left). I went to my pocket to pull a spool, but before I got it out, Rob had pulled a spool and started to install it and swim over to the other line. Yea, you read that right. While trying to pull a spool, I felt a bunch of line spaghetti in my pocket... obviously some line had come off of one of the spools in there. When I caught up with Rob at the line that he jumped to, he asked which way to go. I pointed the way to go (duh), but not with much force, because I wasn't ready to go yea. Then I told him to hold. I pulled my pigtail out of my pocket because it was in the way of fixing the spaghetti. Rob just gave me this look like "why the f--- do you have your pigtail in your hand?". Then I pulled a spool out and told him to hold on. I was passing the pigtail between my hands, trying to figure out how to spool up the loose line while also hold the spool and my pigtail. I think this is about the point where Rob started yelling at me through his regulator. I'm not sure what he was saying, but it started with "Dude!" Eventually I got the spool cleaned up and put back in my pocket, and pointed the way to go. As you can possibly imagine, I was a bit annoyed with Rob by this point. Like a minute later, as I was swimming along, Rob kept swimming PAST me, so I stopped and yelled at him with hand signals to tell him I was the captain and he should stay the hell behind me :) He mostly behaved for the rest of the dive after that. A couple minutes up the Hillier tunnel, I remembered, while visualizing the map of the cave, that the Hillier tunnel line runs all the way to the bats, and there is a little connector between the mainline and that line. Doh. Well I won't forget that again.

Dropping the stage bottles before the Hillier tunnel was a good call, since at least in some areas there would not have been good options for leaving bottles on. When we got to the end of the line, I looked off to my right to see if I could see the main line, to jump directly to it, and I could not. So instead I put the micro-jump (actually more of a nano-jump) to connect the Hillier line with the dome room line. And managed to bonk my head on a spit of rock sticking down from the ceiling in the process. Ouch. We headed toward the mainline and of course it was super close, and I could easily have run a spool directly to it. Grumble grumble. We jumped to the mainline and headed up it. I was expecting a torturous swim up the mainline, since there is quite a bit of flow and not much to pull on, but it wasn't too bad. I guess the flow really was down. That part of the mainline always seems so dark to me, because it's big and so less light reflecting around me. So I was worried about missing the jump, since I couldn't necessarily see the right wall that well. But it was not a problem. I let Rob install the jump since I was out of jump spools, and I could tell that he really wanted to install a jump. And I even let him lead from there. Not that he really deserved that, based on his earlier behavior. The river intrusion tunnel was weird. The water looked really clear but it seemed like our lights did not penetrate it very well at all. But I liked swimming in behind Rob and his giant light; there was a cool light effect in that tunnel. We passed a T, where we went right, and not too much longer after that, the tunnel sort of pinched down and went up a little. I saw that coming up, and noticing that I was going to turn on gas in just a couple minutes, I tried to signal Rob before he made it into the smaller passage (since it would be easier to turn around before getting into it), but he didn't see my signal. I guess that is the downside of being behind Rob and his big bright light. So by the time I signaled him to turn around, we were both in a sort of tight spot where it was annoying to turn around. For all I know it opened back up into bigger tunnel up ahead, and I was just making our lives harder by turning a little early. Actually after looking at the map, that doesn't seem likely, but I guess I'll have to investigate that at a later date.

On the way out, Rob pointed out stage bottle rock. Doug had described this rock to us, and I had been looking for it and not seeing it on the way in, but that's because I thought it was just before the river intrusion tunnel; in fact it is just after it. Rob knew that, probably because he stays up late at night, studying cave maps. When we got back to the jump off of the mainline toward the dome room, Rob remembered that we had switched positions, which meant I had to clean up the spool, unfortunately. The flow made that sort of annoying. I managed not to hit my head while cleaning up my nano-jump and then we were back in the Hillier tunnel. The viz got VERY bad in one passage while we were in there. It was so bad that we were both on the line for a brief period. But it eventually cleared up, and the rest of the way back was clear, and uneventful. We didn't see any GPOs or anything. When we got back to our first stage (the first that we dropped, the second that we came back to), Rob was fidgeting a bit about getting on his bottle and when we got to the park bench, I realized why... he wanted to jump off of there. So we dropped our bottles there and headed up that line. I often forget that there is actually a bit of flow on that line. It's not like most of the other jumps off of the mainline, where once you take the jump the flow goes WAY down. It's an especially rude awakening after you have been riding the flow out for a half hour, and then you take that jump.

We headed up that for a while, with Rob leading, since he'd been leading on the way out. We passed the first jump to our left, then the second, and I figured he was just going to keep going up that line. Then he stopped at some point, at an arrow on the line, where it turned to the left 90 degrees. I didn't know if the arrow was for a jump or what, but there was what looked like a tunnel to the right. Rob swam off a bit to look around and then came back and said he was going to install a line. I told him that was fine. I figured he had found a line on the other side. Then he swam off. And swam and swam. And never stopped to tell me to cross once he had tied in the jump. I was sitting there rolling my eyes about this and eventually decided that I had to follow him, because he was getting beyond the point where I could see him. So I followed him line, only to find that there was no other line to jump into. He was just running line. Eventually he came to a room, with a pile of stuff in the center, which was the "White Room". I didn't realize that there wasn't a line to the room. After that, we headed out -- all the way out. Rob re-took the lead once we got back to the park bench and got our bottles. I made it back through the lips without a problem, phew. When we got to back to the reel, I must have made some sort of stray hand signal, which Rob thought meant "go ahead, I'll get the reel". Once I realized that that's what he thought, I signaled him again and was like "uh uh". He sort of shook his head and then waved me ahead. Hehe. I waited for him in the 50 foot room while he cleaned up the reel to that point. That seemed to sort of take forever :P Then I crossed my fingers, hoping I wouldn't get stuck in the eye on the way out, and headed up. There was some definite clanging along the way, but it was a pretty controlled passage through there. I waited for Rob in the 30 foot room and then we got our O2 bottles. After we picked them up, we saw someone hanging out at the entrance, looking down into the room. I thought it was a diver waiting for us to exit, but we were hanging out at 30 feet for a minute or so, which Rob tried to signal. Eventually after no one came by, but I got sick of waiting, I went up to the 20 foot ledge, and the diver was gone. It turns out it was Ted, just peeking in to take a look at the eye (they had entered through the ear for their dives). We settled in on the ledge and negotiated deco. Once that was set, I whipped out my wetnotes, took a few notes on the dive (none of which did I reference while writing this report, oddly), and then we played some hang-man. Or hang-kitty, as I prefer to play -- if you consider each whisker a separate body part, you can be really bad and still not lose. Among today's phrases were "Ted the Cave Diver" and "I love the Station Bakery".

When we finally made it out of the water, we found a note from Ted on our car. Apparently we had been in the water so long that they had come and gone while we were diving :( Bastard. We were both disgustingly hot when we got out of the water. Rob went back in for a swim in his drysuit, but I just couldn't stand being in my suit any longer, so I changed into my swimsuit in the car (while perhaps flashing everyone in the vicinity of the turkey roost) and went to meet him. Brrr. As hot as I was, the water was still painfully cold! After a very short swim, we got out and got going. We stopped by EE, which was closed, but Doug and Mark were both lurking out back, so we chatted with them briefly before heading back to the Country Inn, where we finally found Ted.

North Side of K2

2011-09-17T22:02:00.000-07:00

On Saturday we were on the BAUE tech boat, for my birthday dive-proper. Rob and I were diving with Susan, because Beto had sustained a birthday-cake-related illness the night before :( Rob had been scheming to go to back to Mount Chamberlain to look for the octopus we had seen on the south wall annex. Conditions on the ride down were a little rocky but nothing too bad. It was pretty similar to the day before -- a little worse than I was expecting based on the forecast. We ended up at K2. I told Rob that I didn't feel like going all the way over there from K2, since we would end up scootering out and back practically all of the dive. So I suggested we head north instead, since I love the north side of K2. I told Rob to take us to the super skinny canyon that we went to once before (my birthday -- no way I was leading!).

Viz was pretty good, just like the day before. It wasn't as dark as the day before, but I guess that's probably because of a combination of not being as deep and it was also sunnier on the surface. We dropped on the west side of K2, which seemed odd since, for whatever reason, it seems like we always drop on the east side. We popped over the top and headed north along the east side. As we scootered along the that sand channel to the east, the viz was nice! Eventually we curved around the north side a bit and then hopped across the sand to some of the structures to the north. I think that we did two things a bit differently than usual -- first, we were deeper as we scootered along the main pinnacle, so we didn't have the same viewpoint of the outlying structures; second, we curved a bit further around the north side (so more to the west than the east) than we usually do. As a result, we ended up in an area that I don't know if I've been to before. Maybe once, with Rob's ITC buddy, Peter. Anyhoo, as we explored these structures, we saw some canary rockfish, like we always see up there.

As we were slaloming along through the little canyons and such, I was thinking how we always see basket stars around here. And then Rob signaled me, and pointed out a basket star! We looked at it briefly, and he seemed not terribly interested in taking pictures, and continued along. Then a minute later, I saw another basket star. I pointed it out to Rob, and asked if he wanted to take pictures. I think he wanted to, but he always feels some subconscious pressure to not stop the team to take pictures when we are diving with others (well maybe others than Kevin). So he stopped and took some pictures. The little guy wouldn't unfurl for us though :( Once we he was finished, we started to go, and I saw a fish, I think it was a canary, swim into a little nook under a boulder. I followed it with my light, to see if there were other fish and there, and saw something weird. There were these big white round things. They were on a field of pink. I was staring at it and staring at it, trying to figure out what I was looking at, and then I practically squealed through my regulator when I realized it was a HUGE GPO. An HPO I guess :P Or its legs anyway. I signaled the team (I thought it was a pretty reserved GPO signal, because I didn't want to spook him into retracting further into his den, but Susan said she knew right away it was a "GPO signal" :P) and then swam a little closer to get a good look. It's definitely the biggest GPO I've seen. And that spot was the perfect GPO nook! I looked around to see if there were any shells outside of it, and didn't see any. But Rob said he saw some next to a side entrance. While Susan and Rob were checking it out, I was looking around for something to feed it, but the only thing I could find was a crab. While the little devil on my shoulder was certainly telling me to break it in half to try to lure the octopus out, there was no way I could do that.

After we finished with the octopus, we soon turned around and headed back to K2. We were scootering back along the east side, and I was a bit off of the bottom because, well, I'm not a deep freak like some of my dive buddies. Rob stopped (below me) to check out a crack in the rock. There was a crack, maybe 15 feet from the bottom (which was chock full of rockfish, by the way), and a little cavern at the bottom. Of course Rob had to check out the cavern. I guess he got partway in and decided he couldn't make it through. He signaled for us to come take a look, and I descended down to him, accidentally plummeted into the sand on the bottom (oops) and after recovering from that, I looked into the cavern and saw that it connected to the crack above. I also saw that it was a bit stirred up in there, I guess from Rob's bubbles or something. Then we continued along, coming up shallower on the wall. I love that wall. It's very impressive. I think I may like it better than the south wall. I was a pretty fishy day on the wall. I saw a few juvenile yelloweyes, but they were all too shy to have their picture taken. There were some less skittish fish that tolerated some photos, but I guess those didn't make the cut. Rob only gave me one picture from the dive -- how sad.

We made it all the way back to the peak, and passed the other two teams right around there. We had a couple minutes left, so Rob suggested we do a loop around the south side of the peak (after checking the crack for a GPO of course), and then we started our ascent. I was relieved of the duty of shooting the bag today, phew. At 50 feet, I looked at Rob and noticed something on his hood. It looked like a logo in the center of his hood, but I knew there wasn't a logo there. I swam over to look and saw that it was a tiny brittle star, maybe 1.5 inches in diameter. And it was just planted on the top of his forehead, right in the center! I swam over to Susan and told her to look at Rob. She practically lost her regulator from laughing when she realized what it was. So we spent the rest of the stop laughing and pointing at Rob. Poor Rob. We told him to take a picture of his head with his camera and take a look. He could only tell that there was something on his head, but not what it was. I was hoping he'd make it all the way to the surface with the starfish still there, but at 20 or 30 feet, he was gesticulating wildly and it popped off of his head. I caught it in my hand and showed it to Rob. I wish we'd gotten a picture of it on his hood! Deco was otherwise uneventful. After the dive, there was a general ambivalence about a second dive, so we did a little bit of searching around for whales but couldn't find anything. So we just headed back to the dock instead.

Birthday Wall

2011-09-16T20:36:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I do a dive that is so great that I find it difficult to write a report about it -- because the report can't possibly do it justice. This dive is just such a dive. And this is why it's taken me over two weeks to post about one of the coolest dives I've done in a while. Well, I hope that hasn't ruined the suspense about how the dive went, but here's the report. I commissioned Rob to setup some diving for my birthday weekend. Phil was available, yay, but we couldn't get Lobos tickets for Saturday so we settled for a Friday dive instead. This actually worked out well sine there was a somewhat last-minute BAUE boat on Saturday that we could go on too. I kept telling Rob that I needed to figure out where to go, but never got to it and eventually suggested that Rob make a suggestion. I was just too busy tom study the bathymetry maps in the week before the dive. He told me he had a mark for a site from 150 feet to 300 feet. I was doubtful and when he gave me the numbers, it looked more like it was a pinnacle from like 150 to 220ish next to a wall that went deeper. So we could check out the wall and then come up the pinnacle. This was all a few minutes scootering from the Dos Gatos area, so we figured we could finish up on the shallower structures there. Nice easy dive plan, huh?

The weather was very cooperative and we got to Yankee Point without too much trouble. It was actually kind of snotty coming around Point Lobos; in fact, I asked if Phil could take over the boat-driving from Rob, because it was a bit scary. They both ignored me and once we were around the point, it was a smoother ride. When we got near the site, Phil was eyeing the depth-sounder skeptically because it was pretty consistently reading 230ish without any sign of structure. Rob promised him that a small pinnacle top would suddenly shoot up to 150 and he was right we suddenly saw a plateau in the 180 rand and the it abruptly got shallower, peaking at 149 (at which we cheered and dropped the hook) and then got deeper again. The boat seemed kind of empty with just the two of us, even though we had a ton of gear. We got geared up and did all of our checks. We reviewed the plan, go here then here then here, but did not reviewed the bottom or deco profile, since it was the same profile we always do for these 15/55 Massively Multilevel Dives. We rolled into the water and found very little surface current and nice viz, on the top anyway. We headed down, met up at 20 feet for a bubble check, and continued down the line, which took forever because of my ears. Around 100 feet they started to behave. The viz was still good, though it was dark. I was looking below me waiting and waiting to see a pinnacle and around 140 feet I finally looked up and realized there was a pinnacle, towering above me, but the side we anchored on was so steep that looking down the anchor line, I didn't see the structure :).

The pinnacle actually came up to like 130' but it was this skinny spire poking up that shallow, which doesn't appear on the bathymetry. Then there was a plateau of sorts at like 170 or 180 before that sloped down deeper. We got to the plateau and regrouped. Rob was giving me a somewhat mysterious hand signal which I thought was a signal to reset my bottom timer (or at least note the time), since the uber-slow descent had eaten up like 5 minutes. I had already noted the time so I gave him the okay and we headed down the structure. Rob's initial claim about the profile was actually pretty accurate. The site was not really a pinnacle next to a wall. When you head down the side of the pinnacle you end up in 250' looking down, without really covering any horizontal distance. On the boat, Phil had been telling us about a ratfish he had seen a few days before. And what do you know, as we were looking at the sand below us, Rob signaled me excitedly to point out a ratfish below us. He immediately scurried down to get a look (and a picture... He brought the 60mm so the ratfish was a good subject). I was hanging above him, pondering how deep I wanted to go to see a ratfish, when I saw an interesting purple splotch on the sand, about 15 feet from Rob. It was round with little round bulges laying in the sand around it. It was a GPO laying completely out in the open on the sand! Just laying there. Once I convinced myself that there really was a GPO just laying in the sand I signaled Rob and pointed it out to him. He quickly lost interest in the ratfish and we both headed to the octopus. He was very friendly and I even let him suction one leg onto my hand for a bit. Two of his front tentacles were short and looked like they had been cut off. I guess the friendly octopus met another not so friendly creature. He slowly slithered across the sand with us until we ended up at a little structure across the sand, which was pretty fishy, and the octopus slithered up the structure. Rob started to take some pictures but I quickly suggested that we should head up a bit shallower. He nodded sadly.

We headed back to the main wall and then headed along that toward the deeper end of it. There was a current pushing us in that direction so we were pretty much just drifting along. The octopus encounter was just the beginning of an awesome dive. There were three really cool things about this dive. First, the topography was just cool. For a while, we were drifting along the wall at 250' looking down and not seeing the bottom. My guess is that the bottom is at at least 300'. The viz was good but it was DARK so difficult to say. Next time I come here I will bring a deeper gas so I can find out. Second, the fish life was amazing. We saw dozens of lingcods, many on the small side but a few (mostly shallower) pretty large ones too. Then there were the rockfish. There were tons of rockfish of all sizes. Lots of schools of juveniles. At one point we drifted over a boulder with a bunch of redfish on top of it. I thought at least some were yelloweyes, but as I lit it up, they all scattered into a crack. When I swam up to the crack there were at least a dozen stafford piled up against each other, and a couple yelloweyes I think. They were just crammed in there. I looked back to Rob to show him, and saw the one lone fish that didn't scatter was a bocaccio, and looking off into the distance, I realized I was staring at a school (!) of bocaccio. I didn't even know they came in schools :). There were also lots of big vermilions, several little groups of canaries, and plenty of fish that I don't even know what they were. Rob got pictures of two such mystery fish, which are (according to Tom Laidig) a sharpchin and a Pygmy -- both new-to-me rockfish, I think. After consulting my map, I was relieved to see that this spot is in a no-take area. Finally, the invertebrate life at this site was unusually good for this depth. At a lot of sites, below 200', the invertebrate cover just isn't as impressive. This is true, for instance, at Mount Chamberlain. But at this site, it was really very covered all the way down to 250'. All in all, an awesome site. I can't wait to go back.

Eventually we agreed to turn around and head up a bit shallower. I figured we started out a bit deep so it would be good to finish up a bit shallower. But Rob seemed to be in a hurry to get up to 190', and as soon as we were there, he signaled me to switch. I didn't understand why, since we still have 5 minutes left for out deep segment, but whatever. Turns out, there was a bit of confusion about what the bottom profile was supposed to be :) Rob thought we were doing 20/20, when the plan had been 25/15. Oops. Oh well. We hung around on the spire for a few minutes and then decided to head out into mid-water, to look for shallower structure. We were scootering over nothing for a couple minutes, with literally nothing in site in any direction, when finally I saw some structures below me, and eventually it got shallower and we landed on a pinnacle. We quickly discovered that it wasn't Dos Gatos, because the pinnacle came up to 70'. It was a nice spot, though it had quite a few barnacles on it. I even saw a head of hydrocoral covered in barnacles :( I think I identified this pinnacle on the bathy maps, but I have no idea if it is a named site. We worked our way up the pinnacle, and switched onto our 70' bottles, then put up a bag and left the pinnacle. I was joking with Rob before the dive that without Kevin, how would we put up a bag? I drew the short straw, and Rob was left unimpressed with my bag shoot. The line got caught on my glove as it was unspooling, and I had to give it a good flick to get it off, and then had to swim after the spool as it got dragged away from me. Oops. Maybe I need to shoot the bag more often.

Deco was uneventful and so was our retrieval by Phil. Conditions seemed quite a bit calmer on the way back, as we regaled Phil with tales of our epic dive. I can't wait to go back to that spot :) I think it is the best 15/55 dive site that I have dived. It needs a name, and I really don't feel up to the task of naming such an awesome site. I just can't think of anything that does it justice. So for now I am calling it "Birthday Wall" for lack of a better name.

Rob was sad that we saw a GPO while he was shooting macro, but I love the octopus eye shot! It's so funny looking.

Que Paso

2011-09-10T20:42:00.000-07:00

On Saturday, I was supposed to dive with Matt and Leah on Phil's boat. When they arrived at Lobos, Leah wasn't feeling well so she decided to stay at Lobos. So it was just me and Matt with 32%. Very strange going out with Phil like that. I had packed an O2 bottle, because I always figure it could be of use on the boat or in the car, but definitely won't be of use in my garage. Phil had an O2 bottle as well, so we decided to bring those along so that we had the option of doing something deeper/longer. While discussing site options, I randomly mentioned Que Paso and that is what we settled on.

Phil made me drive the boat which I am not really a fan of. But we managed to launch it and retrieve Phil without crashing into anything or running over any divers. This was the first time I experienced Phil's new engines. They are very quiet which makes it hard not to punch it, since you don't have the sound feedback. The forecast had looked pretty good, but it was actually a bit of a rough ride. It was also overcast which always makes it seem rougher than it is. We got to the site and it was a mysteriously calm patch just around there. We got geared up, in the oddly empty boar and flopped into the water. Phil reminded us that we would have to use our fins, not our trigger fingers, to get down the line today :). He also suggested that we come up the line instead of drifting if possible (i.e. there wasn't too much current). There actually was a little bit of current on the way down but nothing too bad.

The anchor was right next to a little crack that I recognized -- Rob has a picture of Susan from that spot. But it wasnt nearly as nice looking now because of the barnacle invasion. We headed down the pinnacle until we found one of the more vertical sides. There were white barnacles everywhere On the boat Phil had been talking about how there was a sister pinnacle that we could swim to. I got the impression that it was far enough away that we would only see it in really good viz. But we quickly spied this other pinnacle just across the sand from the wall that we were on. So we went to take a look. It was pretty neat; it was surprisingly barren of white barnacles (it was not as covered in general as the main pinnacle). In the center if the pinnacle there was a crater of sorts which I thought made it look like a volcano. Back on the boat Phil referred to this as an "amphitheater" which is an excellent description. There was a school of blues on this pinnacle, and there were some bug blues hanging out down in the amphitheater.

We headed back to the main pinnacle and circumnavigated it. I sort of felt like the whole dive, we were swimming around looking for a better spot -- one with something other than barnacles on it! I swam right over a couple of cabezons that I didn't even see until I spooked then and they took off. The last one that we came across bolted and then started acting really territorial toward us. So I figured there had to be a pile of eggs somewhere... Then I looked back at the spot that it had bolted from and sure enough there were eggs. So I guess he was guarding a best but not very well :). That spot was actually right on the edge of a crack with a bunch of hydrocoral -- so at least one scenic spot was left. I saw a couple of kelp greenlings acting territorial too but didn't find any nests.

We eventually ended up back on the wall where we started, and found one vertical stripe that was completely encrusted with corynactis and colorful sponges, and no white barnacles. It was odd because right next to it was a big swath of barnacles. So we hung out there until it was time to go shallower. Eventually we did head shallower and did a couple of loops around the top of the pinnacle. I expected to eventually wander past the anchor line but we never did. When we wanted to head up we actually started looking for it. I eventually found myself back at that recognizable crack which I was sure was where the anchor had been. But no anchor and no line. We gave up and shot a bag instead. We did a little deco at 20 feet. While we were there, Matt found a really cool critter. It was very similar to the "jelly bird" I saw once before but his one had some extra processes on it's back... making it look slug-like. When we surfaced, I told Phil that the anchor line eluded us. Turnout the anchor slipped, so he reset it, and then it slipped again, so he gave up. He claimed the weather picked up while we were in the water but then it calmed down again before we surfaced. Seems like that happens a lit in Phil's boat :). We told Phil about the jelly animal and he said it sounded like a sea angel. I finally got around to looking it up and that's definitely what my jelly bird was, and I suspect that the one we saw on this dive was some sort of sea angel too (but almost all of the pictures that I can find are of the one type with a smooth back).

The ride back was calmer than the ride down. When we got back to Lobos, Leah was feeling better so we headed to RG for lunch.

Mount Chamberlain South Annex

2011-09-05T08:17:00.000-07:00

Jim wanted to go diving on Labor Day so of course we joined him. It was supposed to be a pretty full boat, but in the end it was just Jim, Kevin, Rob and me. Having successfully made it down to Point Sur on Saturday, we decided to try again (but hopefully dive Big Sur Banks). We made it all the way to Sur 19 in what I would consider significant wind. There were whitecaps not too far south of Lobos. I was pretty surprised that we bothered to keep going, but we did. Not too surprisingly, once we were there, we decided it was not diveable. Well, Rob pulled his usual "we can dive this" nonsense, but Jim and I were pretty convinced otherwise. Actually, I'm sure we could dive it, it was just the getting back on the boat part that I was not so sure about :)

So we headed north for a calmer spot. The ride back up was unpleasant and a bit scary at times. We got back to Yankee Point and it was pretty calm there. In fact it was calmer than I remembered from the way down, though that was perhaps in comparison from the ride to Big Sur. We decided to anchor on the south wall of Mount Chamberlain, and "if the viz is good" go to the south annex... The wall that runs parallel to the south wall a couple hundred feet south across the sand. I think that Jim had not been to that spot before, but I love the spot. Maybe that's because we only go there in good viz :). We dropped down to find really bad viz on the wall. It was green and dark and chunky, and keeping the team of four together was annoying.

After a few minutes on the wall, heading west, we found a basket star on one of the boulders at the bottom of the wall. After checking him out, Rob suggested we head to the annex. The viz was crap but I figured why not... you can't really get lost between here and there. So we headed over the sand and in a little over a minute we saw the reef, phew. We landed on a familiar spot and were looking around at the fish when we got a light signal from Kevin. It was a rather excited light signal, so I was thinking "that had better be a GPO!" And it was! At the very bottom of the wall there was a little overhanging ledge, with a GPO under it. He had one arm completely outstretched, hanging out from the overhang. I think he was waving to us. Even though he was under a ledge, we had a pretty good view of him, and he was pretty active. We took terms swimming over to the opening to get a good look at him. By the time we were done with him, it was nearly time to head shallower, so we headed back north to the south wall. We came up the wall and headed north toward K2. We never actually found the shallow K2 peak, but we found a spot that came up to 110 or 120. I thought we should just hang out there instead if spending the rest of our bottom time futilely looking for a shallower peak to come up. So we hung around there for a few minutes before Rob got restless and suggested we search around a bit more. So we did, and it was futile :). One thing I did notice as we scootered around is that as soon as we got to 120 or 130, I started to see those evil white barnacles. Grumble. They are everywhere!

Deco was uneventful. There was the usual assortment of unnamable deco critters. At 20 feet Rob and Kevin decided that my gauge is broken. Apparently it is off by a couple feet compared to theirs so I kept finding myself a couple feet deeper than them. I think their gauges are the broken ones!

Planet Roxy and White Wall

2011-09-03T20:35:00.000-07:00

We were on a tech boat on Saturday and the forecast looked great. So of course the plan was to go south until the weather dictated otherwise. We made it to Point Sur and then discussed where to go. Jim had numbers for some new site (not sure where the numbers came from) and he called it Roxy something. I can't remember the rest of the name, so I've decided to call it Planet Roxy, for no particular reason. Anyhoo, the site was storied to be about as far out as Midway but a bit south of that. Or maybe it was north, I always get those confused. The profile was also supposed to be similar to midway, with the top in the 120 range and the bottom less than 200.

We dropped into excellent viz and not much surface current, but as we descended, we saw the line flatten out and then were greeted by an impressive current. Also, viz was quite green and murky at the bottom. Where we first dropped, there was a nice wall from maybe 130 to 180 or so. We dropped down the wall and Rob attempts some shots in the current. I found a Crinoid at 180'! That is by far the shallowest I have seen one locally. It was on the side of the wall, leaned over in the current. Poor little Crinoid.

We scootered around a bit to try to find more structure but eventually gave up and headed back. We saw a bunch of bigger red rockfish (including some yelloweyes) much like we have seen at Midway. Near the end we found a nice little crack with some hydrocoral for Rob to shoot. That part of the reef topped at like 120 feet making it a good multilevel option. All in all I would go to Midway over this site in the future... It has the same sort of fishlife but much better structure.

We headed back north and decided to try a "new" spot near Cypress Point. Beto has been wanting to look at this site for a while. Clinton said he was pretty sure he had dived it once a while ago. It was a well supposedly coming up to 60 and dropping off to like 130. Kevin had not brought a 32 stage so he sat this one out (despite my many strokey ideas for how we could cobble together the bottles we had so that we could all dive). The viz totally sucked on the top of the structure (which was not quite as shallow as reported). We headed down the wall, on backgas, which had slightly better viz. Also, further down the wall we escaped the barnacles (which were everywhere in the shallows). There were some nice hydrocoral bushes. Sort of like locals ledge deep was how Clinton described it.

Little Cow Canyon

2011-08-27T16:36:00.000-07:00

There were back-to-back BAUE tech boats this weekend. We were on the Saturday boat, which was slated to do a 15/55 dive. Earlier in the week, there was talk of potentially switching to 18/45 so we could make a run for Big Sur Banks. There seemed to be a general ambivalence about what to do, so we stuck with the original plan, and hoped that the fog that had been hanging around all week would go away for the weekend. It turns out we made the right decision. When we got down to Monterey on Saturday morning, there was fog. The middle of the bay was pretty fog-free, but we could see (or not see, rather) that there was thick fog out by Point Pinos. Jim had driven down the coast to see whether it cleared up in Carmel, and reported that there was thick fog all the way down to Yankee Point. Hmph. So we decided to adjourn for breakfast and come back a bit later, in hopes that the fog would have lifted. We headed to the breakfast club, where I had some very tasty French toast with strawberries. This was definitely risky, since I am usually pretty strict about what I will and will not eat before a significant deco dive; and French toast with strawberries is definitely not on the "will" side of the list. By the time we got back to the dock, it was about 10. The fog situation looked better in the bay, but looking south from K-dock, we could see fog in the hills. We decided to go out and take a look anyway. On the way out of the bay, the fog seemed to be lifting, and between Point Pinos and Cypress Point, it was really clear. It looked good enough that we all decided it was worth it to put our drysuits on. Just after Cypress Point, we encountered a wall of fog, but then a bit south of there was better.

We made it down to Lobos and started to discuss our options. We decided to look at Yankee Point and if that wouldn't work, we would retreat to the E3 area, and if that wouldn't work, back to the Outer Outer Pinnacles area. Once we passed Lobos the wind really kicked up and by the time we got to Yankee Point, we pretty much turned around without discussion. By the time we got back to Lobos, even there it was quite windy, with whitecaps about. Jim was worried about the direction of the wind and the potential to drift into the rocks, so we headed back to the OOP area. It was pretty freakin' windy at this point, and I was feeling pretty negative about the idea of getting into the water with 3 bottles, a process I do not particularly enjoy even in the best conditions. Luckily, when we got back to the OOP area, the water was dead calm. I guess Cypress Point was protecting us from the wind? We circled and circled and discussed our plans. Jim had some mark in his GPS which Rob had given to him, that was supposedly a spot from 160' to 230'. But no one had actually dived it. After discussing our options (which included some strange ones), we eventually settled on dropping the downline on that spot, and planning to spend the dive there (that is, not heading to the next shallower pinnacle at the end of the dive, which had been one of the options). So we finally got geared up while the line was set. Rob was looking a bit green during the process of gearing up, most likely from circling while we decided what to do, and at some point while we were getting ready, he made a bucket deposit. Ewww.

Normally when doing a 3 bottle dive on the Escapade, I have a crew member clip my O2 bottle to my leash when I am standing on (or one step from) the swim step. Today I decided to just clip it off while seated, since it's only like an extra 3 steps with the bottle. When we were ready to go, Michael and I hoisted me up and then Michael practically collapsed in laughter as I trudged to the swimstep, looking like a bottle monster. I didn't even bother to hold the O2 bottle, I just let it drag along. Probably not very good for the boat deck, but it worked well for me. Rob pointed out that my other bottles were sort of bouncing around against the valve/reg on the O2 bottle, so it probably wasn't very good for my gear either. Oops. Anyhoo, I got into the water and grabbed my scooter. It was super calm with very little surface current. Rob and Kevin were getting their stuff sorted out when I told them I would meet them on the line. Then I attempted to scooter down to the line, from about 10 feet away from the ball. Silly me. The viz was like 3 feet, so there was no way I was going to find the line from that far away :) I had to return to the surface, go to the ball on the surface, and follow the line down. We got to 20 feet and did bubble checks. Rob told me my right post was bubbling, and told me to hold while he monkeyed with it. It was very reminiscent of T2, having to fix a post on the way down at 20 feet. Once that was sorted out, we headed down. As I mentioned the viz was crap near the surface. But below about 30 or 40 feet, it was really good. Not epic, but very good. We came to the top of the structure at about 160 feet. The ball was actually in a little sand channel between the main structure and another mini pinnacle.

We were on the north side of a ridge that ran, for the most part, east-west. We headed west along the edge of the ridge, since we knew that was the deeper end. Along the way to the west end, we saw a Diaulula lentiginosa, two of those weird reddish carrot-shaped deco creatures (this was the first time I saw one on the bottom), a couple of starry rockfish, and some vase sponges. When we got to the end, there were several parallel fingers of the reef extending out, with sand in-between. On the south side of the northernmost finger, Rob found a crinoid, which he showed to me, because he knows I love crinoids. While we were looking at it, I saw a rockfish, which I didn't recognize at all, sort of tucked up against the reef. But completely out in the open. I pointed it out to Rob, and as he also had no clue what it was, he took some pictures. While he was doing that, I got an excited light signal from Kevin, who was at the very tip of the next reef finger. I went over to see what was up, and saw a field of crinoids -- yay! There were over a dozen full-sized ones and a couple of baby crinoids which were oh so cute. Eventually Rob came over to shoot some pictures of me with the crinoids. While I was supposed to be pretending to look at the crinoids, I was actually ogling some of the many (dozens) of Acanthadoris hudsoni all over the reef, including a really tiny one maybe a centimeter long. So cute! I was also noting that my hands were freakin' cold, I thought because my new wrist seals were too tight, inhibiting circulation (or, as those GUE types like to say, "perfusion"). Eventually Kevin and Rob moved along to the east a bit, back to what I would consider the south side of the main reef (as opposed to the "fingers" extending from it). I was still playing with the slugs and crinoids when I heard a squeal and looked over at them, just in time to see them both start to signal me at once. I scootered over to them, and then were pointing into a crack, which contained the largest lingcod I've ever seen. He was scary-big, and I have no idea why he felt the need to hide in a crack, considering his scary-bigness. Right next to him, half in the crack and half out of it, was a giant vermilion. They must have both been snacking on the same nuclear waste to end up so big.

After marveling at the giants for a bit longer, we headed to the east, ending up in a canyon between a ridge to the north and a ridge to the south. So we were on the south side of the ridge we had started on. Along the canyon, we saw several vase sponges and just generally a lot of fish. Although we did see quite a few vase sponges, they weren't the impressive towering ones that you often see in the OOP area. In fact, I was a bit surprised that this site didn't have "better" vase sponges. We stopped around 180' and switched onto our 190' bottles. We looked around briefly at that spot, then continued to the east. As we neared the high spot on the east side, we saw two bright dots in the distance, coming toward us, and eventually Matt and Jim appeared. They had been looking for any other high spots to the east, but hadn't found anything. Both of our teams ended up finishing our dives on that 160' high spot where we had started the dive. This spot had more of the stuff you typically see shallower, with a heavy covering of Corynactis. Rob thumbed the dive on time, and I started barking out deco orders. When we got to 90', I told them, by the way, that I was deco captain. Teehee. When we got to 70', we discussed the deco plan. The deep portion of the dive had been significantly shallower than we had planned, so we adjusted our deco slightly.

The viz was pretty amazing on deco. There were a good number of egg yolk jellies in the water column, and from 20 or 30 feet, you could look out in the distance and make out jellies that were obviously quite far away. The seascape was dotted with them. One other neat siting on deco was a pretty nice looking salp chain. It wasn't huge, but was pretty big. I regretted being too lazy to bring my hero cam to play with on deco. At 20 feet, the viz got a little wonky -- we could be in a patch of great viz and see a patch of murkiness drifting toward us (or, more likely, we were drifting toward it). But those murky patches sure were toasty warm!

Aside from the jelly-peeping, the deco was pretty uneventful. When we surfaced, the wind had definitely picked up a bit, but it was not too bad. The pickup was pretty easy, in fact it was quite fast. I ditched my two bottles, my scooter, and then headed up the ladder. I felt like I had an unusual amount of difficulty climbing the ladder. Usually, it is getting from the top rung of the ladder to the swimstep that is tough; there's always a two-second moment where I'm not sure I'm going to make it, and think I'm going to fall (but haven't... yet). But today it was pulling myself up the first few rungs of the ladder with my arms. Luckily I had pre-warned Michael to give me a hand, since I was climbing with my O2 bottle still on. After I plopped down on the bench and got out of my rig, Kevin and Rob eventually appeared back on the boat, and we reviewed the cool finds of the dive, while retrieving the other team. About five minutes after I got back on the boat, before I'd even stood up, I suddenly felt a stabbing pain in my left elbow, and an intense desire to get my arm out of my way too tight wrist seal :) I have (non-decompression-related) pain in my left shoulder and wrist with some regularity, but never my elbow, and never like this. It felt like an ice pick being jammed into my elbow. I also had a less distinct pain in my wrist. Rob helped me out of my suit and to retrieve my leftover O2 bottle, which I breathed for the entire ride back to the dock. After maybe 15 minutes, it felt maybe 50% better, and within the last 5 minutes of the boat ride back to the dock, it went from still hurting a bit to not really hurting at all. So, no permanent damage, except maybe to my skin -- I didn't get around to putting sunblock on during the ride home, and you know, wrinkles are forever. I cannot identify any reason that this dive would have caused my first-ever DCS hit, except for my tight wrist seal. I didn't consider the profile of the dive to be particularly aggressive, considering the dive was shallower than usual and we barely modified the deco. The only other slight difference was that I was extremely speedy in getting out of the water; so I may have done less "surface deco" than usual. But there is usually a lot of variation in this regard, so I don't see this as being a very significant factor. So I blame the wrist seals. Or maybe it was the French toast.

In addition to not attending to my skin care (or bladder) needs while slurping Oxygen on the ride home, I didn't manage to eat much, so I was starving when we got back to the dock. We headed to La Tortuga for lunch.

After circulating the picture of the mystery fish to the "fish guys", we found that the mystery fish is a juvenile cowcod. Neat! So I named the site "Little Cow Canyon" after the fishy. And after my little cow cat.

Drysuit Shakeout Dive

2011-08-20T18:51:00.000-07:00

Rob was out of town this weekend, and I was not very on top of making plans to dive. I made some feeble attempts to find something to do, and by Thursday I had given up on diving. Or given up on trying to make plans anyway. On Friday afternoon, Matt asked me if I had any plans, because he was suddenly without a buddy for his Lobos tickets. Due to some sort of scheduing snafu, Leah couldn't dive on Saturday. I had also received a call on Friday from Any Water Sports, about my new drysuit having arrived. So after work, I headed down to AWS (with like a dozen tanks in the poor RAV4, which Rob had left for me to take to AWS after our dive the previous weekend) to try the suit on. I was happy to find that it actually fit pretty well. It didn't fit exactly like my current suit, which I was a bit miffed about (since I consider that suit to "fit perfectly"), but it did fit well. It was definitely worthy of sea trials. We got a late start on Saturday and rolled into Lobos at about 10:45 :) As we pulled in, the conversation turned to where to go. Eventually we decided to head down the sand channel, and if the viz was good, we'd head toward Granite Point, and otherwise, we'd head left, to the Sisters or Beto's, or maybe the shallows over there. Since we had no clue where or what depth we would end up, we took O2 bottles along for the ride.

The water was super calm and the tide was nice and high. I donned my new drysuit and had a little photo shoot before I got in the water, since both Ted and Rob had asked me to take a pic. Unfortunately the picture makes the suit look blue, but I swear it looks purple in real life! We loaded our float with scoots and bottles (the tide was conveniently high enough that we could load it up on the ramp and then I swam it out). Then we got geared up and after some reviewing the plan and doing gear checks, we headed into the water. I got roped into leading the dive, grumble. After dealing with a bubbly right post (which confirmed for me that I could actually do a flow check on the surface in my new suit), we scooted out on the surface until we were a bit past the worm patch. We dropped in 30-ish feet. I did another flow check once we hit the bottom and found that I could indeed reach my valves in the new suit. The viz was looking pretty good on the sand channel. We headed out on the right side of the sand channel, and by the end of middle reef, I had decided we'd go to Granite Point. As we were approaching transect 1 by the end of middle reef, I stopped at the crack just before the transect and peered through it. Ted had recently asked me if I knew if the crack went the whole way through the reef. Amazingly, though I have peered into the crack on numerous occasions to look for slugs or fish, I've never bothered to look through it. And it does indeed go through -- I could see light on the other side.

After that little stop off, we headed straight to granite point wall. The viz out there was good but not great. There were tons of egg yolk jellies, and unlike the dead or dying ones I saw last weekend at Lobos, many of them were in very good shape. We poked around behind the wall first. I found a couple interesting slugs, including one that was super tiny which I think was a Dendronotus albus but it was TINY, like the size of a big Eubranchus. After puttering around there for a bit, we headed north and scootered for a bit, stopping to look at the egg yolk jellies here and there, until we got to the little cove with hydrocoral. We looked around there for a bit. The barnacles are out of control there. I frequently scour the wall on the south of the cove, and all of those pretty patches of sponges are totally covered with barnacles. From there, we continued northeast up the chute that starts in the back of that cove. We basically continued east-northeast until we got pretty shallow, up to around 20 feet at the reef tops. It was alternating between periods of uber calmness and massive surge. But it was fun to just hang up there right under the kelp canopy. Eventually we headed a little west and found a decent-sized school of blue rockfish hanging in the kelp forest. I harassed them with my hero cam, which they tolerated surprisingly well.

From there, I decided to head back to the wall-sand interface, and work our way back. We headed west from where we were, until we hit a drop off and we headed down to the sand, and worked our way south. I found a couple of Hopkins roses right next to each other on a little rock under an overhang. They were cute, though not in the best spot for looking at. On our way south, we passed some rocks that were covered in Onchodoris bilamellata eggs. I had seen a bunch of their eggs last week too, but never got a chance to look for slugs. I was hoping I would find some today. I got the impression that Matt didn't know what kind of slug the eggs belonged to, so I was hoping to find one to show to him. Eventually we ended up back at the main wall and were looking around there, right at the northern tip. In between three boulders, I found a little crack with a rock in the bottom, and saw a single Onchodoris bilamellata sitting on that rock. I excitedly signaled to Matt and he came over to look. It took him a moment to figure out what he was looking at, and while he was staring into the crack, I noticed that one of the rocks next to it was completely carpeted in the slugs. It was so covered in them that they just blended in like they were the surface of the rock. Another nearby rock had a bunch of them too, this time fewer, so they were easier to see one by one. We found another rock that was completely carpeted to. There must have been a thousand slugs in total on these rocks. Really cool but also sort of creepy!

After appreciating the slugs for a while, we continued along the wall and finally headed back toward middle reef. Once we got to middle reef, we headed to the sand channel and were scootering back, when I spied a little thing in the water column. I stopped to look, and it was a super cute tiny little fish. I signaled for Matt to come over and after a moment of doubt on his face, he looked at the fish. I originally thought it was another one of those adorable kelp poacher things, but now I don't think so. First of all, it was way darker -- dark brown to black. And it had a much shapelier tail. I am going to have to do a bit of research on it. It had a really familiar look to me but I can't quite put my finger on what it reminded me of. In any case, it was super cute! We continued in past the worm patch and eventually decided to switch to our O2 bottles, because hey, why not? Shortly after that, we found another interesting floater -- some cool looking shrimp. It had an opaque brown (or maybe grey) and white striped shell. We continued in and I veered to the right until we got to the point where I knew we were right along the edge of the cove. But I lost confidence in my ability to find the float line underwater and eventually thumbed it, about 40 feet from the ball :)

I would say it was quite a successful dive with the new drysuit. The suit is a bit bigger than my other suit in the thighs and torso, but still within the reasonable range. And I love those small Halcyon pockets!

We packed up and headed to RG for milkshakes to go, then headed back to San Jose for dinner with Leah.

Anniversary Dive

2011-08-14T20:49:00.000-07:00

It was our anniversary weekend, so we decided to do a dive for two at Lobos. Since we haven't successfully dived Twin Peaks in a while, we decided to go there. Rob and Matt spied an Okenia felis out there recently, so I was hoping for another siting. But strangely, Rob was shooting wide angle (which may have had more to do with what was already setup than anything...). We got to Lobos pretty late, at my insistence, since we went on a date the night before. On the way down to Monterey, we passed Ted, which we were a bit shocked by, since we were running so late. I think we got to Lobos just before 9:30. It was a pretty good day for loading a bazillion bottles onto the float (I secretly knew that the tide would be more favorable a bit later, so that was part of my master plan to show up late). I offered to swim, since swimming bottles totally beats carrying them. I even offered to swim out Ted and Brian's bottles to their float, since they didn't have much and I was already in the water; and it's always good to be owed a favor :)

Rob and I got into the water pretty quickly, got our gear from the float, and headed out on the surface. We dropped into the sand channel to find pretty so-so viz. We started down the sand channel, and I quickly heard any annoying bubbly noise coming from my left post. We stopped briefly so that Rob could fix it. The exact same thing happened the last time we dove Lobos, but this time I didn't forget to do a flow check after Rob was done tinkering with my valves :) We got started once again and found that the viz cleared up a bit north of Hole in the Wall, Lone Metridium, etc. We headed to the left at Hole in the Wall, and sort of straddled the line between worse and better viz. Along the way, I saw one of the big boulders in the sand was covered with the eggs of Onchidoris bilamellata. I figured I could look for slugs on deco :) The viz still was only okay to the north though. Eventually we headed that way, encountering a pretty big school of blue rockfish above us about halfway to the First Sister. They were just hanging there, above us, at about 60 feet. The so-so viz continued out to the start of the Road, and then a little bit along there, it seemed like the viz actually got worse. Maybe it was just because it was darker, so it seemed that way. Anyway, it definitely wasn't the right day for Rob to be packing wide angle :P Oh well.

Despite the bad viz, we did eventually make it all the way out to the Peaks. Once we got to the big one, we slowed down, and would park in an area for a bit, then slowly move along. There was a noticeable current out there, to the point where it was difficult to stay in one place to focus on little stuff :) But we still made a couple of interesting finds. The best find was definitely an Okenia felis, which Rob found. Good work! It was actually a really nice looking specimen, nice and symmetrical looking -- it's a shame Rob couldn't get a picture. This was definitely the deepest I have seen one. All of the others have been on the Road in 120 to 130-ish feet. After ogling that for a while, we eventually moved on, and I found an Aldisa albomarginata. I haven't seen one of those in ages! That slug is close to my heart, since I was looking for it when I found the first Okenia felis :P Other than these two slugs, we saw some Dotos and I found a cute muppet fish (an Irish lord I think). Shortly after we both switched off of our stages, I suggested we head in, so we could look around on the Road on the way in. So we did that. We didn't find anything terribly interesting on the Road, but did see some Dironas.

Eventually we headed in. Rob wanted to shoot straight from the Road to Beto's, so we went that way. I was a little nervous partway across that we were going to miss it to the north, so I started subtly nudging Rob to the right :) We hit Beto's and headed in along that, with just a brief stop to look for the wolf eel (Bert), but he was not in, or maybe just not taking visitors. Since we came back via Beto's, I didn't get a chance to look for those slugs on deco. On the way back just south of Sea Mount I saw some more rocks with lots of eggs on them, but they were around 75 or 80 feet, so I didn't get a chance to look at them either. Boohoo. Just around where we stopped to go onto our 50% bottles, Brian and Ted scooted past us. Ted didn't notice us, so we tried to sneak up on him and buzz past him :) After our 60 foot stop, we headed over to Middle Reef for the rest of deco. Eventually Rob decided to take some pictures of Ted and Brian, though they didn't seem that interested :) Once we got to 30 feet, we left Middle Reef and just headed in. Rob's scooter died as we were arriving for our 20 foot stop. Or I guess it was just making that noise where it is about to die. We just hung out for a bit at 20 feet, and then decided to mosey on in. We passed by a couple of red clouds which were swarms of some sort of little shrimp -- it was pretty eerie to see this moving cloud of red. Kind of cool but also pretty gross. I was trying to avoid the cloud, but Rob swam right through one. Eek! Eventually we made it back to our float and we surfaced.

After we got ourselves and our gear out of the water, we cleaned up and went to RG with Ted and Brian.

Since the viz was so crappy, Rob didn't even bother to take his camera out. So no pictures today!

Sur 20

2011-07-31T20:03:00.000-07:00

There were tech boats scheduled for Saturday and Sunday this weekend. I was diving Sunday, and Rob was on both boats. The Sunday boat was originally slated to be a 15/55 trip, but early in the week, Jim told the organizer that the forecast was looking really stellar and making it to Big Sur was a real possibility. So we voted or something and it was agreed that we would switch it to 18/45, so we could try to get down there. As the weekend arrived, the forecast looked good for both days, but extra super good on Saturday. Hmph. Anyway, Rob called me Saturday afternoon to tell me that (a) they made it to Big Sur Banks (Sur 19 to be precise) and (b) he was horribly sick for basically the entire trip back, despite the dead calm water -- so sick that Ted had to drive him home (luckily they carpooled, so there was no car-ditching required). But the report from the day's diving was dead calm seas, raging current (especially on the bottom), good viz, and blue whales on the trip home. Rob ended up punting on Sunday, and it was just me and Kevin. On the ride out, I pointed out that without Rob, our team lacked leadership. How would we know which way to go? I suggested that once the site choice was finalized, we call Rob so he could plan our dive for us :)

Quite a while later, we were almost to Point Sur, and debating whether to go to Midway, Sur 19, or Sur 20. The viz the day before was reported to be good, so I decided it was time to give Sur 20 another try -- seems like the couple of times I have been there, the viz has been pretty bad, so I have a preference for Sur 19. So eventually we settled on Sur 20. In the end, I somehow drew the short straw and ended up leading to dive (and deco, but I like that). There was some bizarre new experimental plan for deploying the divers. I thought it sounded bizarre and rather unpleasant. In an effort to deploy all of the teams at the same time, the first teams got in the water and waited on a current line for the final team, then we would all let go of the current line and drift to the downline (which had been set in advance, before the boat was anchored). I didn't think hanging on a current line in a stiff current sounded too pleasant. So even though Kevin and I were geared up and ready to deploy first, I pulled the "oh, after you" with Beto, Sue, and Jim's team, since (for once) I was actually quite comfy sitting on the bench waiting to deploy. The seas were really calm, but apparently the day before had been even flatter! So we got in second, and after I popped up from my jump in, I had to swim like hell to make it back to the boat to get my scooter. Not a good sign. I couldn't manage to hold onto the line with any force while clipping on my scooter, so I found myself just getting dragged along toward the end of the current line (I had my elbow hooked around the line, so I could use my hand to clip my scooter). I quickly saw the ball at the end of the line approaching, with Susan holding on for dear life, and decided that I had to let go, or I was going to end up dragging her off the end of the line with me. So I let go, clipped my scooter forthwith, and got on the trigger. I was making slow progress back toward the line, which, I supposed, was all that really mattered. Before I managed to get back to the line, we were instructed, as the final team deployed, that we could let go and head to the downline. So, remember that part about "drifting" to the downline. Due to some sort of current miscalculation, the current line was actually down-current of the downline. Doh!

I was struggling to make headway on my itty bitty scooter in the big bad current. I found that if I was on the highest speed plus gave the occasional little kick, I was making forward progress. Just barely. Kevin (with his Cuda) looked concerned and hung back for me to catch up. Once I caught up to him, I grabbed his elbow, and we scootered along basically holding hands. Teehee. Eventually I decided to grab his manifold instead, so that was a little easier to grip. We made it to the ball and then had to wait for everyone else to materialize, scootering at top speed to stay with it. Beto eventually signaled his team to descend, so we descended as well. The current was reasonably bad in the top twenty or so feet, but by the time we cleared fifty feet, it was noticably less. Two other things happened around 50 feet... we passed Beto and Susan who had halted their descent, and the lights came on, as we cleared the slightly mucky layer and were suddenly greeted but much clearer, bluer water. Not that the viz was terrible in the top layer, but it was significantly better below. I'm terrible at judging viz, but I'd guess it was 50 or 60 feet on the bottom. It was pretty good -- definitely the best viz I've ever had at Sur 20.

We got to the bottom and agreed to hang out near the downline for the other teams to arrive. Actually we agreed to wait there for 5 minutes. Five minutes came and went, and there were still no other teams. This was not much of an imposition though, since the downline was set along the crack in the center of the pinnacle, and the top of the side that we were on (the south side) was probably the nicest part of the pinnacle, hydrocoral-wise. As we approached 10 minutes, I wondered what we should do. Considering the rather stressful deployment, if we surfaced and had to re-deploy, I didn't think I would have the gas for a reasonable dive. So I figured if no one appeared, we could just do an abbreviated dive, and the others could dive in a second shift. At around 12 or so minutes, Beto and Sue appeared, but without Jim. Weird. I later found out that his scooter was not up to the task of getting him to the downline. Anyhoo, once we saw them, we headed off and initially did a big circle around the whole pinnacle, just to have a little tour and see what was where. As we came around the northeast side, we were greeted by a giant school of blue rockfish. I don't know where they were when we started the dive... maybe I just couldn't see them because I was on the south side of the crack, but it was like we went from having hardly any fish at all to this giant swarm of them. I've included a crappy hero cam screen capture so you can get an idea of the fishiness. That was really cool. We enjoyed the view there for a bit, and then Kevin found a neat little arch/swimthrough at the bottom of the pinnacle, and of course he had to go through it :)

At some point at least 20 minutes into the dive, we were scootering around and passed Dionna and Mark. I guess they had some current-related snafu that caused them to get there late. But at the time, I was wondering if they had been there all along and I had just not noticed them :) Anyhoo, we eventually headed back to around where we started, and spent most of the rest of the dive just looking at the hydrocoral. We also found a nice big egg yolk jelly, quite a few big lingcods, and a few of those little juvenile yelloweyes (no adults though :( ). And more hydrocoral. Now that I've seen Sur 20 in good viz, I think it has more interesting structure than Sur 19, but Sur 19 has better hydrocoral. There's lots of hydrocoral at Sur 20, but not as many really big impressive bushes.

Eventually it was time to go, and after making sure we were down current of the down line, Kevin shot a bag and we were off. Starting from around 70 feet, there were a bunch of jellyfish, of the random, medium-sized, anonymous variety (meaning I don't know what they are called :P). At one point we also saw a weird floating thing that I've seen once before, and have no idea what it is. This time, it appeared just as we were about to move up a stop, so I decided to bring it with us. Well, encourage it to come with us by flapping my hand upward under it. I hope that doesn't make me a bad person. Anyway, in the process of this flapping, I touched it, and it didn't feel at all like I was expecting -- I thought it would be squishy but it was rigid! I have included a grainy hero cam picture of it. I'd love to know what it is. Just above 40 feet there was a very clear line where the murk began. I knew it was going to be warm in the murk -- Rob told me it had been 59 or 60 degrees in the shallows the day before. The entire 40 foot stop I kept reaching my arms above me because I could feel the warmth up there! Indeed, once we got to 30 feet, it was toasty warm! It was so warm, I decided to push our 20 foot stop a bit. And I'm totally not a deco pusher usually (unlike Rob and Kevin).

We were the first team to surface, and I commented on how nice and unusual it was to get back on the boat in such calm seas. We retrieved the other teams, and went back to pick up the anchor and the ball. I guess they had trouble retrieving both, but when we went back for them, it was not a problem at all. As we were about to leave the area, I saw a whale in the distance. Everyone else missed it. I was accused of imagining it. After describing it to Susan, she thought it was a Minke whale. I'd never seen one of those before, but I thought it looked like a dolphin fin, but then there was a really long back, that was clearly a whale. Now that I've done a bit of web research, I think Susan was right. So woohoo, I've seen a Minke whale now :) On the way home we did a little more targeted whale watching and saw at least one (maybe two) blues, and several humpbacks. I was excited to see a blue whale, which is what I really wanted to see, but I wouldn't call it a super awesome blue whale encounter. It sounded like they had much better encounters the day before :(

We finally got back to the dock around 4, so I headed straight home.

Rob's Birthday Dive

2011-07-22T19:33:00.000-07:00

We managed to not have any dive plans on the weekend adjacent to Rob's birthday, I think because of a combination of generally being busy and pondering some sort of travel. So fairly last minute I tried to put together some diving for the weekend, and Kevin suggested seeing if Jim was available for some Friday diving. The swell and wind forecast were looking good leading up to Friday, though Jim reported insane fog throughout the week. When we showed up on Friday morning, the fog situation looked good, so we headed out. The water was actually a bit rougher than I expected. We motored past the Lunaticos area to see how things were looking once we got around Lobos. We gave up on diving Yankee Point and were offered a site near Lobos or Lunaticos. We decided to head back to Lunaticos. By the time we got there, I was quite seasick. I had skipped the Bonine because of the forecast (and I didn't want to feel drugged on the drive home for no reason). We decided to just dive as a team of 4, with our standard 200/150 profile.

As soon as I jumped in, I could see that the water was brown and the viz was crap. As we headed down the line, the crappy viz did not relent, and all of a sudden, the reef was there. I had to put on the breaks (that is, jank on my inflator) pretty quickly because by the time I could see it, I was quite close to it. Rob was leading and I was #2. He signaled to head in a particular direction, but I guess Jim and Kevin weren't quite ready to go. But Rob took off anyway, and then I was left trying to keep him in sight while waiting for the rest of the team. I briefly thought that I lost him, until Jim or Kevin pointed out a tiny beam of light coming from below us (of course). In the first five minutes of the dive, I lost Rob a second time. The viz was less than 10 feet, there were big particles swimming around in the water, and I was feeling horribly seasick. Trying to keep the team together was just too much for me, and the thought of losing the team and being left alone was stressing me out. I told Rob that I was feeling bad, and I think I somehow conveyed the fact that I was having trouble keeping track of everyone. Or maybe I didn't convey that and he just knew. In any case, he asked if I wanted to split up into two teams of two, and I agreed. We proposed this to Jim and Kevin, who agreed only after Kevin got a confirmation that I was feeling okay enough to continue the dive :)

Once they took off, I told Rob to forget about scootering and our plan and let's just kick around near where we were. So we did that. We did eventually scooter a little bit just to move around, but we definitely didn't cover much ground all in all. We headed a bit deeper, though in the end it was a shallower dive than planned. Despite the consistently horrible viz, we did make some good finds. First Rob found a couple of vase sponges. Not at all unusual for the area, but they were on the shallower side of where you find them -- I think we were around 150 feet when we saw the first two, and then a little deeper when we saw the third one. But all were above 170 feet, which is where I think of vase sponges as typically getting "common". Eventually we meandered over a rubbly patch off of the structure, and I got a quick signal from Rob. I looked toward it, and saw a snake-like tail flapping along under his light. I momentarily thought it could be a hagfish but it was actually just a wolf eel -- a very skinny wolf eel. It was long but skinny. I have never seen such a skinny one. It was grey though, not juvenile red. Rob got his camera out and took some pictures of him. We eventually meandered back to the reef and started to head shallower up it. Eventually I saw another wolf eel swim by. I wondered at first if it was the same one, but this was a more normal-sized eel, so definitely a different guy. Rob took a few pictures of that one as well. Other than the eels and the sponges, the one other good siting was a starry rockfish. Not terribly exciting, but I like them.

Since it was his birthday dive, I was kind enough to let Rob run the bag while I called deco :P Once we got to 70', we adjusted our deco a little since we were shallower than planned. The deco was uneventful. I felt that for the amount of junk in the water, the quality of jelly critters on deco was pretty low. But the water was a bit warmer than usual on deco, so that was nice.

I was hoping to see some blue whales on the drive back, since there had been a lot of talk of the blue whales being in town. Jim checked the radio for chatter from the whale boats, but it sounded like there weren't any blue whales around. So we just headed straight back to the dock.

I am a bit delayed in posting this report, because I was waiting and waiting for a picture of one of the wolf eels. Rob thought that the photography prospects were so bad that it wasn't even worth opening his camera and retrieving the pictures. So I had to wait a while to get pictures!

Best GPO Encounter Ever!

2011-07-17T22:31:00.000-07:00

The title doesn't leave much up to the imagination, but here goes anyway :P On Sunday we (Team Kitty, that is) were on a BAUE tech charter. The plan was to do something in the 15/55 range. For some reason, which I don't think I had much say in, it was decreed that it would be a 3 (deco) bottle dive. Well hmph. I am not the biggest fan of 3-bottle dives off of the Escapade, since I find it difficult to get myself into the water in all of that gear (on Phil's boat, on the other hand, you just have to roll yourself in with the gear on, which is much easier than having to stand yourself up and get to the swimstep). But this was the plan, and who was I to question it? It seems like we have had a lot of cancellations of 15/55 boats this year. Well, there have been a lot of cancellations of boats in general but in the 15/55 range, it is particularly bad, since there aren't as many sites in that range, so the weather can really limit whether there is any place to do a dive at all. Anyhoo, on Saturday conditions were great, and Jim said that the boat could have gone "anywhere" in those conditions. We were hoping for more of the same on Sunday. On the way out of the bay, Jim mentioned the small craft advisory and the wind forecast, which I had not previously been aware of. Then he checked the weather again and said there was no longer a small craft advisory. Phew.

As we neared Point Lobos, there was talk about diving the Deep E3 area versus Mt. Chamberlain. I didn't really know why we were even discussing Deep E3 without trying to make it to MC first. Jim decided that MC would actually be preferable since based on the direction of the wind, there were some concerns about where we might drift near Lobos. So we continued down there, and when we got there, conditions were actually pretty good. There was a bit of wind, but nothing too uncomfortable, and the swell was quite small. We got geared up and did a first round of gear checks as the crew set the downline somewhere on the southwest corner, and then once they were finished with that, they helped us with our bottles. Our team was to be deployed first, since we had the longest bottom time. I was sitting closest to the gate, since that is, after all, my seat on the Escapade. I very bossily told the deck hands (Michael and Derek) where I wanted each of them to stand and what pieces of gear they were each to handle as they helped me into the water, followed by a brief lecture on the perils of hypoxic backgas. Bossy, yes, but the deployment went quite smoothly, and I like to think my careful choreography helped ;) After the boys got themselves into the water and collected scooters and camera, we headed down the line and met at 20-some feet to get situated and do bubble checks. Then we headed down the line. I think my descent was pretty speedy, though occasionally I had to flatten out (from my head down scootering position) to clear my ears. We got down to about 170' or so on the reef and paused there until everyone gave the okay to continue. It was quite dark, and the water was rather green. There was an icky layer down to 50' or so, but at the bottom the viz did clear up to maybe 40 feet.

In the darkness (and the not totally stellar viz), I didn't have a very clear idea of where we were. Luckily Rob was leading. We scootered down a crack of sorts, and as we came to the bottom of the crack, there was a basket star that was totally unfurled on a gorgonian on the right side. We then headed left, following along the side of a wall, with the bottom in maybe 230' of water, if that. We were definitely on the shallow side of our planned bottom depth for a bit. As we were scootering along, I was wondering if the dive was really worth all the effort and the gear. I am sure I've said this before, but I just don't think the deeper reef (> 200') at MC is quite as beautiful as it is shallower (around 150'). It just doesn't seem as colorful. But it has the potential for interesting critters (like the hagfish or sometimes crinoids). Eventually we left the wall and hopped across the sand to our right, until we came to a low-lying reef. At the time, I thought this was in the same general area but a bit further south than the usual low-lying patches of reef in sand on the southwest corner. But now I think maybe we were actually on the back side of the very south of the west-side wall. Since we really couldn't see far, it is possible the little reef patch we were on continued and I just couldn't see it.

Anyhoo, once we got there, we stopped and started to look around. I found a Diaulula lentiginosa and was about to signal Rob to look at it, when he signaled me to come look at something. I figured my slug wasn't going anywhere (and was certainly big enough to find again :P) whereas whatever he was looking at might go somewhere, so he won. I headed over and there was a small-ish lingcod with a little rockfish in his mouth. He was just perched on a rock with this treat. And he even let Rob get some pictures. That was pretty cool. I eventually swam around Rob, toward Kevin, so I would be out of his way and wouldn't disturb the fish. Then I was innocently poking around on the reef when I got a light signal from Kevin and as my eyes swept across the reef to look at him, I saw the object of his light signal. A big! GPO was just sitting out on top of the reef, a couple feet from me. According to Kevin, he heard me squeal through my regulator when I saw it :) I turned to signal Rob, but Kevin beat me to it. Kevin managed some sort of disco-ball effect with his light to signal "GPO!" to Rob (it reminded me of diving at 40 Fathoms Grotto with some single tankers on air). Poor light etiquette perhaps, but after the dive we all agreed that it was way too panicked to mean someone was out of gas ;) Rob came over and we all watched as the GPO basically just skittered across the top of the reef, not really in a hurry to get away and not really attempting to take cover anywhere.

Rob skittered along with it, shooting a zillion pics of the octopus. Kevin and I posed in the background above the reef for the first few pictures. Eventually I just hunkered down off of the reef, on the opposite side of Rob from the octopus, so I would be out of the frame. I laughed to myself as I saw the teeny tiny tip of one of the octopus tentacles groping for Rob's strobe arm, and then slowly winding its way around the strobe. Rob was so busy taking pictures that he didn't even notice it at first. I pointed it out to him and then decided that if there was going to be a diver-GPO skirmish, I wanted to get it on video. I was getting out my hero-cam (which I realized had like 0 chance of producing usable footage at this depth, but one must try), and when I looked back up, I was rather confused to see that the diver with the camera and the diver in the grey suit were no longer the same. Kevin was holding the camera, and Rob was entangled with the GPO, who was tasting Rob's arm. Kevin was just going click click click, taking pictures without really knowing how to use the camera, while I was trying to get anything on my camera. We were clearly really concerned about Rob's welfare. Eventually Rob retrieved his arm from the octopus, and his camera from Kevin, and the octopus skittered across the sand and rubble field. We followed him as he would stop and pose, then move a few more feet, and stop and pose again. Kevin and I took turns posing behind him, and posed together a couple of times. Somewhere during the meander across the sand, there was a crinoid siting too. I lamented after the dive that that rubble field was probably teeming with crinoids -- it had that Mount Chamberlain crinoid feel to it. But who has time for crinoids when you are playing with a GPO?

Eventually it was really getting to be time to go, especially as we were now on the deeper side of our target depth :) Kevin signaled Rob to look at the time, and surprisingly, Rob did not ask to push it. We said goodbye to the octopus and headed for the top of the south wall. When we got to a reasonable depth for the occasion, we switched onto our 190' bottles and continued in. We eventually made it to the channel. We paused along there from time to time, and Rob took a couple of pictures of the reef and Kevin, and also pointed out a Doto amyra which had an egg-ribbon alongside of it. We also saw quite a few lingcods in the channel. As we were approaching K2, Kevin started to signal us excitedly again, as he had found a huge skate laying on the bottom. Unfortunately it seemed to have recently expired -- it had some crabs walking on its back, though it didn't look decayed at all. So it must have died super recently. It was quite an amazing sight even though it was dead. It was huge, at least 5 feet long I would estimate, and the swirly pattern on its back was really cool. After Rob took some pictures of it, we continued on to K2 and we actually made it the whole way there, even in not-so-stellar viz.

As soon as we started to ascend up the peak at K2, from about 90' up, the current was totally sweeping us away. Whoosh. Rob put up a bag at 80' and the bottle shenanigans commenced. Off the 190' bottle, up to 70', onto the 70' bottles, and then bottle rotations all around. I was quite pleased with my bottle rotation; it was speedy and not too spazzy. I feel like I have finally conquered the bottle rotation (2 years after T2, I know). As I told Rob after the dive, to great eye-rolling, the great secret of a non-spazzy bottle rotation is ... keep your head back. Yes, it's a very advanced technique that I first learned in Fundies. The deco was pretty uneventful. It was long, and somewhat cold (but not that cold, as I was wearing my near-new undergarment), and I was hungry. Rob kept shivering and I told him to stop because it was making me cold :) As we approached the surface from 5', I was thinking that now comes the hard part, getting our gear and ourselves back on the boat. I was expecting the wind to have increased, but in fact when we surfaced it was rather calm. We re-boarded the boat quickly without much drama, and then went to pickup the other teams. The trip back to the dock was pretty smooth, then we headed to Phat Burger for lunch.

BAUE Wharf Dive

2011-07-16T21:50:00.000-07:00

On Saturday, we attended a little BAUE get-together at the wharf. I think the wharf is awesome, because it can have lots of different kinds of nudibranchs. And it is best to dive with a group, so you can spread out the pain of having a surface support person. The last BAUE wharf dive featured a lot of surge and terrible, terrible viz. You don't really need very good viz for a good wharf dive, but the surge was pretty annoying. The forecast was looking a bit better this time around. When we got there, the water was crazy flat. After a little briefing, and the realization that nobody else wanted to dive with us, Rob and I got geared up and headed into the water. We trudged through the water for as long as I could stand and then we put our fins on and I instantly thought we should have trudged further :) Because swimming in almost-standing-height water is pretty dang annoying too. After what seemed like forever, we got to the bend in the wall, and we dropped and swam to the pilings.

The first few pilings closer in always seem to be very encrusted with the red bryozoan. They are a good place to look for fringeheads, but otherwise kind of dull, in my opinion. The pilings further out seem to have better nudibranch substrate (unless you are looking for Hermissendas). But when you are at the wharf, you have to look for fringeheads; it is part of one's duty as buddy-of-macro-diver. I find it not that hard to find fringeheads in the red bryozoan, but pretty tedious. So I looked around and after finding I think 4 fringeheads for Rob, I decided that was enough and suggested we swim out a bit further. There were a couple of slugs I was hoping to see here -- Polycera atra, because I almost never see it, but have seen many at the wharf before; and Doto amyra, which I see all the time, but always deep (except at the wharf). We swam about for a bit and I spotted a nice looking piling that was all fuzzy with hydroids and quickly set my sites on that. I found it was teeming with Eubranchus rustyus (first), and then some more leafing through hydroids eventually turned up some Dendronotus frondosus. We ended up seeing zillions of both of these slugs all over the place throughout the dive. Rob was not very pleased with my insistence that he take pictures of the Eubranchus, but eventually he found some good specimens.

Rob found the first Polycera atra (and maybe the second and third), but eventually throughout the dive I saw quite a few, and I assume Rob did as well. In the end, I did not find any Dotos at all :( We did see lots of Spanish shawls, and a couple of their egg masses, oodles of Hermissendas, mostly of the grey variety, and some trilineatas. I also found a cute little Adalaria jannae (or was it Onchidoris muricata? :P) slithering across a red bryozoan. On such a tiny little backdrop, it really seemed to be moving quick! There was one other interesting slug find, which was a yellow dorid with white dots. I thought at first it was the usual Doriopsilla, but it didn't look quite right. Then I wondered if it was the Doriopsilla mimic -- Baptodoris mimetica, which I have "never seen" in the sense that I have never noticed I have seen it :P Its back seemed way bumpier and more spotted. I made Rob take some pictures (which of course he thought was crazy, since he thought it was a Doriopsilla). After looking at the pictures, I think that's probably what it was and Rob "could believe it". But when I suggested it might be worthwhile to process and post one of the pictures (after he was already finished with the pictures from that dive) he didn't seem to agree. Hmph!

We headed in and I told Rob that I wanted to look at the concrete wall on the south end, since it sometimes has different stuff on it. We eventually made our way back there, and while I was looking on the wall and about to give us, Rob pointed out a Pacific electric ray that was swimming around. Woohoo! I knew I stuffed my hero cam in my pocket for a reason! So I whipped that out and followed the ray around for a while. It was just swimming around, then would lay down for a bit and then get up and swim around again for a while. It was really neat. Plus it was fun to use the hero cam for the type of thing it is more meant for... videoing in very shallow water.

From there, we headed in. We stopped in a couple of feet of water to look at the green anemones, and eventually we surfaced in about 3 feet. Rob took his fins off before surfacing and then found out the hard way that we weren't actually quite shallow enough for him to comfortably walk :P I swam for a while longer on the surface before popping my fins off. The beach was much more crowded than it had been when we got in. Once we were out of the water, I got out of my rather sandy drysuit, and we joined everyone for a potluck picnic on the pier. After that eventually broke up, we headed to Taste of Monterey and then Oh Sushi with Kevin (who, like us, was staying in Monterey that evening, since we had a boat on Sunday).

All of the pictures from the day are here.

A Little Different at Lobos

2011-07-09T19:56:00.000-07:00

Matt made reservations for Lobos on Saturday, originally trying to get Phil to take us out. That didn't work out, so then we were just left with two reservations and no real plans. I originally thought we were diving with Matt and Leah, and didn't give much thought to gas plans or logistics, until late in the week, it turned out they didn't think we were diving together. So the world was our oyster, or something. My scooter was recently repaired, but had only been garage-tested, with a new set of electronics (that's the magical little box in the back of an X-Scooter that can just decide to die one day, leaving your scooter utterly useless). I didn't want a repeat of our last somewhat failed dive at Lobos if my scooter crapped out, so I was leaning toward a 32% dive. That way if my scooter died, we could just go for a dive without a big change of plans. I suggested we do a long dive in the 80' to 90' range out at Three Sisters, Beto's Reef, etc. So we decided to bring some O2 and just head out there and go wherever we felt like going for however long. Plus I'd get to test out my new 32% + O2 deco heuristics locally :)

Rob let me sleep in, and we got to Lobos at just about 9. It was very calm, and the tide was pretty civilized. We got geared up pretty quickly, put our scooters and bottles into the water, and headed in. Rob was shooting macro, I think because that's what his rig was setup for, and he was too lazy to change it :) We scootered out on the surface and dropped in the sand channel in just over 30 feet. Since the dive plan was my idea, I was stuck leading the dive :P We headed out along the sand channel, where the viz was good but not great. It was kind of dark. As we came around Hole in the Wall, I could see that the water was clear and bluer/brighter to the north. We followed the ridges until we got to Lone Metridium and then headed out toward the sisters. I paused briefly along the way when we came to a kelp stalk with a bunch of kelp rockfish, and a few olives stacked up along the kelp stalk, pretending to be leaves. Later on we paused when a huge school of blue rockfish appeared above us, probably at around 60 feet. Then we continued on and hit the first sister in no time. We stopped when we got there and sort of meandered along there, but weren't there even long enough for Rob to get his camera out. Then we headed to the second sister.

Once there, I started to look around for some nudibranchs for Rob to shoot. I very quickly found an exciting one, which I wasn't immediately sure what it was... it had a familiar look though. It had orange rhinophores, and the cerata were translucent greyish-white with what I'd call white "piping" along the side. The rhinophores also seemed slightly bulbous to me. I showed the slug to Rob and he started to unfold his camera; it was on a little piece of red salad kelp that kept fluttering in the breeze. After Rob got his camera ready, he was staring blankly at the spot I had pointed out, and I realized he'd "lost" the slug. So I looked for a moment and found it for him again, and then I moved along. While waiting for him to finish with that, I found several Hilton's nudibranchs, which were the first of many many of those that I found on the dive. I was also stewing on what that slug was called, feeling like it was on the tip of my brain, and then finally I remembered -- Catriona columbiana. I was fairly sure that that's what it was, and after a bit of research (well, mostly accosting Clinton over IM), I am sticking with that story -- the only thing that doesn't quite fit is the lack of orange in the cerata. Sadly, Rob lost the slug again and never managed to get pictures (and I guess he wasn't that interested in getting pics of it, since he didn't ask me to find it again!). We wandered around the second sister for a while, seeing more Hilton's, several trilineatas and some Diaphorodoris lirulatocauda, and I marveled at a nice big egg yolk jelly hanging just off of the pinnacle. We had seen several on the scoot out, but this was a particularly nice, big specimen.

Next we headed to the third sister, and the rocks in between the two. On those rocks, I found zillion more Hilton's nudibranchs, plus a solitary Dendronotus iris. I also noticed zillions of skeleton shrimp, some quite big, all over a bunch of hydroids on the rocks. I think Rob briefly tried to get some pictures and quickly gave up -- the little bit of surge made that pretty impossible. Eventually I suggested heading to Beto's Reef, so we did. On the crossing over the sand, we saw some more of the egg yolk jellies. We finally hit Beto's and I thought we were right at the spot where the wolf eel lives, but we were actually a bit south of there. We swam around a bit and then eventually scootered out a bit further north before heading back. The two good finds there were quite a few Dironas, and a juvenile yelloweye, who was willing to sit for a picture or three. Oh, and the biggest lingcod I've ever seen was swimming around Beto's. That thing was a monster! We stopped to look for the wolf eel on the way home, but he was not in.

We stopped briefly at Seamount on the way in, and other than a particularly friendly lingcod, and more the the same slugs, didn't see too much. We likewise stopped at the rock north of HitW for a few minutes, but I was getting chilly so I called it. Then on the way in on the sand channel, I realized that what looked like a little bit of kelp trash in the water was swimming. I pointed at it to Rob and then without any warning, did a 180 on my scooter and scooted back to the little thing. Then as I was approaching it, I started to thing it was just a bit of kelp trash and I was about to look really foolish. No, it was a cute tiny fish. I pointed it out to Rob and he was like "why are you pointing at a piece of kelp trash". I pointed at it more forcefully and made him look and his eyes got a bit big and he pulled out his camera. Then he shot pic of the adorable little fish for 5 or 10 minutes. I wasn't sure what the fish was, but I knew I had seen a picture of it on the BAUE field guide -- it is allegedly a juvenile kelp poacher. Eventually Rob was finished and we headed in. At the worm patch, we went onto our deco bottles, and then we agreed to scooter in a bit further. The viz was not too good, so we basically just went until we were right in 20 feet, and hunkered down on the bottom for our 20 minutes of deco (brrrr, a bit longer than I meant to incur). While we were there, some juvenile rockfish were around us, and I saw one interesting looking one that had a dark patch across one side of its face, around its eye. I showed it to Rob, but he was not impressed. With a couple more minutes left, I suggested we continue in a bit, so we did, but then I suggested just surfacing, since the viz was quite bad and I had no confidence in finding our way back to the float. Rob said he would lead instead and then he scooted us around, over pristine sand with somewhat better viz, and this just didn't seem right. Eventually we surfaced (at my insistence, I think) to find that we were just in line with the ramp, but in the east half of the cove. Doh! We took a heading and headed back down and toward the ramp. Rob soon left me in his dust, and since we were in 8 feet of water, I decided meeting at the surface would be easiest. Then I got to see his bubble trail going back and forth, back and forth, obvious searching for me. Um, it's 8 feet deep, why wouldn't you just surface? He finally did, to a big eye roll from me, and we headed in.

Lunch at RG, with Matt, Leah, Kevin and Don.

The Blog is Officially Up to Date

2011-07-06T21:28:00.001-07:00

I've posted a zillion posts in the past few weeks, some of them out of order. So here is a quick rundown of what's new, from oldest to newest:

Rob and I took an underwater archaeology class in May.

Rob and I found a cool anchor at Mount Chamberlain in May.

Rob and I, and a few others, went on a cave diving world tour to Mexico and Florida in May and early June, and dove at:

Taj Mahal Gran Cenote Pet Cemetery Jailhouse Naharon (twice!) Dos Ojos

Ginnie Springs (twice!) Peacock Madison

Rob took a ton of pictures on the Mexico part of the trip (which are pretty nice, if I do say so myself!).

Clinton and I did two R3 dives in the bay.

Rob and I had one inadvertent dive at Middle Reef.

Rob and I (and a slew of others) found a ton of critters at the Breakwater at night.

There was also a bunch of assisting with classes in there, but that doesn't get blogged. It's been a busy couple of months!

Solstice Night Dive

2011-06-21T16:30:00.000-07:00

After our dud of a dive on Sunday, I thought it would be good to schedule some sort of dive during the week -- Rob would be teaching the next weekend and then we were dry for the next week or two due to travel and a family visit. So it was either a weekday dive or 3 weeks of grumpiness from Rob. When Clinton asked if we wanted to do a night dive on Tuesday, I thought this sounded like a good option. I guess Vanessa wanted to do a night dive, so Clinton rounded up the usual suspects, including Mike and Sami. We decided to meet a bit later than usual, since sunset was not until 8:30. Whose idea was it to do a night dive on the longest day of the year anyway!?! We got into the water around 9. The water was super flat, and the viz looked great on the swim out. The squid boats were out in full force in the distance (toward the mouth of the bay).

Rob and I were diving as a team, but we swam out with Mike and Sami on the surface. We dropped maybe 30 feet from each other, but that was the last we saw of them. The viz on the bottom was not as good as expected based on the swim out -- it was kind of milky. But I wouldn't describe it as bad viz. We dropped in about 30 feet, right near the area where it pretty abruptly slopes down from 20 to 30 feet. There was a field of kelp salad where we were, and we meandered about looking for critters. Almost immediately we saw a photogenic turbot, and Rob started to get his camera out, which of course led the fish to swim away. Clinton saw some nice slugs at Breakwater on Sunday, so I was in a sluggy mood. I was looking and not finding much but Hermissendas. I happened upon a Dendronotus iris as I was checking out some crabs in a neat position on a tube worm. I was waiting for Rob to finish shooting whatever he was shooting to show the crabs to him, when he signaled me and seemed like he must have something interesting. I swam over and saw him pointing to an Acanthodoris rhodoceras! I've only seen this slug twice, both times on dives without Rob, so I wasn't sure if he had ever seen it. I was very excited by this found (and felt even lamer that all I had found so far was a few Hermissendas and a rainbow nudibranch!).

We just worked our way around this area for the whole dive, and we ended up seeing quite a few more of the A. rhodoceras -- I counted 5 total, yay! We also saw the usual array of octopus, though an unusually high portion of them were "big". I think I only saw 3 of the TPOs but at least half a dozen of the medium to big sized ones. Eventually it got to the point where I would point out an octo to Rob and he wouldn't bother taking pics :) My one other good slug find of the night was a little orange Triopha maculata. I haven't seen one of those in a while. I just now noticed that Rob must not have gotten a good-enough-to-post picture of that, hmph. Aside from those, I think the coolest thing of the night was that we saw lots of little fish in general, and lots of fish feeding. I saw three different small fish with another small fish in each of their mouths. And let me say, those other fish weren't necessarily going to go quietly. One of the fish had a sand-dab in its mouth, which was flapping its tail around. Another one had something small and goby-shaped (though I don't know what it was) that was having a hissy fit trying to get out of the fishes mouth -- can you blame him? Both of the fish were really flailing all around, the one trying to keep his catch and the other trying to get away. In the end, dinner managed to get away, phew. There were also just a lot of cute fish including like the smallest kelpfish ever, which Rob found kind of curled up in a little ball of eelgrass weeds. And there were a few cute little fishies which I thought were juvenile cabezons, plus the usual array of cute little sculpins.

I suggested we head in with about 1200 psi left, since you never know what you are going to find on the way in, and don't want to miss an epic photo opp because you are low on gas. We made it to 15 feet and I was starting to think that was folly, because we were in the bland boring part of the sand and hadn't found anything on the way in. Then Rob found the third fish-eating-fish of the night; a juvenile lingcod had a tiny fish-tail hanging out of its mouth. Rob went right to work taking pics of it, and was engaged in a photo shoot for maybe 10 minutes. The fish wasn't scared off by our lights or Rob's strobes, though he was moving around in the water column, which led to an amusing amount of flailing, breaking trim, etc. on Rob's part in order to keep with the fish. I was actually getting pretty bored by the time he finished with the fish, but based on the pics, I think it was worth the wait! We surfaced from there and were maybe 50 feet from Clinton and Vanessa, who were swimming in. So we caught up with them and swam in together. They saw a squid on their dive (eating a shrimp!) plus an octopus eating a crab. Lucky them. But no Acanthadoris's for them. As we swam in, there was a squid boat that had moved into the bay and was not too far from the breakwater (well not too close either, but it was probably due north of the breakwater as opposed to further out where they had been). The bright lights and the fog were kind of eery.

Considering the late start, we decided to pack up gear and hit the road. On the way home, we stopped for a McFlurry. I'm a fan of the new Rolo McFlurry. Mmm, chocolate and caramel are the best. We managed to get home at a not-horrendously-late 1 AM.

Not Diving Twin Peaks

2011-06-19T17:17:00.000-07:00

On Sunday we were planning a nice long dive to Twin Peaks. We schlepped a ton of gear (6 bottles and 2 scooters) to the float, then we schlepped ourselves and Rob's camera into the water. We got all of the bottles on and headed out on the surface. About a minute into the surface scoot, my scooter started making a terribly noise. It was grumbling sort of like when the battery is about to cutoff but not quite the same. Plus the noise was continuous. At first I was wondering if my prop was scraping against the shroud. I took a look and that didn't not seem to be the case. I handed the scooter to Rob, and he took a look. At first he couldn't reproduce the sound, and then I don't know if he finally did, but then the scooter just crapped out entirely. Hmph! So we headed back to the float. Rob didn't even offer me a tow, so I had to swim back with 3 bottles and a bum scooter, hmph. When we got back to the float, Rob got out with my scooter and opened it up and doinked around with it for a few minutes, and determined that it was just dead, and the fuse on the battery was blown. Not a good sign.

We debated for a few minutes whether to do a kick dive to middle reef or what. Eventually we decided to do that, though Rob scootered out and towed me, until we got to about 30' at middle reef. Then we just kicked out along the west side. We stopped to look for the wolf eels and they were not in. Then we stopped to look for the transect 4 warbonnet, and couldn't find it. The piece of palm kelp that was long the landmark that we used to find him was gone. Rob searched around a bit without any success. So we eventually moved along. The wall north of there has a lot of ugly barnacles all over everything. It makes the wall much less attractive than I remembered it, so hopefully they will go away soon! And I wouldn't mind if some Onchidoris bilamellata came along to help with that. We eventually made our way to the end, to transect 2 as we call it. I poked around under the overhang there, looking for anything of interest. After I got past the transect (to the east of it, just past the little vertical crack), I found an insanely cute little fish, which was probably the highlight of my dive. I'm not sure what he was, but as I told Rob after the dive, he was definitely of the genus Muppet. You know what I mean when I say a fish looks muppety -- he might have been an Irish Lord, or something like that. I also found a giant vermilion rockfish lurking near that crack.

From there, we came over the top of the wall, and swam in on top of middle reef. There were some big lingcods up there, as there tend to be. After swimming in on top for a bit, we came back down the wall on the east side, and swam in that little sand channel on the east side. Eventually we popped back over to the west side, and when we got back to like 30 feet, I headed to the sand channel and we scooted in. At about 15 feet, the viz was getting pretty bad, so I suggested we ascend, and we surface scooted in from there.

Not exactly the dive we planned, but I liked the muppet fish.

Actually Rec 3 Diving

2011-06-11T18:45:00.000-07:00

Since BAUE now officially has a GUE Rec3 diver to call our own, after looking at the schedule for tech boats this summer, I decided to add an R3/shallow T1 trip. This was basically a do-over of the trip we tried to do in March (which ended up really just being a standard tech boat, due to weather issues) -- we would shoot to do two dives in the 100' to 130' range, or if weather did not allow that, we would do one dive in that range and a second more recreational dive. This time it was R3 or bust since we had a real live R3 diver (and his team, who was also provisioned for two R3 dives). The trip was originally planned for Sunday afternoon, but then it turned out the Saturday morning slot was available, so the week before, we all agreed to move to Saturday morning. The idea was that the weather would hopefully be better. Of course the night before the forecast was not looking too good. I was diving with Clinton and he decided to bring macro, thinking we were unlikely to make it out of the bay. I told Clinton that I was diving no matter what, even if it was under the Escapade in its slip :) I guess I was feeling a bit eager to get back into our local waters!

Ted, who I was carpooling with, actually showed up at my house at about the appointed time, and we got going on time. Despite my grandmothery driving (which was frequently heckled by Ted), we somehow made really good time to K-dock, and when we got there, only Ben was there. Eventually the others arrived, including the boat, and we tried something novel... instead of standing around in the parking lot making excuses for why the weather might be too bad to go out, we just walked our gear down to the boat without comment. Plan A, Carmel; Plan B, The Bay; Plan C, Escapade slip. We ended up making it to Plan B without any problems -- Kawika's Garden it was. I was perfectly happy to dive there, as it had been a while (if my blog search is to be believed, it's been over a year!). Plus it's always fun to do macro dives with Clinton. He and I were the first into the water, with a slightly longer bottom time planned than the R3 team (we weren't actually doing an R3 dive, we were using the usual T1 gases). We decided to leave the scooters on the boat, which was a good call. The water was rather green and murky. The viz was definitely in the "not so good" category, but not in the Braille category. We pretty much plopped down near the anchor and just meandered very slowly looking for critters. I don't think we ever got more than 20 feet from the anchor line, but in that viz, who really knows? :)

We didn't make any super awesome finds (no Tochuinas like Beto and Dionna found :( ), but we had fun looking for little guys. There were the usual, mysterious array of juvenile rockfish, and other little fish. There were also a surprising number of those ugly barnacles in strange places -- on the reef, I'm used to, but they were even on the kelp salad and some of the sponges -- what the heck!?! I also found several rather large Aegires albopunctatus, and several of them were very speckled, a lot more so than usual. I saw Clinton leafing through some hydroids that had some slug eggs on them, and thought it was a good thing one of us was feeling patient enough to do it. Eventually, he found some tiny little orange-ish nudi in the hydroids, which I could only identify as "some kind of Dendronotus?" (that question mark is part of the ID). When he posted his pics and I saw that it was a Dendronotus venustus, I was momentarily excited as I thought it was a new-to-me slug, until Clinton told me this was the new name for D. frondosus... I knew the name sounded familiar! (I know, I'm a very bad slug nerd.) I also found the world's tiniest Hermissenda on a yellow sponge, which struck me as a rather odd place to find one, so naturally I made Clinton take a picture. I also goaded Clinton into taking a picture of the worst macro subject ever -- a gigantor Dialula lentiginosa. As I swam toward it, I initially thought it was a Doris odhneri, but then I noticed that distinctive sandy back on it. I signaled Clinton and pointed it out to me, and he gave me this look like "you've got to be kidding". I knew it was not exactly a macro subject, but I still thought he'd want to see it! Apparently he had swam right by it thinking it was a Doris odhneri. Once he took a second look, he realized it was worth a photo and then I got to watch his rather comical attempts to take a picture of a, I don't know, 10 inch long slug with a 105. He got a bunch of detail pics of it, but he was also trying to take a picture of the whole slug. It was highly amusing -- he was like 10 feet off of the reef trying to shoot that bad boy. I felt like this slug was a kind of interesting find, since it is the shallowest I've seen this slug (probably the next shallowest one was like 160') and I've never seen it north of Lobos before.

After not too much longer it was, sadly, time to start the ascent. I shot the bag, as is customary when diving with Clinton. I felt like it was a bit of a cluster, as it took me two tries to get enough gas into it. I shot it from like 80 feet, so that's pretty lame! The deco was relatively uneventful, except for two things. First, around 50 feet or so, a double ender suddenly jettisoned itself from Clinton's gear. I don't even know what Clinton was doing, but all of a sudden I saw the slow, yet not slow enough to stop, descent of a double ended. There's always that moment where you think maybe you can get it and then you realize you can't and just wave "bye bye" (that's literally what I do when someone drops gear like this -- give it a sad little wave :P). So if anyone finds a double ender at Kawika's, you know who to call ;) The other more exciting aspect of deco was that it was 57 degreees from like 30 feet up! That was awesome. I felt like it was a nice gentle re-introduction to cold water. Aside from that, there was the occasional dive bomber sea nettle, which for some reason always picked me to dive bomb, but not too much else to see on deco. On the surface interval, we headed back to K-dock, since we were so close, and Brian was apparently quite seasick (which I didn't notice because I have poor awareness). We hung out at K-dock for a while and decided to go to the "Drop Zone" for the second dive. This is the name for the site where Beto likes to take his T1 classes on the third or fourth day of class. It's just a decent-sized shale ledge at 100'. I haven't been there since T1, when we had very little time to appreciate the fauna before regulators went bubbly and the like, so I thought it would be cool to go there. It was, after all, the first place I ever saw a Tochuina!

It turns out that Clinton and I, despite having quite a bit of tech training and quite a bit of tech diving between us, don't actually know how to plan a 100' dive :) Or at least not a 100' dive on 18/45 as a second dive of the day. So we decided to just do an insane amount of deco -- in the end we basically did 1:1, which turns out to only be like 50% too much time according to DecoPlanner. Anyhoo, after coming to an agreement on that, we agreed to just swim along the ledge until we either hit gas or 30 minutes. On the way down the line, the viz was quite bad on the way down, but it opened up to at least 30' on the bottom. That was a pleasant surprise compared to the previous dive. As planned, we just meandered along the ledge looking under and over the ledge for whatever we could find. I found a strange little bright blue thing on some sort of hydroid (or something) thingy. I had no clue what it was, but I was pretty sure it was an animal of some sort, and it was bright blue, so I showed it to Clinton. I thought it might be a tiny snail or something since it looked like it had two little horns. Turns out it was a little amphipod... this is why I recommend always bringing a macro photographer with you. Clinton found a few Onchidoris bilamellata on top of the ledge, which I was excited by. Eventually I found an octopus (a TPO) and called Clinton over to take a pic. When I was trying to point it out to Clinton, it put on quite a show changing its color. While Clinton was taking pics of it, I continued along the ledge and found a bigger octopus just hanging out, spread out on the bottom. I stayed with him, trying not to be spazzy so he wouldn't be scared away. I waited and waited for Clinton to finish and he finally did and I signaled to him to come over, and immediately the octopus retreated to under a ledge. I showed it to Clinton but at that point there was no point in trying ot get its pictures. After not too much longer, Clinton thumbed the dive on gas, and we started the ascent. At 70', I could see the reef below quite clearly in all directions -- way better viz than the last dive.

I felt like the bag shoot on this dive had to make up for my previous performance, but I did not really manage to do that. In fact, it was quite a bit worse as I descended unintentionally quite a few feet as a shot it :( But one of the good things about diving with Clinton is that he does not get moody about poorly performing buddies :) Once again on the ascent, it was very warm. The viz was really bad as we got shallower though. It was strange since the bottom viz was so much better here than at Kawika's, but the shallow viz was way worse. There were also still some nettles on the ascent, and they were as voracious as ever, at least as it pertained to my head. Once we hit the surface, it was a very short ride back to the dock, followed by lunch at 17th Street Grille. I'm really not the biggest fan of that place, but I've decided that next I go there, I'm getting onion rings and a salad. Their burgers are scary.

Madison

2011-06-05T20:36:00.000-07:00

Rumor was that the flow was down at Madison and the viz was up, so we decided to head there for our last day of diving. We have only dived there once before, basically straight up the mainline just past the jump to Rocky Horror, so we didn't really know what to do. I assigned that task to Rob, since it was his turn to lead, so he did some web research and came up with a plan. The plan was to go to Rocky Horror and then on the way out, do the Godzilla circuit. He gave me a briefing on Rocky Horror. It went something like this. You come to this little "sign in" station which is basically a mutex so that only one team goes in at a time. Then you go through a clay passage (called Potter's Delight, I suppose) and then it narrows but becomes rock all around, and that goes on for some time. As far as the Godzilla circuit goes, well all I really knew about that was that I had seen a godzilla toy tied to the line at the jump for it the last time we were there.

On the way to Madison, a little over halfway there, we (well, Rob) stopped at McDonald's for some food and Rob realized he didn't have his wallet, which among other things meant that he had no cave card. Hmmm. After much hemming and hawing about it, we decided to go anyway and take our chances. Rob managed to sweet talk the ranger into allowing him to dive without a card, when he told her his sob story about leaving his card at the hotel, and showing her my card (I didn't actually get to see the sweet talking happen, since I was in the bathroom). Phew. It was surprisingly not too crowded when we got there, and we loaded bottles in with just a few groups of swimmers enjoying the water. Rob was bringing his camera on the dive, a first for Florida cave diving. We got into our gear, did all of our gear checks and stood up to head to the water. Rob picked up his camera and noticed that the battery was dead. I guess he left it on after he had set it up and test fired it the night before :( So, he stowed it in the car and we headed to the water, a bit disappointed. We ran a reel to the mainline, which was as silly as it was last time, but we kind of forgot about the mainline placement -- if we had remembered, we would have just run a tiny spool I think. Rob had actually suggested going through the rabbit hole and I poopoo'd that, I guess because I knew nothing about it. More on that later. We dropped our O2 bottles just at the turn at the end of the little corridor in the cavern zone. Everything was pretty much as I remembered it, including the two sensors at around 500' and 700' (though I think the placement of the 700' one may have changed a little). But I did notice on the way in that the godzilla toy was no longer on the line.

We dropped our stages just before the Half Hitch, which was not as tricky to negotiate as I remembered. I don't even think there was any banging associated with going through there. The flow was way down, which was nice, though it did pick up a bit in the same passage where I remembered it picking up before (though it was still relatively low). We took the jump to Rocky Horror and I was wondering when it was going to get small and clayful -- Rob's briefing didn't really make that clear so I had no idea. We finally got to the little sign-in board, and Rob moved the thingy to signify that a team was in there. I was a bit jealous that Rob got to do the fun part. Then we headed in. I thought the Potter's Delight section was totally awesome. I love clay. I don't know why. For some reason when I am swimming through a clay passage, I feel this strange compulsion to touch the clay, even though I know not to. It just looks so tempting to dunk my hand into the clay :) Perhaps I should take up pottery making. And the clay in Potter's Delight in particular is this lovely creamy color, even nicer looking than the clay passages in Devil's, and even more tempting to touch!

Eventually we came to a point where the tunnel appeared to end ahead, but really there was a 90 degree turn to the right. Rob stopped there and gave me an okay, so I assumed there was a restriction ahead, possibly the start of the rocky portion. I returned the okay, because, well, I was okay. Then he disappeared into the tunnel. I kicked up to the turn and looked down this tiny little coffin-sized passage (very small coffin, that is), and thought "no freakin' way am I going in there"... as Rob disappeared around another turn to the left, like 10 feet from the start of the rocky passage. I realized there was no way to signal him and tell him that I didn't want to go in there, because he couldn't turn around. So I figured the best course of action was to just wait there, covering my light, until he noticed the lack of buddy behind him, and found a good spot to turn around in. After a few moments of being sort of terrified at being by myself in the dark (covering your light tends to make it dark in a cave), I had the good sense to look at my gauge to see the time. And then I waited. And waited. And waited. With all sorts of crazy thoughts going through my head, like how long should I wait before I go in after him? What if he has a problem and I am not there? Should I ever go in after him? It's Rob, he can deal with any problems he runs into, and going into a place I am terrified of will probably be globally less optimal than just waiting it out. Maybe I should check how much gas I have to decide how long to wait. No, I just checked it two minutes ago, I'm just being neurotic, I know my gas situation. You get the idea.

And then finally after the longest one minute and forty seconds of my *entire life*, I saw an itty bitty beam of light coming from the other end of the coffin. And it got bigger and bigger and before you know it, there was Rob. He looked at me, and I gave him the "I'm a wimp" signal (that's the G-rated translation) and he pointed at me and gave it back to me, and we headed out. When we got back to the sign-in board, I totally wanted to flip the thing, but figured it was more proper to let the last man out do it. Bob gets to do all the fun stuff! Once we got back to the mainline, we agreed to recalculate and head further up the mainline. We made it to the Roto Rooter tunnel; it gets a bit deeper right at the start of that tunnel (and there is a jump to the right that goes practically straight down deeper). On the map, this section is quite aptly called "the dropoff". Those cave diver people are so good at naming stuff. We went just a bit into the Roto Rooter tunnel, maybe 100 ft in. This may sound odd, but that part of the tunnel reminds me of Mexico. It is sort of low and wide, with bits of cave jutting up and down from the bottom and top, like decorations in Mexico. So it isn't narrow at all, but you definitely feel like you have to stay on the path. Kind of like the Diaz line at Pet Cemetery. I eventually turned the dive not quite on gas, but because I wanted to save extra gas for our little foray up the Godzilla line on the way out.

We headed out to the Godzilla line, and I kept asking Rob each time we passed a jump, no matter how wrong it looked, if this was the one (I was leading now because it was the exit), because I was rather worried I would miss it, what with the lack of Godzilla doll (can you really call a Godzilla a "doll"? that doesn't really seem right). We finally got to the right one, which of course I recognized instantly once I was there. On the way in, we came to a jump which Rob thought was the jump we'd come back to to complete the circuit, so he installed a spool there. In hindsight that was folly. We eventually made it to the Godzilla room. I assumed this was it because it was such a distinctive room, but the presence of two Godzilla dolls on the line sealed the deal. We continued on until the line ended. We could see back to the line, which I was sure was the line we had come from, but which we could not technically be assured of (since we didn't mark anything -- that spool we put in was the wrong jump), so we turned around and went out the way we came. And just for my future reference, the jump that completes the circuit is right by the 600' arrow on the Godzilla line. On the way out from there, we took the Banana Room jump, which I knew nothing about, but eventually after going through some wide but not very tall room it ended right by the 500' on the main line. Once we hit that, we turned around and came back out the way we came, stopping to cleanup our wayward spool. We should have realized that was not the right jump, because that jump line was very silty looking like it wasn't frequently used. And I get the impression that the Godzilla circuit is a very common dive. Oh well, now we know.

On the way out, Rob pointed out the rabbit hole to me (though at the time I didn't realize this was the so-called rabbit hole), and then when we got back to open water, he showed me the other side. I poked my head in to look and saw that this was the other side of what he had pointed out. Ahh. For some reason I thought the rabbit hole entrance was tight, but it is not (though tighter, I suppose, than the main entrance). We used my new and improved deco heuristics and only were subject to 15 minutes or so on our oxygen bottles. I passed the time taking notes on the dive in my wetnotes (which I didn't actually use to write this post... that would be cheating), and Rob used the time running out lots of line from the reel in the basin. I wasn't sure if he was trying to get some boogers out of the line, or if he was just amusing himself. I'm still not sure. When we ascended, there were quite a few more families enjoying the water. The ranger told us that this was nothing compared to peak summer traffic.

After the dive, Rob reported that just past the coffin tunnel, where the tunnel turns back to the left, it opens up a bit. I have since seen a video of the exit from Rocky Horror, and I think I'm willing to try it again, with some conditions. I just want to say that despite the little bit of drama on this dive, I thought it was a totally awesome dive. I love this kind of dive where you recalculate to check out a little bit of lots of different passages in a cave. And I loved Potter's Delight! I want to take a bath in that mud. It probably would not have been quite as fun of a dive if there was photography involved (though it would be nice to have pictures).

Anyhoo, on the way back to High Springs, we ended up in some epic-bad traffic due to some fatal accident on the highway, but not before stopping in Lake City for lunch (or breakfast, depending on how you look at it -- I like biscuits any time of the day). When we finally made it back to High Springs, Leah and I went to Winn Dixie and got some snacks and beer (and some girly variant for the girls) and we stayed in for the evening.

Peacock to Cisteen

2011-06-04T20:29:00.000-07:00

On Saturday, we all headed to Peacock. Rob and I did a dive at Peacock 1 to Cisteen, mostly because I looked at the map and mused about how I wondered what that dive was like. When we got to Peacock, it was pretty empty at both Orange Grove (which we stopped at to give Matt and Leah a little briefing about) and Peacock 1. There was one team coming out as we walked down to the water to get in. We didn't know exactly how the lines ran to get to Cisteen, but I remembered seeing the jump off of the mainline toward Cisteen. There are two different jumps that aren't that far apart that both eventually go there, and I didn't know which one actually went the whole way to Cisteen (presumably the other one ended and then we would have to jump back into the other to head up to Cisteen). In any case, the plan was to take the first jump (the Nicholson tunnel, according to the map), and then jump back onto the other line if necessary.

I was leading the dive, and the mainline started even closer to open water than I remembered (though, in hindsight, exactly where it started before). The chute going down from the cavern to the sign was a lot bigger than I remembered too :) Rob always likes to shoot down it head down, and I usually do the same thing, but today I realized that it is much more civilized to go down sideways (which is how I usually come up the chute). That worked nicely. The viz was really good once we got into the cave. It was like a whole different cave compared to the first time we dived it, when the viz was just marginally within standards to dive it in C1. I was thinking that as we swam along in there. When we got near Pothole, we found a pair of shoes, one near the line and one off to the side, which I don't remember seeing before, but they looked like they had been there a while. Who knows. We got to the jump, and I put the jump in and we were off. After about 9 minutes, the line ended and the tunnel we were in was perpendicular to a fairly big tunnel, by Peacock standards, where that other line ran. Shortly before we got to the end of the line, the tunnel ran a bit deeper and it got much colder, and slightly murky -- the water was quite green. It probably wasn't really "much colder" in terms of degrees Fahrenheit, but it felt like quite a shock as we swam into it. But it was actually pretty refreshing.

Anyhoo, it took me a moment to locate the other line when we got to the end of this line, even though it was in a pretty obvious location, but a bit above us where we came out of our tunnel. We jumped over to the other line and headed right. We passed the two jumps to our left which show on the map as "the wishbone" and then the line got quite busy with cookies, arrows, and little tags that were related to some sort of survey project. Just after that, there is a T and the right goes up abruptly, I assumed to Cisteen. So we went right and what do you know, it quickly ascended into a cavern zone. We popped up at a sort of icky little body of water -- it was pretty green. We chatted briefly, and since we were not too far from thirds, we decided to just head back (though in hindsight, we really should have headed just a bit further up the line... why not?).

On the way out, I thought of doing the wishbone loop a bit too late, and since Rob was leading, I thought it would be a bit annoying to stop him and turn him around. So we just headed straight back to the mainline. When we got back there, I was cleaning up the jump spool and put a finger down on the cinder block thingy (not really a cinder block at all... but a concrete cylinder thingy with an eye bolt or something coming out the top) and it moved. Rob was super annoyed by this. After a bit of discussion about heading further up the mainline, I thumbed it, in part because Rob was annoying me and in part because my knee was bothering me (which may have had a small part in Rob seeming more annoying than usual). This swimming thing is a real bummer; I prefer pulling myself into the cave and then being spit back out. The swim out was uneventful. It turned out to be a pretty short dive.

When we got out, we packed up the car and headed over to Orange Grove to look for Matt and Leah. They were rinsing the duckweed off of their drysuits when we showed up, so it was perfect timing. We stopped at the Luraville country store for lunch and then headed back to High Springs.

Ginnie Springs: The Ice Room

2011-06-03T20:51:00.000-07:00

Matt and Leah were arriving in Florida on Friday to do a little cavern diving. Since they were arriving around noon, we worked in the morning and once they got in, we headed over to EE so they could pick up gear, and then to Ginnie for an afternoon dive. They were going to dive the cavern while we went for a dive, and then once we came up, they were going to take a peek at the ear and the eye, and then we were all going to check out the river... the river was unusually clear, so we figured it would be fun to drift down to the cavern entrance. For our dive, Rob wanted to go to the Ice Room. I wanted to approach the double lines from the opposite side, to see the whole path back to the Hill 400 line, so that sounded like a good plan to me. We asked Doug for directions, and he had some explanation of how to know when to jump off of the double lines line based on the shape of some rock on the bottom, which I was not very confident would lead to success. But I figured we would go up there and see what we could find. We at least recognized the description of where to jump off of Hill 400.

For some reason, Rob led this dive again, maybe because he was the mastermind of this dive? David definitely would not approve. The first 30 minutes of the dive seemed very familiar. Oh right, we dove here yesterday :) We continued up the Hill 400 line to the jump around 1200' and headed in there. It sort of goes up and then comes back down. The line on that end is pretty similar to the section that we just made it to yesterday, before turning. Every time I saw a passage off to the right that could have possibly gone somewhere, I was wondering if that was it. Eventually, somewhere between 1400 and 1500' I think (a bit further than where we made it the day before), we eventually found the jump, and it turned out to be marked, though we were told it wasn't marked. Rob installed the jump spool and went to check it out and then signaled me to follow a moment later. I followed his line and was a bit confused when I got to the end of the spool, because he had hit the line just before the first T (we were told there would be two Ts after we made the jump), like just inches before the T. It took a minute for me to realize which way we were to go, just because it didn't look quite as expected. But then I figured that the line we were supposed to jump to must have started over there (behind us and to the right), so the way we wanted to go was over there (ahead of us and slightly to the right). We got going and it was pretty silty and brown and got twisty and a bit low in some areas. It also got shallower. The depth difference from the double lines line to the Ice Room is maybe 25 feet. Finally we came to the room and it opened up and was quite tall. It was pretty obvious that this was our destination. It was a neat little room, not too huge around but tall and very dark. And the entry into it was fun, it reminded me of a spiral staircase :)

We were only there for maybe a minute and then Rob turned the dive, on gas I guess (shocking, since Rob doesn't usually breathe). And so we headed back out. When we got back to the spool, I told Rob to hold for a sec, because I wanted to look at where the line we jumped to started. It ended maybe 15 feet from where we jumped to it, but if we had jumped just a bit earlier and up and to the right instead of down and to the left, we would have intercepted the line at its start. Rob cleaned up the spool and we headed out. When we got back to our stage bottles (at the start of the Hill 400 line), we once again agreed to pick them up, carry them to the park bench, and then head off there. When we got there, he signaled for me to go ahead and keep leading. Hmph. Since we took the first jump to the left yesterday, I took the second. I'd never gone there, so had no clue how that would go. Like 30 seconds later (okay, that may be a slight exaggeration), the line ended. It was evidently just a short connector between two lines. So I jumped to the other line and arbitrarily headed right. And like 30 seconds later, that line ended. Double hmph. That line ended at the "big room" I think. At this point I was sick of pulling a spool out every 30 seconds, so I signaled to turn, and we headed back and past our spool. This was the same passage we ended up in yesterday, so after a minute or two, I turned it I guess on boredom, and we headed out.

When we got back to 20', the deco negotiations began. Well, it's more like I told Rob what the deco was (using my magic new formula) and he said okay. He didn't quite seem to grok my magic formula, but he knew I'd spent a bunch of time in front of Deco Planner the day before, coming up with the formula, so I guess he was okay with that :P For basically the same dive as yesterday (depth and time-wise, anyway) we did 15 minutes less deco, and lived to get bent another day. As I was approaching the surface, I noticed a guy in a red drysuit by the stairs, and when I hit the surface, I realized that Matt and Leah were getting in the water. Great timing! After chatting a bit about their first dive, and what to do next, we headed into the 30' room at the eye and played around in there for a few minutes. Then we swam over to the ear and Rob and Matt dropped down the chute to look around, while Leah and I hung out at the ledge at like 5'. When they returned, we drifted down the river.

Drifting down the river was pretty fun, though we had to keep popping up to look around and make sure we didn't miss the exit point. Aside from a bazillion beer cans and some cute little fish, the best find was a BIG turtle that Rob found. I had been talking up the turtles at Ginnie to Matt and Leah, who hadn't seen any on their dive (and we hadn't seen any on either day), so I was glad that we found at least one, and it was a big one at that! Eventually we made it to the exit point, and managed not to overshoot it, and basically walked down the run in 3 feet of water, since it was a bit of a pain to swim up the run, against the current. It was a pain to walk up it too, with two bottles :P Once we got out, the boys went to retrieve the cars, and after cleaning everything up, we headed to the Great Outdoors for dinner.

Ginnie Springs: To the Double Arrows and Beyond

2011-06-02T20:33:00.000-07:00

For some convoluted reason, we decided fairly late in the game that since we were flying through Miami on the way back from Mexico, we might as well take a side trip to Florida cave country. So we abandoned the leg of our flight from Miami back home, got a rental car, and drove to High Springs (then flew home from Jacksonville). I didn't think the drive from Miami was too bad; I thought it was rather scenic and way more fun than a drive through California of equivalent length. I wasn't the one who had to do the driving though. And the radio stations in that area were a bit challenging. We planned to work remotely for at least part of the trip, so on Thursday, we decided to dive in the morning and then work mostly west coast hours in the afternoon. I considered this a "soft landing" back to work; I could work through that annoying email backlog without people actually stopping by my desk to annoy me in person :P

We headed to EE to provision and found our stuff without too much trouble. We had a little bit of trouble finding our stage bottles, in part because they weren't where I expected and in part because I swear they were white when we left them but now they were grey. Okay, I guess they were always grey, but we just have too much gear to keep it all straight in my head. So once everything was found, we headed to Ginnie. Last time we dove Ginnie, on the way out, we headed up Hill 400 to the jump at 1000' that eventually has a set of double arrows at like 1600'. I thought this area was super cool, so I proposed that we go back there, but on the way in, so we could make it further up the line. I really liked the area that was wide but low in the 1300'-ish area. I also liked the area right after that where it is like a bunch of rooms separated by fun little doorways to contort yourself through. So that was the plan. Rob led the dive, because it was his turn -- I led the dive on the last day in Mexico. Plus I always hoover through my gas when I run the reel into Ginnie, so it just makes more sense :) It's nice to be the mastermind of the dive without having to do the dirty work :P

I knew Rob had some time constraints for being available to work, so I was watching the clock as we got geared up. I was a bit worried that after a week in Mexico, I wouldn't be able to deal with the 104s or the flow. Walking into the water in 104s was a bit of a pain, but in the water I think I actually feel more stable in 104s. And the flow was not too bad. I think I made a breakthrough with respect to being at the very top of the gallery. I always feel like I'm at the top when I really am not (I'm like at the "next to top" spot, which makes a huge difference). Today, I got all the way to the top and in fact, I did a better job of it than Rob did, and I was practically overtaking him as he fought his way up. Rob always claims there is some sort of eddy if you get in the right spot near the top that will actually pull you in. I'm not sure if that's entirely true, but I was definitely moving rather effortlessly. I think the key was to stay high and to the left, but not completely to the left (since you can't get as high there). Anyhoo, eventually Rob got in line and we made it through the gallery pretty quickly.

When we got to the Hill 400 jump, someone had already installed the jump, and they had taken my favorite tie off below the mainline. Bastards. Oh well, Rob's problem. He installed the jump and we dropped our stage bottles on the Hill 400 line, and then headed up it. Well, this tunnel was pretty much as it usually is, except that I noticed something that I have never noticed before, but which I assume has always been there -- I think around 900 feet, just after the "hill", up to the right, there is this pink koosh-monster thingy that is sitting on a ledge above the line. Strange. I was thinking that I've probably never noticed it before because it is a few feet above the line and I am usually not that high, but that Rob must have seen it before since he always likes to hang out close to the ceiling :) After the dive, I asked about it and he said he'd never seen it before. But it was pretty silty looking so I figure it must have been there for a while.

We took the jump to the left at 1000' and went straight to the double lines, skipping the little connector line that runs from the Hill 400 to that line. The low area didn't seem quite as low as I remembered it. The area after that, with its series of little rooms, did not continue too much further than where we had gone before (just to where the opposing arrows are), and then it became more tunnely. It got a bit more narrow and then eventually got open and sort of less tunnel-shaped. We turned on gas somewhere between the 1400 and 1500 markers. When we got back to the start of the double line, we moved the spool over to that little connector line and headed right. After a minute or two, we passed another jump to our right, which I didn't know anything about, but now see that that line goes for a while on the map. Then the line ended, or so Rob reported (he was in front, so he saw the end of the line and turned us, but I did not see it). But he said that the tunnel appeared to continue at least for a bit. We turned and returned to the Hill 400 line, and when we got there, we briefly discussed heading further up the line. We decided not to. I was secretly scheming to take the jump by the park bench on the way out, so figured we could save the gas for that.

We headed out and passed another team on our way out. When we got back to our spool, there were 3 spools and an extra stage bottle. It was like the spools and stage bottles had mated while we were in the cave, though the new spool and bottle had a distinct lack of baby face. I suggested to Rob that we pick up our bottles and carry them to the park bench and drop them again, so we did not go back onto them. Once we got to the park bench, I told Rob to look at the time, since I knew he had some time constraints. He said it was fine and took the lead again (actually he sort of drifted by me on the way there, and I gave him an annoyed "I'm #1" signal, so we were practically side by side by the time we got to the park bench) and put the spool in while I dropped my bottle. We headed up that line without much of a plan, and at the first jump left, Rob signaled to go that way. We did the Expressway tunnel circuit in C2, but I hadn't been on this line past the next jump. Today we stayed on this line and just kept going until it ended. It ended at a fairly big dark tunnel, which I think is the line that runs from the park bench to the maple leaf. We rather arbitrarily decided to go left, and headed toward the maple leaf. This tunnel is pretty big and dark, it is hard to see across the tunnel in spots. After a couple of minutes heading up that line, we turned (on gas I think), and headed out. The exit was uneventful.

When we got back to 20' and after we went onto our bottles, the deco negotiations began. Amazingly, Rob was actually negotiating down. Deco was pretty boring, so I got my wetnotes out to take some notes on the dive. That passed a bit of time. When it was finally over, we came out and Rob was a bit miffed about the time. Apparently when we agreed to do the jump at the park bench, he wasn't including deco into his calculation of how long the dive would be -- doh! He blamed me for being what he called an "extreme recalculater". Since he was in a bit of a hurry, we called the Station Bakery to order some lunch, and picked it up on the way back to the Country Inn, where we worked for the rest of the day. Rob and I were discussing the fact that our deco rule seemed to be overkill (especially on the shallower profiles in Mexico), so I did a bunch of monkeying with DecoPlanner that afternoon to come up with my own rules for deco on 60, 80, and 90 foot dives on 32% with O2 for deco, and decided we were try those out for the rest of the trip :)

Dos Ojos

2011-05-31T19:17:00.000-07:00

For our last day of diving in Mexico, I suggested Dos Ojos. Actually I asked "if Dos Ojos worth doing?" I was pointing out that there are several dive sites that it seems everyone does when they first start cave diving which we have not done (I guess because we didn't train in Mexico). Dos Ojos falls into this category. Kevin said it was "definitely" worth doing. Then Rob asked Kevin if there was any cave dive in Mexico that Kevin thought was not worth doing. Kevin admitted that they are all worth doing at least once, but Dos Ojos is worth doing at least twice. So if Kevin ever tells you that a dive is worth doing, you should realize this has no signaling value whatsoever. But if he says it's worth doing twice, well, maybe that means something. We met up with Don and Kevin at the entrance at 9, and after showing our cave cards (gasp) and paying 100 pesos (which was surprisingly cheap), we headed in. It seemed a bit hotter than it had been, though that may have been because we were not in the shadiest spot. The original plan was to mix up the teams today, but somehow that fell by the wayside. I'm not sure how -- though I mentioned it to Rob and he said he didn't know how to affix his strobe to the sidemount people, so maybe that's why. Anyhoo, in the end, Rob and I dove together. Kevin and Don led us in to "make sure we found the jump" off of the cavern line, though I'm not really sure how we could have missed it. We took the Barbie line to the main (IMAX) line.

We didn't have access to a map with much detail (Kevin claims there isn't one) and as it was described, it didn't sound like there were many options for navigation off the main line, other than the "old" main line, plus a little connector back to the new main line. So as we geared up, I told Rob I was only taking two jump spools (since I knew he would have 3). I can't explain why I did this, except that I was feeling too lazy to stuff another spool into my pocket? Rob had the bright idea to walk our tanks down to one of the tables right by the entrance, then go back up to the car to get dressed. The stairs there are pretty nice, though some of them are a bit tall (or so they seem once you are in doubles) and the middle "flight" of stairs are all sort of leaning downward, which isn't too fun. But there is a handrail which is reasonably sturdy. After getting into our suits, we went for a swim to cool off, then we got into our gear and into the water. We bobbed around for a few minutes while Kevin and Don finished their gear checks, and then we headed in after them. The cavern line starts in open water, but there are (at least) two cavern loops which means (at least) four lines starting in open water on the upstream side (though either of two of them would be the correct line). I was leading the dive, and once we got to the Barbie, Kevin or Don pointed in the direction of the main line and we headed that way (they were heading to the old main line, so we parted at that point). I fished out my 150' spool because the line had been described as pretty far from the cavern line, though I think in reality either of the spools in my pocket would do. By the time we got tied into the main line, it was about 20 minutes into the dive (the cavern line is supposedly about 1500 feet, and the jump is supposedly a little more than halfway, though having not seen the other half of it, I can't be sure about that).

The cave was not that intricately decorated at first, but became quite decorated as we got further in. The passages were all pretty big, some very big. As we followed the mainline, this other parallel line appeared to our right and ran parallel to the main line for a bit. Then it disappeared and eventually appeared again. At that point, Rob suggested we jump over to it, so we did. This was about 40 minutes into the dive, just where the main line was about to take a sharp left. The line we jumped to once again disappeared from site of the mainline and went a bit shallower into a briefly narrower passage. Then it opened up again and there were some cool formations on both sides of the line. Right where it opened up again, we dropped our stages. Maybe 100 feet later, the line once again dipped down, where that room "ended". Rob wanted to take some pictures in that room, so he took the lead, so he could stop us as he found something photo-worthy. We proceeded slowly for the next 5 or 10 minutes, as Rob took pictures. Eventually we came upon another rather green cenote just ahead of us, and the line turned to the left. Two minutes later, we passed a line arrow pointing the way we were heading (the first opposing line arrow we had seen) and it said "Tak Be Ha cavern" or some such thing on it, with a jump to the left. I had never heard of Tak Be Ha before, but a quick google search reveals that it is a cenote in the Mayan Riviera :P

From there we could see another opening up ahead and to the right, which was perhaps the same cenote we had just passed, but the view of it was blocked by a wall in-between -- not sure. We continued until we got to it, and then Rob signaled to turn around (I'm not sure if he thought the line ended or what). So we turned back and took the jump at the "Tak Be Ha" arrow. This line eventually ended, after another 5 or 6 minutes, putting us on the middle of yet another line, which I made an executive decision to go left on. This line also ended after a few more minutes, and this time at the end of the line, we found Kevin and Don's cookies and a jump spool back onto the main line (or some gold line). So I guess this line was the connector from the old to the new main line, or a connector anyway. We jumped to the mainline, using our fifth and final spool :( (what was I thinking bringing only two!?!). Since we were switching order as we came to photo-worthy passages, we kept arriving at jumps and Rob would give me the "after you" signal and make me put the jump in. So lazy... Anyhoo, we headed further up the mainline and got to some really big and nicely decorated passages. Overall I would say this cave had a good mix of small (icicle-type) decorations and big impressive column-type formations. I know Rob is addicted to saltwater passages, but I think he got some of his best pictures of the trip at Dos Ojos. After about 10 minutes, I turned the dive on sore feet :) Friggin' jet fins.

Since we still had an insane amount of gas left (with the 17 foot average depth, one stage can give you a looong dive), we took our time on the exit and Rob took more pictures. On at least two of the jumps, as I was pulling the spool, Rob was hunkered down in front of our cookies, taking pictures of me pulling the spool. In my head, I was thinking the caption for the picture should be "diver pulling a spool without ANY help from buddy". Not that I need help, but it's just polite to pull ties, ya know? When we finally made it back to our stage bottles, I was totally relieved to take a swig from Rob's camelbak. I was so thirsty! Rob took a few pictures in that area right after we picked up our bottles, but pretty much from that point out, we were just heading out. My feet were killing me, so I was looking forward to popping my fins off :) I briefly considered doing it when we got to the other eye on the cavern line, but decided to suck it up!

Once we got out, we decided to break down our gear (completely, boohoo) and pack up the car before going for a swim. I guess we were pretty efficient about doing this, because we managed to go for a swim (brrr) and were waiting in the water a little while before Kevin and Don appeared. We agreed to meet up at ZG in a little bit and then headed down to Tulum for one last empanada (or in my case, three) before heading home. The guys were like kids in a candy store at ZG, because there were a bunch of new cave maps on sale there. They are such dorks.

Naharon toward Mayan Blue

2011-05-30T21:25:00.000-07:00

Rob really wanted to dive Mayan Blue on this trip, since we didn't last time, and there were a few spots in particular that he wanted to go to. But there had been reports of car break-ins at Mayan Blue recently, so we punted it from our list. Then when we were trying to decide where to go on Monday, somehow the Naharon to Mayan Blue traverse came up. Actually the traverse had come up long ago, before the trip, when Rob kept proposing it and I kept telling him no. But in the end we decided to dive Mayan Blue from the Naharon side :) Rob wanted to go to the Battleship Room in Mayan Blue, which seemed pretty doable from Naharon with two stages. Dennis told us how to get there from Naharon at dinner on Sunday, and Chris refreshed our memory on Monday morning (margaritas and cave directions don't mix very well). The navigation actually was not too complicated, since we already knew how to get to Southern Sacbe (we hadn't actually been there, but had passed the jump), and then you are on that for a long time, go past one T and eventually get dumped into the Battleship Room. Kevin and Don were also at Naharon and were planning to do the same dive. We got in the water a bit before them though, so we weren't piled up on the way there.

Rob led the dive, since it was his turn. We dropped our bottles and Rob installed his strobe on my tanks at one of the sticks again, and then we headed to the mainline, then the Desconocido line, then SW Sacbe, and finally to Southern Sacbe in a little over 20 minutes. The Southern Sacbe line does not have as many column-type decorations as in SW Sacbe, but it is bright white with blue water, and there are many interesting formations. The walls have that crinkly look that some passages below the halocline have (like the crack we went to the previous day). There were occasional restricted areas, but overall it was pretty open, but also distinctly tunnely. We dropped our first stage bottles after one restriction that was a bit tight with the bottle, but otherwise, carrying the bottles was not a problem in this area. We were on the Southern Sacbe line for quite a while, and finally hit a T around 50 minutes in. The T had an arrow back the way we came that said "Naharon" and an arrow to the right saying "Mayan Blue". Phew, good to know we were on the right track :) A few minutes after that, we dropped our second stage bottles, and a few minutes after that, the line became gold line (also a good sign, because we'd been told it was gold line through the Battleship room). For most of this portion of the dive, the line runs just below the halocline. But the rooms are tall enough that you can swim either below or above the halocline with a perfectly good view of the line.

Not too long after the line changed to gold line, we came into a room that was clearly getting bigger. Then off to my left, I saw a formation that looked very distinctly like a gun from a tank or a ship. I'm not much of a military or weapons guru, but even I recognized it. I pointed it out to Rob, and figured that must be why this was called the battleship room. Just a bit beyond that, the room opened up more and we could tell that it was HUGE. This is why Rob wanted to go to this room -- he kept telling me how HUGE it was. To our left, the room extended beyond the glow of our lights, and it extended ahead of us as far as we could see. After we looked around a bit in awe, we decided to hang out in that room for a few minutes and then head out. I stayed on the line was Rob swam over to the wall on the left, and in his light, I could see the extent of the room. It was really neat watching his light across the room. After a few minutes taking turns doing this, we turned the dive.

About 5 minutes later, we passed Don and Kevin, and after a couple of high fives (very dorky, I know), I tried to convey to them that the room was about 5 minutes ahead and totally awesome. Not sure I did. We were sort of in the middle of the halocline at this point, so I doubt anything really got through. On the way out, Rob picked up his camera (which he had deposited somewhere between our first and second stage drops) and took some pictures in the Southern Sacbe tunnel. When we got back to the Southwest Sacbe line, we dropped all of our bottles and headed further up SW Sacbe for a few more pictures. We made it further up that line today, because we didn't start taking pictures until we got a bit further (so made more progress early).

Eventually we turned it and when we got back to our bottles, Kevin and Don's jump to Southern Sacbe had been removed. By the time we got back to the basin, they were there doing deco, and left a couple minutes later. After doing too much deco, we got out of the water and cleaned up our gear. Then we headed to Super Carne for some meat, errr lunch. Then we headed down to the gelato shoppe, since I was determined to have gelato at least once more before leaving :) Then we headed to ZG to get tanks for the next day, and then hit a beach bar in Akumal for some afternoon drinks. There we discussed the plan for the next day. We decided to go to Dos Ojos, because I complained that it was one of those sites that everyone's been to, but we hadn't been to yet. Plus it is super shallow and I was happy to not carry two stages around yet again!

Naharon: Some Passage

2011-05-29T19:47:00.000-07:00

On Sunday we decided to go to Naharon. Lynne, Peter, and Kevin were diving there too. Since Rob is a salt-water slut, of course the goal of the dive was to find some good salt-water passages to photograph. He had some ideas of where to go (I think based on advice from Beto), but when we got to ZG, he asked Chris about it. Chris wasn't too sure about the sections that Rob was thinking of going to. He asked us if we were stage diving, and when Rob said we were double staging he was kind of like "oooh, in that case!" and drew us a map of a place to go to. I'm not sure what the passage we went to is called -- on the map that we have, it just shows up as a dotted line passage. So I guess you could say we were off the grid ;) Chris gave us a detailed map and description of all of the landmarks on the way to the tunnel. The path included the double domes and then a jump to the left into a "crack" of sorts, which he thought we would find quite good for photography. I was leading, and a bit worried, since the jump was not marked. But as you may know, I am an extreme visualizer, so Chris's detailed description was quite helpful.

The unfortunate side to this place was that it meant schlepping two stages the whole way (well, one and a half stages the whole way, or something). I've really been failing on my mission to only double-stage dives which include a "stage depot" along the way. We were delighted to find that the steps into the water were in good repair, so we got in that way (last time we didn't for some reason, I think because they were in bad shape, and instead took the very slippery route). I remember finding the whole Naharon experience to be quite slippery and treacherous seeming last time, but this time, possibly because of the last 90 days without rain, it didn't seem like this at all. We lined up our bottles on the platform by the stairs and get geared up. I managed to not drown in the basin with 3 bottles on (we brought O2 as well). (As a complete aside, I wonder if all of the 2 80s plus 1 40 dives in Mexico will translate to Monterey... I find that in Monterey, 1 80 and 2 40s is really my "comfort" limit though this mostly has to do with deploying into the water without being crushed under the weight of my gear. That's a lot easier in MX.) Okay, maybe that wasn't such an aside... since I hate carrying two 80s up front, I decided to try a little experiment and see what happens if you leash the second stage instead of the O2 bottle. This experiment was an epic fail. Pretty much all it accomplished was a trail of silt behind me for the first 30 feet or so, because the bottle actually fell down between my legs and ended up dragging beneath me. Anyhoo, we dropped our O2 bottles at the big stick thingy that was our secondary tie, and I moved the stage back up front (where it belongs :P). While we were there, Rob affixed the slave strobe to me (we remembered the bungee today, don't think we'll forget that again!).

And then we were off. We jumped to the Desconocido line (which I have heretofore been calling the "Descondido line" because I *swear* that's what Kevin calls it... but the map and Chris seem to be in agreement otherwise). We passed the jumps as described by Chris, there are a bunch to the right which are all in some way involved in the merry-go-round circuit. Then we came to the double domes, the first of which was at about 44 feet, and the second at 25 or so feet. We dropped our stages somewhere in-between the two domes. A large portion of the travel, and I think most of the travel between the domes is right around the halocline. But the passages are plenty big to avoid any halocline-induced blurry vision. The second dome is really neat. You go WAY up to get into it and then there are some formations in that room, and then its right back down to the other side. Once we were through that, I started thinking every little turn in the line was THE turn that Chris had described. But when I finally got to the passage, it was quite clear to me that this was it. I went to check that this really was the passage (that there was a line to jump to), and after confirming that there was in fact a line in there, we dropped our stages and I installed the jump. Once we got into the crack, I told Rob to go ahead of me, since it was narrow enough that it would be annoying for him to keep stopping me and turning me around to setup shots. It was also narrow enough (and possibly unvisited enough) that the slightest wiggle of the camera caused silt to be stirred up from the walls by the strobe arms (though it wasn't really that narrow). The crack is very attractive. Not in the usual beautiful disneyland-castle-like saltwater formations. It isn't very decorated in that sense. But it is like this very blue, very symmetrical (in some sense) passage that just goes and goes. I really like the symmetric tunnel aspect of this passage -- it's like how I like the "subway" tunnel in Twin Caves (on the Mill Pond) because of the symmetry. We spent a bit of time in there taking pictures, so we really didn't make it that far up, I don't think. Chris had mentioned a T, which we did not get to before turning on gas.

On the way out, we stopped in the second (shallower) dome for a brief photo shoot. For some reason we were having a serious breakdown in communication -- I swear Rob would tell me to pose here and then that wasn't at all were he wanted me to be! From there, the exit was pretty uneventful, until we hit the Southwest Sacbe jump, and decided to head up there for a bit. For some reason, Rob installed the jump, I guess because he was in the lead on the way out. We had a bit of a delay installing the jump, because Rob swam into the wrong passage, oops. We finally found the right one though, and headed up the line. Rob took a few pictures up there, though I don't think we really made it far enough to get to the nicest sections. Rob claims that because the passage is not completely below the halocline (and thus the ceiling is black), it isn't the best passage for photography. Hmph. So after going not too far up there, we headed out, and eventually found our way back to the cavern zone. As we swam toward it, I saw someone in a swimsuit, I thought free-diving. But as I got closer, I realized he was hanging in the water continuously, and actually breathing a stage bottle. It was Kevin, and he was kind enough to take our empty stage bottles once we got onto the O2. That was kind of funny to watch since, well, he had no means of buoyancy control, and those empty bottles are pretty buoyant! After doing way too much deco (the heuristic we were using for calculating deco was WAY over-conservative in the 60 foot range, I have since determined after studying profiles in DecoPlanner), we headed up.

As we were cleaning up gear, I noticed that I was missing my knife. I am guessing it got caught on the line and popped out or something. At first I was hoping it fell out when I was getting out of my gear and I would come upon it as we packed up our gear, but that never happened :( For some reason, we went back to Don Cafeto for lunch. I'm really not sure how that happened, but I think it involved my longing for one of their limonadas. Today I got a chile relleno, which was SUPER good. I think it was the best one I have ever had. The sauce was just super good. We then headed back to ZG, swapped tanks, and then went back to our place to hang out with Kevin. We eventually ended up going to the Pub to meet Don, Elissa, and Dennis. After quite a while there, we eventually wandered to Latitude 20, which is I guess a new place in PA. Since we'd had a mondo lunch, Rob and I split the paella, which we both liked (Don and Elissa split that too, and they too liked it).

Jailhouse: Swiss Siphon

2011-05-28T20:21:00.001-07:00

Saturday we went to Jailhouse, along with Lynne and Peter. Rob and I went to retrieve the key on Friday after dinner, which was interesting considering our lack of Spanish. But eventually we managed to get the key after paying slightly more than we expected/remembered (but this was not atypical of this trip -- many of the sites seem to have increased their prices since our last trip). Several people had suggested Swiss Siphon to us as a nice photogenic salt-water passage, so we decided to check that out. After meeting up with Lynne and Peter, the four of us headed down to Tulum. Since Lynne and Peter were in the lead, Lynne hopped out to open the gate for us. We followed them in and eventually we got to the open area beyond the jungle, where you are essentially driving through a farm. We have seen horses (or maybe a horse) there before, but today there was a cow. It had a rope around its neck, and was tethered to a tree by the side of the road. Unfortunately, it had decided to stand on the other side of the road, so the tether was stretching across the road, blocking passage. So of course, Lynne was sent to deal with it. It turns out it was actually a bull, but a quite young one, with just little stubs of horns. Pretty cute actually. It was totally funny to watch Lynne give a tug on the rope to try to get him to move. At first he was cool with it, but then after a moment, he sort of spooked. But luckily his reaction was to run away in the direction we wanted him to go. I really regret not getting a picture of Lynne herding the bull!

After that we quickly came to the cenote. When we first went to check it out, there was a really big, pretty blue butterfly flying atop the cenote. Later we noticed a gazillion other butterflies off across the "parking lot" all congregating around a tiny little puddle to drink from. Guess they didn't realize there was a much bigger puddle just through the trees a bit. Speaking of the puddle, it was still pretty much a muddy hole, but not quite as muddy as I remember it. We set our stage bottles and cameras down by the water, and then got geared up pretty quickly. Since we lacked oxygen, we decided to do a single stage dive. However, we did want to take a quick peek at the INAH line just upstream, so the plan was to recalculate gas back at the entrance room and take a quick foray to there at the end of the dive. We also talked about possibly heading further up the mainline after Swiss Siphon. We got into the water, and as I mentioned, it didn't seem quite as muddy as I remembered it. I could see Rob descend from 3 or 4 feet away without a problem. However, I think that the viz opened up a bit later than before. I basically felt the rock at the entrance before I saw it (though perhaps that was because Silty Bob was ahead of me). When we got into the entrance room, by the T, we stopped there so that Rob could put the slave strobe on me. But we quickly realized that we forgot to put the bungee loop on the tank that is used to attach the strobe. Doh! Rob pulled a spool from his pocket and told me to hold and then for a couple of minutes I felt all sorts of pushing and pulling on my gear from various angles, including some tugging on the manifold. There was also some bolt-snap gymnastics, with a bolt-snap being clipped off to my right chest D-ring and then retrieved back from the D-ring. I wasn't entirely sure what was going on, but at the end of it all, I was wondering if I had cave line running around my manifold, and a spool dangling from my tanks. After the dive, Rob confirmed that that was precisely the case.

Once we got going, we took the bypass line which is very shortly after the entrance room, and essentially drops you back on the mainline as if you went left, right, right, but skipping two of the Ts. The jump from the bypass was closer to the entrance than I expected, but I think that's because I was thinking of the minutes from the first T, and it was described to me in terms of minutes from the start of the dive. It looks on the map like the bypass is a big win, but it really isn't. It is much smaller than the alternative passage, so you go slowly, plus there are those two pesky jumps that you have to install. Anyhoo, it took about 9 or 10 minutes to get through the bypass, and we jumped back onto the mainline right in the halocline (at just about 50 feet). We continued up the mainline (to the right), and then we started looking for the Swiss Siphon jump, which is not marked. Rob actually stopped us just before the right spot and poked around a bit before moving on and then quickly finding the right place to jump. This passage is very pretty, pretty much right away. I thought it was extremely photogenic. We had been through the mainline passage right near the jump, and thought it was very nice, but this was even better. We spent quite a lot of time there taking pictures. The passage is quite big, with nice big decorations at frequent intervals, and of course it has the usual below-the-halocline blue glow. We dropped our stages somewhere in this tunnel and then we hit a T. One of the people we had talked to about Swiss Siphon told us to go right at the T, so I told Rob to do that. Apparently he had not heard that, so he thought it was just a lucky guess that we ended up in more beautiful passage.

The plan had been to use only some of our penetration backgas in the Swiss Siphon and save the rest for further up the mainline, or the INAH line. But we agreed to conference about that when we got there. We quickly decided that we should spend as much time as possible in this passage. So after spending quite a bit of time here, we eventually turned the dive on gas. When we got back to the mainline, we agreed to head a bit further up it for just a couple hundred PSI. It was nice, and Rob took a few pics, but I think Swiss Siphon is way nicer. Then we headed out back to the entrance room. We paused at the T to discuss our plan for heading to the INAH line, and as we were discussing, we saw the glow of Lynne and Peter's lights coming from that passage. We waited for them to come out, and then we headed upstream. I dropped my stage before the room where the jump is. I swam into that room, and I was absolutely certain that this was where the jump was. I remembered it perfectly. But I couldn't find the passage. So I thought maybe I was wrong. I took a few more kicks, and then I saw that the jump was marked on the line. Okay, so this is definitely the right room. But for some reason I still failed to see the passage (and I knew exactly what it looked like!). I think when I first looked around, I was in a bad position to see it, and then I got so discouraged by that that even when I was sitting right on top of the jump arrows, I missed it. But Rob pointed it out to me, and after a moment of "oh duh", I installed the jump and we were off. Once we got into the saltwater passage, I let Rob lead so he could decide where to take pictures. We stopped for shots in three spots, and made it to that big gazebo-type formation where the line turns right before I turned it on gas. I realized at like the last spot where he was taking pictures that I had forgotten to deploy the sensor for the remote strobe on all of the previous pictures (on the INAH line). I had it clipped off to the back of my light head, on the bungee loop. Turns out, that position still allowed the sensor to fire. Phew. I was worried I was going to be fired as Rob's model!

When we got back to the entrance room, Rob removed the strobe from my tanks (which is sad, since I never got to see exactly what craziness was required to affix it to me with a spool). We did a few minutes of backgas deco at 20 feet. I basically just pinned myself to the ceiling since I was terrified of stirring up the gelatinous muck below me. That worked quite well. Coming up into the warm poop water was pretty gross. Somehow bad viz just seems way grosser when it is bath-tub hot! Lynne and Peter were already out of the water when we surfaced, and they were kind enough to help us with getting our bottles and the camera out of the water (this was a recurring theme throughout the week -- Lynne, Peter, and Kevin routinely helped us with our bottles because they were already out of the water when we came up, and I felt bad that we never had the opportunity to return the favor!). Rob got himself out of the water, and then I got myself to me knees and with one hand on a tree and one hand on Rob, I stood myself up (okay, maybe it would be more fair to say Rob and I stood me up :P).

After we packed up gear, and looked at the butterflies for a bit, we headed to Tulum for lunch. We had agreed to meet at Taqueria Diaz, since Jacob had recommended it, oh I don't know, maybe five thousand times in the past two weeks. But when we got there, we found it closed :( So we decided to go across the street to Don Cafeto instead, which is one of those places I have heard reference to many times (I think from Beto), but never been to. We all got some variety of beef tacos, which were okay but not great. But their limonada was totally awesome, and basically made it worth going there just for that. We also had some tasty guacamole, and I liked the pickled carrots in the bowl of pickled things that they brought. Since ZG closes early on Saturday, we headed back to the condo and got there pretty early. So we decided to go snorkeling out behind the condo. I brought my snorkel and everything, even though Rob snickered about it. I also brought the Hero Cam, since I figured this was the sort of thing it was actually made for, so it would be cool to actually use it for that! It was quite a successful snorkel. We found a bunch of rather small patches of "reef" but even in those small patches, there were an impressive number and variety of little tropical fish (I suck at naming tropical fish, so that's about as specific as I can be). Eventually as we got closer to the breakwater, there were bigger patches of reef, which had a lot of medium-sized fish, plus I saw at least one barracuda, and a really big triggerfish. Conditions were getting rougher as we got closer to the breakwater, plus we were swimming against the wind or current. So at some point I sent Rob to take a look, to see if there was another interesting enough to make it worth going further into the rougher water. Of course that was a mistake. He swam maybe 100 feet away and then started grunting and signaling and yelling "turtle". I guess he happened upon a turtle sleeping on the reef, but it got scared away before I could see it :( After looking around for a bit, we headed back, which was quite a bit easier since we basically just drifted back. On the way in, Rob made two good finds. First, a lettuce sea slug (which of course I got some video of, just for Clinton :P). And the best find of all (that I actually saw) was a spotted eagle ray, maybe 100 feet from the beach. That was really exciting!

Later that evening, Lynne told us they were going to Akumal to have dinner with some friends, so we tagged along to Lol-Ha. Lynne and I shared the ceviche, plus the table had guacamole and mango margaritas. I met a very skinny but well-groomed beach kitty who was not interested in being pet but was very willing to share some ceviche with me.

Pet Cemetery: Blue Abyss and Dark Side of the Moon

2011-05-27T20:53:00.000-07:00

On Friday, we went to Pet Cemetery with Kevin, Lynne and Peter. Rob, Kevin, and I dove as a team. We met up at the Dos Ojos entrance, where you pay for Pet Cemetery too, and then we followed the others down the slightly long road to Pet Cemetery. The road is in quite good shape for a while, then gets worse (about on par with the road to White River) and then it gets better again right before you get to Pet Cemetery. The site has some nice, sturdy tables to setup gear on, and a nicely groomed trail to the water. The bathrooms are also super nice, so all in all it has really nice facilities. The staircase is very steep (Lynne has a good picture on her blog here). It was pretty freakin' scary to walk down the steps. I think Rob was nice enough to carry more than his fair share of the bottles down :) Once you get to the bottom of the stairs, there is a platform with some high benches, where you can put your doubles. So we walked them down before getting into our drysuits, and sat them on the benches. Then we got into our suits and went for a quick swim in the cenote before getting into our doubles, doing gear checks, and getting back in.

The plan was to go to Blue Abyss and then to Dark Side of the Moon. We were double staging, but the plan was to leave the full stage at the Dark Side of the Moon jump on the way in. So my kind of double stage dive :P Rob was bringing his camera on the dive, which was exciting. He just got a new slave strobe that he was using for the first time. When we first got into the water, he bungeed it to my tanks. He did not want to schlep the camera the whole way to the Blue Abyss, so the plan was to drop it on the line at some point on the way there. We took the cavern line, which seems to go on roughly forever, to the IHOP line. I think that the "cavern line" uses a very loose interpretation of what the cavern zone is :) But it is a very nice cavern line, and very long. Just a few minutes up the IHOP line we encountered a marked jump to the left, and just as described, there were two lines, one going roughly forward and to the left (toward DSotM), and one going roughly backward and to the left (toward Blue Abyss). At this point we were in a big, very tall room. We dropped our full stages there and headed down the Diaz line, toward the Blue Abyss. I thought this line was very pretty. It is relatively small passage but is quite decorated in many areas. In a few spots it gets restricty, but the tunnel is not actually very small. It is just that the stalactites are spaced so that you have to weave yourself between them. Rob dropped his camera (and I de-strobed) before we got into the really weavey area. I thought the passage was very nice, and worth diving even without the Blue Abyss as a destination.

Eventually we came to the jump to the Blue Abyss, about 55 minutes into the dive. The jump goes down a bit of a chute, which was fun to go down. Within 10 minutes, we hit the Blue Abyss. We came up a little tunnel that suddenly opens up into a big room, and you keep swimming until you hit the edge of the universe. Well, the edge of a big dropoff anyway, and the line goes shooting down into the abyss. After looking at it from above for a minute, we followed it down and once we crossed through the halocline, the water had a really deep cobalt blue. It was pretty cool. We continued down down down, and eventually settled a bit off the bottom. As Rob was looking around, I descended just a bit more, and reached my arm down below me -- just so my gauge would show a greater max depth than Rob's. Teeheheh. After playing around in there for a few minutes, I signaled to Rob to ascend. Rob returned the signal and then told me to shoot a bag. Hehehe. We slowly ascended; it was like we were moving in slow motion, especially as we crept through the halocline. When we got close to the ledge, we played around there for a few more minutes, shining our lights up at the ceiling, etc. Then we headed out. Just as we came back to the Diaz line, we crossed paths with Lynne and Peter, who were sitting there waiting for us to come out before they jumped to the Blue Abyss line.

We headed back out. When I got to my stage (the half-full one, which we dropped along the way on the Diaz line), I was so happy to be reunited with my Camelbak, and stopped the team so I could take a few sips. I haven't mastered the art of drinking on the go, but I've definitely made a lot of progress on the drinking underwater thing in general -- I was previously afraid of drowning while I tried to drink from it, but on this dive I got thirsty enough that I quickly got over that! Once we got back to the IHOP line (there were no pictures taken on this first segment of the dive), we dropped our stages and picked up the full ones, and moved the jump spool over to the Dark Side of the Moon line. I decided on this dive that the plan was a bit flawed in the sense that we didn't start taking pictures until more than 2 hours into the dive. I was getting tired and just not feeling very patient about posing for the camera :) We had been led to believe that this line was more photogenic than the path to the Blue Abyss. I am not convinced that that is so, however. There were some very nice sections of DSotM, but they were interrupted by not very beautiful sections. However, looking at the pictures, there were clearly some really nice spots! The slave strobe makes a huge difference. I thought the pictures looked great, but there were clearly a few things to tweak (like my trim, which led the slave strobe to light the floor behind me, not the wall in a few of the pics :P).

I eventually thumbed the dive because I was getting tired and my feet were a bit sore. We took a few more pics on the way out. By the time we got back to the stages we had dropped, I was totally not in the mood to swim two slightly positive stages out. That cavern line just kept going and going :) About 5 or 10 minutes from the end of the dive, my light crapped out again. This was seriously anomalous, since I was using a 10W lighthead (since I knew my 21W would not give a long enough burn time for this dive) and it lasted a bit under three and a half hours, on a battery that usually lasts 3 hours with my 21W. I guess the battery didn't get a good charge or something. After packing up, we headed to EE to get tanks for tomorrow. Then we headed down to Tulum to have some empanadas with Kevin at Buenos Aires. I was very sad that they did not have the blue cheese and chorizo empanadas :( Maybe next time.