First dive after two months of forced abstinence in AK

[Tubesnout23]

Last Thursday I 'tested' the water with my right hand at La Conner marina to convince myself that I was not in the Arctic anymore. Whuauh! Here in WA the water is actually 'soft'! On Sunday I felt ready to go back diving again. I thought about doing my first dive after two months of being dry at Langley because it is a good place to dive if you are a bit 'rusty and you don’t want to deal with currents', but my buddy wanted to go to Keystone. If the current would be a problem we would do a drift dive.

Once again we missed slack and the current was flowing nicely westward. I don't know how we managed not to forget pieces of gear because my buddy also hadn't been diving in two months as well! But we didn’t. Dressing up with all that scuba stuff reminded me of my daily dressing routine in the Arctic where I usually wore about three layers of clothing (more when riding on a snow machine).

So we decided to walk and wade to the pilings and drift from there to the jetty. We have done this several times now so it seemed a ‘piece of cake’ to us. Unfortunately we did not anticipate what would come next… When it was time to drop as fast as we could next to the pilings my ears would not clear and I had to swim back up while my buddy kept going down disappearing from view. I embraced one piling so the current would not take me downstream and waited for my buddy’s head to pop out from the restless water.

I kept telling myself that he was experienced enough to handle the situation without problems. However I could not see what went on underwater (he probably could not see me either! We were not in the tropics after all and the visibility was not that great! I guess the depth must have been about 20 ft). I knew that if I had let myself stress out it would have been more likely that I would have released my grip on that mussel encrusted piling and in no time I could have turned into an hopeless piece of drift wood at the will of the current …

So I kept my cool... However after a short while a slight sense of anxiety began to linger in the back of my mind… While I was waiting with my arms wrapped around that prickly upright piece of timber smeared with creosote I tried to figure out what to do in the remote possibility that my buddy would not surface …Eventually the plan to swam back to shore and call for help ended up not being necessary because after some ‘eternal’ few minutes I finally saw my buddy’s bubbles reaching the surface. What a relief!

Fighting the current, he began to grab one piling at a time like a rock climber surprised by a storm to get closer to me. Then we decided to let ourselves go to the current away from the pilings and try to submerge again. My left ear was pretty stubborn and it took me at least three tries to be able to clear it! We were moving up and down and forward like a couple of roller coaster carts! When my left ear finally popped we slowly reached a depth of 40 ft and drift to the jetty without any further problems.

At last we were able to relax and enjoy the view of the bed and bull kelp waving like blades of tall grass in the wind. We missed the wolf eel and the octopus at the pilings…I didn’t care! We had had enough thrills there already! Drifting between two big Lewis’s moon snails, a bunch of bright yellow-orange female kelp greenlings and in the middle of a parade of ling cods was our reward!

[Scuba Scott]

Nice report and great picture. Glad you dive ended well.

[Tubesnout23]

Glad you dive ended well.

Me too...

Thanks

[smike]

Nice to have you back. Would love to hear about AK! Tell Sam Hi for me.

S'Mike

[Tubesnout23]

Nice to have you back. Would love to hear about AK! Tell Sam Hi for me.

S'Mike

Hi Mike! Sam is working like a dog lately, at least 12 hours every day and on Saturdays half day. I hope to fix the leak in my suit before the weekend.

Catch you later!