It's about diving. And cats.

Me diving

Sunday, October 12, 2008

Twin Peaks, Try 2

Since I am a bit behind on my blogging (was out of town all week last week), I will keep this report short. We had been planning to dive on both Saturday and Sunday, but the BAUE tech boat got blown out on Saturday. On Friday around lunchtime (on our way down to AWS to pick up our tanks), Rob got the call that the boat was off. So we decided to use our free weekend day for a last minute BBQ (since our weekends always seem too busy to pull off a BBQ). Pepper had a fun time harassing everyone and Oreo was quite brave and waited at least an hour before retiring to under the bed. Pepper and Naia made progress on their tenuous friendship, and Oreo studied the friendly giant from afar.

On Sunday, the conditions were significantly better. After our failed attempt to go to Twin Peaks the previous weekend (when the prop fell off my scooter), we decided to give it another try with my now-fixed scooter. Kevin came along with us. Rob was shooting macro. Rob wanted to try a slightly different route, following Beto's to the end, and then heading over to the Road from there. I am not really sure what the purpose of this was, except to waste more time deeper on the way out :) I guess it was just a for a change of scenery. As it turned out, it was pretty worthwhile to do -- as we were heading along the side of Beto's, we encountered several canaries at the bottom. On the way over across the sand, we saw more, and then just as we intercepted the Road, we saw another group of them. Probably the most canaries I have ever seen in one dive before.

Once we got to the Peak, we clipped off and started poking around looking for macro subjects. Rob found some hydroids with a bunch of Dotos on them, and then I found several more hydroids with them. Some of the Dotos were quite big (by Doto standards), which was good, because I could actually show them to Kevin and he could make out what he was looking at. The big pink ones are so pretty :) Anyhoo, as I was poking around looking at Dotos, I noticed a hydroid with eggs all over it. After looking a little closer, I found some tiny Dotos as well as some other tiny slugs. After some further inspection, I realized they were Cuthona divae, another slug which we seem to be seeing a lot of lately. I dragged Rob over and commanded him to get some pics. Soon after that, we headed in. It was a pretty uneventful trip back in. At the first sister, we ran into Don, Elissa, and Matt. After some Kevin antics, we continued in and did the usual drill. 152 feet, 83 minutes, 49 degrees. After that, we did a quick second dive to do a few skills near the worm patch. I was amazed that I remembered how to do a valve drill :) 29 feet, 35 minutes, 50 degrees

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