Ice Room-ward

It was our last dive of the trip, and we were on a bit of a schedule, since we were flying out that night.  We looked over the map to see what was left to show to Ted, and we settled on the Ice Room.  This seemed like a good destination since Ted would get to see the "other half" of the loop we had started up on the dive on Saturday (or part of the "other half" anyway).  Plus it's a cute little room and it just makes for a nice destination.  We got to Ginnie early and made good time getting into the water.  Ted once again weaseled out of leading, so it was my turn.  Once again we went in through the ear, which I am coming to appreciate more and more, and finding the deco on the log at least acceptable, if not luxurious.

As you may remember from the dive two days earlier, I destroyed my mask on the way out of the water, and had dived a new mask the day before.  I had no problems at all with it fogging on that first day.  But today, it was already starting to fog by the time we got to the lips, grumble.  I decided to just make do, since it wasn't undiveably foggy, and I thought if I switched to my backup, there was a chance that it too would fog (and possibly be worse).  So I just sucked it up, and was constantly flooding and clearing the mask.  But it just got worse and worse.  The dive went on as planned, up to the Hill 400 jump, up that line, but the further we went, the more distracted I was by my mask issues, plus I was moving pretty slowly, and sucking gas like a Ted hoover because I was so distracted.  So I finally decided to switch masks, probably quite a bit later than I should have!  I waited until we got to the jump off of the Hill 400 line.  I dropped my cookie, clipped my spool to the line, and then turned around and told the guys I needed to switch masks.  I pulled my backup mask out and switched, while Ted watched me.  Then I had Ted put my other mask back into my pocket, because that's such a pain to do.  The backup mask that I switched onto was my trusty old clear-skirted super-voluminous mask.  I have to say, once I put it on, I was kind of like... how did I ever dive with this monstrosity?  It is just SO big.  But it is an excellent backup mask, since it is at that point where it just never fogs, without any sort of de-fog treatment (it's not such an excellent backup mask from the perspective of being giant, and taking up a lot of pocket real estate.)

Anyhoo, once I was back to the land of the masked, I looked back to my spool, and to my surprise, Rob was being pushy efficient and had picked up the spool and installed the jump while I was dealing with my mask.  After I gave him some giant eye rolls in return, I led us up into the tunnel that goes to the Ice Room.  We slowly made our way up there, because it is kind of small and silty in some spots.  According to Rob, it is only silty when I am in there.  We got to the point where we would jump to go to the Ice Room.  We had agreed in advance that if we didn't have at least another 200 psi in penetration gas at that point, we would just turn there, and save the gas for some adventures on the way out.  I checked my gauge, and I was right at the line, so I called turn.  Rob was clearly annoyed with me (which annoyed me), but well, what could I do at that point?  So we headed out, and on the way out, Ted circled with his light every little plume of silt generated from Rob's kicks, which cheered me up quite a bit :)

We exited to the Park Bench, and then we headed up the line from there.  We tried, once again, to make it to the Wonder tunnel, using the same route that we took the day before, which is more convoluted but with less flow.  We made it to the big room (or is it the bone room at that point?) and we saw the marked jump.  But we couldn't see the line from there.  Rob asked Ted for a spool, which was, shall we say, misinterpreted by Ted.  But what happens in the cave stays in the cave, so I'll have to leave it at that.  Eventually Rob suggested we stay there while he check things out, and then I handed Ted a spool, which he managed to install on the line, but not actually hand to Rob.  Rob came back, having found the tunnel (I think) and told Ted to give him the spool.  Ted looked at me, confusedly, and I told him to give Rob the spool.  Then Ted thumbed it.  Hehe.  So out we went, without anymore spool-passing, hand-holding, or the like.

I led us out, because I guess we got swapped around when we recalculated.  This had the nice side benefit of leaving Rob in position to pull the reel.  Bwahaha.  When we got back to the reel, Rob seemed annoyed by this, but when I offered to take it, he just dismissively waved me along.  I asked again at the bottom of the chute and got the move along signal, and so I did.  I guess Ted managed not to get tangled in hoses today, so we were all up to the log pretty quickly.  We negotiated our deco, wiled away the time with some wetnote-passing, and then surfaced, sad to be finished with our last dive of the trip.