Arriving early, I scooted my gear down to the water's edge. There was a heavy fog, with the bridge just barely visible from the beach. Already the fishermen were shoulder to shoulder, casting dirty looks when they saw my scuba gear. With my buddies' arrival, plus a surprise appearance by Jan, we got underway.
Karl as my buddy, we reviewed the dive, then headed in. I had to put some real effort into swimming away from the beach, the water strongly pushing me back toward shore. Getting out and down a ways, we hung onto a boulder and paused for a moment. Turns out Karl was trying to say, hang out here for another ten minutes or so. What I read was, what are you waiting for? With a kick and a twist, we plunged into the current, quickly being swept eastward toward the bridge. The clarity of the water was really not too bad, which was good, cause we could see what was around us. Especially since it was coming very fast. We had made it down to about 65 feet and were cruising along looking at the pretty colors, when I realized that it was the bridge abutment I was seeing, all covered in piles of giant barnacles. With the current trying to pull me out into the strait, I kicked toward the bridge, to be within a hand grab, if needed. One more kick, and suddenly the toes of my fins began flipping up. And then my computer began beeping ascent. I was dumping every bit of air out of my suit and BC as fast as I could, breathing out every breath as far as possible, but found myself continuing to rise. I grabbed barnacles, trying to slow my ascent. They ripped off. I put my arms above me to grab another double handful of barnacles. I had to turn my face aside as my body was forced up into the barnacle field, then scraped up along the wall. The appearance of tubeworms provided temporary salvation, except that the roller coaster ride took a sudden jerk to the left and I let my handful of newly-liberated tubeworms go in order to snag a new grip. At this point, we were about 18 inches deep, so we just surfaced and had a little chat about what the hell to do now.I had a very bad moment when I couldn't find the camera, envisioning it having snapped off its tether somewhere in the current. Turned out it had made its way across my belly and was hanging up beyond my left arm. Whew!
At least there were few urchins along the barnacle walls, the area where I was pulling along hand to hand, but I was pleased to see the big red ones in calmer water.
