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Me diving

Sunday, January 16, 2011

Happy New Year and a Free Calendar

I suppose in the spirit of good bloggery, I have to have some sort of new year's post, where I talk about the past year and the next year, or something. Even better, to celebrate the new year, I am doing my first ever blog giveaway. I have started reading a few blogs regularly (mostly craft-related) and apparently it is good blogging business to occasionally give stuff away. Well, I'm going to give something away that is so cool, it isn't even available to purchase. Rob makes an annual calendar of underwater photos to give out to friends and family, and this year we have a couple of leftovers. So I am giving one away to some lucky blog reader. Here are the thumbnails of the photos in the calendar:


To enter to win, you just need to leave a comment by Wednesday, January 19 at 11:59 PM (Pacific) saying what the coolest dive you did last year was. I will pick a winner using a random number generator from random.org. Here's my answer to that question, by the way: It's a hard one to answer. After a dive at K2 where we saw a GPO in the open among other things, I told Rob it was the best dive I'd done all year. But then two weeks later, we saw dolphins on deco. So I'm going to call it a tie. What a tough life when you have two awesome dives in two weeks and can't figure out which one was better.

Also, since I am a data geek, I felt compelled to summarize my 2010 diving by the numbers. I used Excel to generate these numbers, which was fairly painful. I did 120 dives with 24 distinct buddies. The top 5 dive buddies by dive count should not be too surprising:


Rob91
Kevin45
Clinton8
Oleg8
Jim7


It seems like I haven't been diving with Kevin as much as usual recently, but the numbers don't really support that. However, I think a lot of those dives were on cave trips. Speaking of which, the breakdown for dives by certification is:

C156
Rec37
T218
T19


I'm shocked and disturbed that I did more cave dives than any other category. That has more to do with how many C1 dives you can do in a day than a preference for that kind of diving, I swear.

Another shocking number: 14 locals dives were from shore, while 42 were from the Escapade (and 4 from Phil's RIB). Wow, I have become so soft about shore diving!

These numbers do not include class dives (either when I was a student, or assisting with a class). I spent 5 days in class (C1) and 9 days assisting with classes (7 days of Fundies, 2 days of Doubles primers).

P.S. Excel sucks. Relational databases rule.

10 comments:

Rob said...

Relational databases are so 1980. Object data-stores rule.

JENNIFER LEA said...

I'm all about the free calendar with Rob's awesome pics!

Hope you guys have a wonderful new year!

Jennifer

Ben V said...

I like the crab on the Jelly... Who says there's nothing to see on Deco :)

Unknown said...

You need to figure out how to make CWK update your FB status that there's a new blog to read. :P

gecko1 said...

Well, I'm lucky enough to already own a calendar (being a top 5 buddy has its benefits!) so I'm going to recuse myself from the contest.

Regardless I'm going to comment about my best dive from last year. Definitely was the Dolphin Deco dive. Best. Decompression. Evah.

ligersandtions said...

I wish the calendars were for sale....I'd definitely buy one instead of just hoping to be randomly selected ;)

I have a few dives that are nearly tied for first, so I'm going to mention all of them: scooting out to Beto's and hanging around there before scooting over to GPW with Stephen, Blue Caverns (Catalina) with Jen, and scooting Ancient Sea Cliffs (SD) with Jen and Chris. Can't wait to see what 2011 has in store :)

JENNIFER LEA said...

I would gladly buy one as well...I really miss CA...:(

Lynne said...

My best dive of 2010 had to be the Blue Abyss dive with Peter and Nick and Lamont. I got goosebumps, sailing out into that enormous, dark blue, unexpected expanse.

Close runners-up were my Ed's Wall dive with Kevin and Karl (and the long, long fall), and a Sunrise dive where we saw so many giant octopuses, we lost count of how many there were.

Mark Lloyd said...

In August on the Escapade out to Big Sur. Not only was the vis great but the whale action on the surface was fantastic. Our second dive at Lobos rocks was incredible, navigating all the way around with blue water everywhere and scooters pulling us all the way.

Kenn said...

Wow, now that's some data! I totaled up my dives for 2010 as well, and came up with a very sad ~46 dives, ~70 hours. I think it' my lowest count since first year of certification.

I'd say my favorite dive of the year was probably one of my most recent as well, on December 4, 2010 to Q-Tip and the "Downtown" area behind GPW. Team Bunny has been focusing a bit more on the eastern sites of Point Lobos, and for this dive we really slowed it down and took things at a leisurely pace. I actually found Itchy and Scratchy on the way out, found a little octopus fellow hanging out by a dropped weight pocket, and tons of medium-sized lingcod throughout the dive. I can't wait to do this dive again!