I'm baaaaaaaaaaack!
Posted: Sat Aug 28, 2010 6:03 pm
Well. It's been a long, dry summer for me. Life has been conspiring to keep me out of the water. I had some serious equipment problems that compelled me to pretty much rebuild and rewire the head of my rebreather, which was no small thing. And my mother passed away in July, which took me back to New Mexico for several weeks.
Somehow, these things combined into a sort of "perfect storm" of not diving for me, and pretty well kept me from doing any dives for 3 months, except for a couple that I scrubbed after a couple minutes because of equipment failures. I would guess that I had a combined total of 15 minutes of dive time since May, and it's almost September.
But today, I got a dive in. I had a chance to go do a technical dive, with scooters.....but I wasn't feeling that one, after my Summer of shame and humiliation. The last thing I needed was to blast down to 200', testing new gear, only to find out it wasn't working. This kid was feeling a little gun shy.
Fortunately, my buddy Spatman told me he was planning to dive Redondo today. Turns out that some of the NWDC girls had a dive planned, but some of them were bringing along their menfolk, and Matt was going to be diving with them!
So, I headed South after doing an extra-thorough check to make sure I hadn't forgotten anything, like my fins, weightbelt, drysuit, or rebreather!
Down at the 'Dond, Matt was already doing Dive 1 and a group of divers was already in the water, but I met up with Liz and Derek, who were not diving today, but had come down for the camaraderie.
After a while, Matt, Jim, Penelope, Kelley, Shel, and Blaiz came out of the water. I got to meet several people today that I had only known from the site- Shel, Jim, Blaiz and Berrit....apologies if I forgot anyone!
After a short SI, Matt told me he'd be ready to get back in as soon as I was, so I geared up and met him down in the water. The tide was waaaaaay out. We were near the end of the pier in waist deep water. At this point, I was actually kind of nervous, checking my displays over and over again, but all seemed well, and we swam out a short distance and dropped into about 25' of.....snot. Vis was pretty bad, maybe 5',with a lot of algea blooms in the water. Another check of my HUD and computer confirmed that everything was working right on my rig, so we set off through the green goop down to the bottle field. We didn't see much, except for one nice red octo that we stopped to say hello to. It was one of those slow "kick, glide,look, look, kick, glide...."dives. Which was exactly what I wanted. After raising and dropping my P02 several times just to see if my displays were tracking, I realized that we'd been down to ~100 fsw, and we were 25 minutes into the dive, and everything was working perfectly. I actually felt my whole body relax inside my drysuit. I gave Matt a big OK sign, and did a fist bump with him. For the rest of the dive, I was in my "happy place," breathing underwater, floating around and just enjoying myself.
Thanks, Matt. That was one of the best dives I've ever done. I really, really needed it.
After getting out, we hung around and ate some tasty snacks- Bob showed up with a new student, whose name I forgot- and we talked about diving as the sun came out. It was a really nice way to spend the afternoon. And I'm SO happy to be diving again! Thank you to everyone!
Somehow, these things combined into a sort of "perfect storm" of not diving for me, and pretty well kept me from doing any dives for 3 months, except for a couple that I scrubbed after a couple minutes because of equipment failures. I would guess that I had a combined total of 15 minutes of dive time since May, and it's almost September.
But today, I got a dive in. I had a chance to go do a technical dive, with scooters.....but I wasn't feeling that one, after my Summer of shame and humiliation. The last thing I needed was to blast down to 200', testing new gear, only to find out it wasn't working. This kid was feeling a little gun shy.
Fortunately, my buddy Spatman told me he was planning to dive Redondo today. Turns out that some of the NWDC girls had a dive planned, but some of them were bringing along their menfolk, and Matt was going to be diving with them!
So, I headed South after doing an extra-thorough check to make sure I hadn't forgotten anything, like my fins, weightbelt, drysuit, or rebreather!
Down at the 'Dond, Matt was already doing Dive 1 and a group of divers was already in the water, but I met up with Liz and Derek, who were not diving today, but had come down for the camaraderie.
After a while, Matt, Jim, Penelope, Kelley, Shel, and Blaiz came out of the water. I got to meet several people today that I had only known from the site- Shel, Jim, Blaiz and Berrit....apologies if I forgot anyone!
After a short SI, Matt told me he'd be ready to get back in as soon as I was, so I geared up and met him down in the water. The tide was waaaaaay out. We were near the end of the pier in waist deep water. At this point, I was actually kind of nervous, checking my displays over and over again, but all seemed well, and we swam out a short distance and dropped into about 25' of.....snot. Vis was pretty bad, maybe 5',with a lot of algea blooms in the water. Another check of my HUD and computer confirmed that everything was working right on my rig, so we set off through the green goop down to the bottle field. We didn't see much, except for one nice red octo that we stopped to say hello to. It was one of those slow "kick, glide,look, look, kick, glide...."dives. Which was exactly what I wanted. After raising and dropping my P02 several times just to see if my displays were tracking, I realized that we'd been down to ~100 fsw, and we were 25 minutes into the dive, and everything was working perfectly. I actually felt my whole body relax inside my drysuit. I gave Matt a big OK sign, and did a fist bump with him. For the rest of the dive, I was in my "happy place," breathing underwater, floating around and just enjoying myself.
Thanks, Matt. That was one of the best dives I've ever done. I really, really needed it.
After getting out, we hung around and ate some tasty snacks- Bob showed up with a new student, whose name I forgot- and we talked about diving as the sun came out. It was a really nice way to spend the afternoon. And I'm SO happy to be diving again! Thank you to everyone!
