Northwest Dive Club

44 pounds with a steel tank? I think I know why you were having problems with your buoyancy. Where are you in the PNW? If you're in the Seattle area, I'd be happy to meet up with you and help you get your weighting straightened out. I think you are probably grossly overweighted, and it's making your...

Wow, you had amazing viz at the hooded nudibranchs site. The last time we dove there, we had about 5 feet

Amazing photography, as always. You made me want to start looking at the calendar to figure out when I can get back up there.

If I'm reading correctly, you were using 38 pounds of ballast? What kind of tank did you have? If it was aluminum, the first thing I would do is switch to a steel tank. That will get rid of 5 - 6 pounds of needed ballast, and make your life easier. It should also help with the pitching forward probl...

Beers, whiskey and Irish cream. Sounds like when I was in high school, and we'd sneak liquor out of somebody's parents' liquor cabinet. We were afraid to take too much of any one thing, so we drank the weirdest sequences of stuff. None of it sat particularly well.

Redondo today wasn't bad at all. Maybe 10 feet in the top 20, opening up to a hazy 15 to 20 at depth.

Yes! We were delighted to rinse off today.

You're actually sometimes better off in a small ED than a big one, if your problem is routine. You're going to get a cut sewn up much faster in Ellensburg than at Harborview, for example. You'll probably get a simple fracture x-rayed sooner, too. I was addressing the issue of the person who is evacu...

I will tell you, from the viewpoint of the person working IN the ER, that if you are presenting to an ER in a major city (like Seattle) you will immediately be entered into a triage process. Triage means sorting patients by the perceived urgency of their medical problem. People who are having heart ...

BTW, Fishy, with the neutral 80 you were using last time, we had a 20 lb weight belt on you with a 5 lb backplate. I think I concluded that 16 pounds on your waist and 2 to 4 on your cambands would be optimal. 12 pounds will be too light.

BTW, the God's Pocket folks REALLY prefer LP tanks . . . they absolutely LOVED our LP72 doubles, because fill pressure was 2400 psi, which was easily within the reach of their setup.

Good to see you here, and I hope you do well with buddies! And we're still on for the 14th, right?

I've been diving with Fishy. He's a good buddy already, and is seriously trying to become a skilled diver. And he convinced me I had seen a tide pool sculpin, which was a new species for me!

I think the Fischnaller book is far more expansive, but it is not as clearly oriented to the absolute novice diver.

Krys, I think you may be beyond this one already.

It can be very frustrating, trying to localize dry suit leaks, because water runs around inside the suit and pools wherever the lowest point is. For example, a leaking neck seal can present as primarily a wet crotch, if you dive in horizontal trim, because the water runs down the front of the suit a...

Wow -- we have three of them, and none eats batteries, and all three flashes fire.

Funny, the only issue I have with the 130s is their weight on land. They dive just like my HP100s.

Now I know what those little tiny white starfish are! Thanks, Jan!

I spent 3 days there last October, and we had just mind-blowing diving. Water conditions were wonderful, visibility was amazing, and as always, the water was full of life -- although the kelp is gone, and there were no nudibranchs :(

Eric, that's beautiful!

OMG, Jan, how could we get tired of your posts? There is an absolutely invaluable wealth of knowledge about the animals we dive with . . . information we would have to work extremely hard to find, if we even knew where to look, or that the information was there to find in the first place. What is es...

Jan, of all the spectacular things you post, I think I like the over-and-under shots of the dive sites the most. Also, I should tell you, I took a new diver down at Cove 2 the other day, and we found a big mass of market squid eggs, and I immediately thought of your photographs and what I learned ab...

I'm really curious why so many people seem to be negative about the DSS stuff. I'll admit I'm a personal friend of Tobin's, but we have a bunch of his gear, and have encouraged students to buy it, and neither our stuff nor anything we know about our students' equipment has indicated to me that there...

Information I got elsewhere on last week's incident was that the diver got water in her throat during a mask skill and choked. She may have had some laryngospasm, but she was unable to breathe and passed out. She came out fine. In this one, a student appears to have gotten separated from his class, ...

I miss Scott Christopher . . . I'm with you. It's annoying as all get-out to be charged for two fills when it's one hookup of a fill whip and sometimes LESS gas than a full fill on a single tank. I also get irritated at bringing in a single tank that's less than 1/3 used and getting charged full fre...

Oh, and I misrepresented the student. He's been in Navy ROTC for 4 years, and is already a commissioned officer in the Marines. He just reports for flight training in a couple of months.

You can always get out south of the boat ramp, or north of Salty's -- that's just a walk up a sandy beach with some surf, and Californians do that all the time. It's just the stairs that are dicey, and if I'd had the sense God gave a goose, I would have told Kirk we were going to go to one side or t...