The first dive of the day was pretty great. Jessica and I went out with Jake’s little brother Jess. We headed out on a slightly different path than normal for the shores. We went south-southwest from the Lifeguard tower (30? not the main building) until we could nearly line up the tip of Scripps pier with the crane on the distant hill. We descended into about 25 ft. of water and followed Jessica for a while.
She led us to the canyon where we found a little bit of life. The first thing we saw on the way down was the corpse of some kind of ray. It looked like a guitarfish. There was a report on divebums of a sheepcrab running off with such a corpse, could it be the same one? Lots of little nudibranchs, all of the same kind. I couldn’t quite pick it out of the list. We found lots of new territory as we were out and for me that made up for the lack of life. Since there wasn’t so much to see we covered lots of ground as we followed the natural contours south.
As we came up out of the canyon we happened upon a vast bed of sand dollars! It seemed to go on forever, easily 100 ft in each direction. We followed the natural contours up into the shallows where viz got worse and worse. At one point Jess led us directly into two warring Sheepcrab! One was about twice as big as the other and clearly the dominant. Jess and I watched them for a while as they’d been the most entertaining critters on the dive so far. Apparently Jessica got bored and headed off North without us. We swam and looked around for a little while but when we couldn’t find her decided to ascend. She was a good 200 ft. north of us. Just bobbing on the surface waiting for us to show up.
Turns out all that Southward contour following led us damn near to the Marine Room! That gave us a nice long walk back to all our gear. We walked most of the way in chest-high water so we’d have some buoyancy to keep all the weight off our backs.
Our second dive was with Jess and a relatively new diver whose name I’ve forgotten. He was really excited to get a little deeper and see what’s at the Shores. Apparently he’d only ever been in the sand flats and had never made it to the Canyon. The four of us (Jessica, myself, Jess, newb) geared up and headed out. This time we took our normal course: straight out of Vallectios St. until the pier and crane line up. We dropped in to about 20 ft. of water and headed south west. We were a little further out than I’d expected but we ended up in a good spot as we dropped in to the canyon.
We poked around for a while and saw a small school of small fish. There were some Catalina Gobies in the rocks and a few other things to see. I found the tiniest Navanax in the world: about 0.5“ long! The ”kid“ ran out of air pretty quickly so he and Jess paired up for the ride back. Jessica and I decided to go with them. Just after our safety stop we came across a random boulder or two in the middle of the sand. This shelter was a magnet for life. There was a big rock fish, some nudibranchs, some snails, and apparently an octopus hiding under there. Jessica tried to show me the octopus but it didn’t quite work out. Jessica also figured out that swimming upside down is fun and how to relax. That made the rest of the swim in much more enjoyable.
We surfaced about where we wanted to be and headed back in for burgers and chatting. Two really great dives.
It’s been a while since we’ve been diving, but this was worth it! We got suited up right on Vallecitos St. next to the park — in the little alley. Cliff showed up to wish us well and stay dry, he didn’t seem too keen on diving today — hopefully we’ll get him next week.
We swam out for a little while and descended in to about 25 ft. of water. It was low tide so we probably would have been under 30 ft. normally. Immediately upon hitting the bottom we saw a Thornback Ray! Good omen! We swam out for a little while until we found the part of the wall we were looking for. I’m finally getting familiar with the area under water, and so is Jess.
We saw no fewer than 8 octopuses! Mostly in pairs, mostly trying to “get freaky” — I think. I got close to a lot of them and even (accidentally) had one squirt ink at me and jet away a little bit. Another one tried to kick a fish four times its size out of a hole to hide from me. The fish won. One even firmly attached itself to the wall by putting its tentacles in some holes. I guess it thought I was hungry. They were various sizes too: heads from 2 – 4“ long. I think they don’t like our bright lights: they were all spiky and bumpy when we were around. Maybe they’ll be more playful during the day.
Also had a second ray come swimming straight at us, then veer off to the side and into the dark. I was kinda worried that it couldn’t see me since it almost was close enough to touch. There were some giant Sheep Crabs out on the peninsula hanging out eating and looking for food. Once again I was nearly accosted by a small ugly red worm, about 3” long. Yuck.
To make up for my assault, we found some HUGE female Sheephead’s hiding in a crevice: 2 – 4 ft. long! Also lots of sole, rockfish, etc. With a dive this long the only thing I don’t remember seeing was Navanax. Saw some other misc. nudi’s though! For once Jess and I came out with a much smaller air disparity: 100 psi. I came up with about 500, she came up with about 400. I also got to use my new mask, which is AWESOME. The field of view on this thing is enormous. Jess gives me crap about there being a big black bar in the middle since it’s got two panes instead of one. Really, I don’t notice it much at all. The wider field of view makes me much more comfortable, I didn’t realize there was a problem!
Last night Jess and I decided to watch Appleseed, one of the anime that had shown up thanks to Netflix. This movie was beautiful, another example of what happens when you combine CGI and high talent animation. The story was, from my perspective, a rehash. There wasn’t too much new if you’ve seen any kind of robot anime in the past. It was definitely worth watching, and I do recommend it.
The basic story is that there are now two species on the planet: humans and bio-riods. Wow, bio-roids. Couldn’t just use “androids” like the rest of the planet, ‘eh? So the bio-roids and the humans had a big non-nuclear war for some reason that’s not terribly clear. During the first scene we meet the main character, some bad ass blonde SWAT type who knows how to blow up robots. There were a few bullet-time effects which were acceptable. At one point we see, in slow motion, her nearly being decapitated as she does a back flip over a robots arm trying to crush her skull. I was thinking to myself, “Are they trying to show us, through slow motion, that she has such expert control she can barely miss, or that she got lucky?” She gets rescued by another squad of robots (in white, so they’re good) and apparently recognizes one before getting hit by a tranquilizer dart.
The rest of the movie is your standard anime/robot fare. If you’ve seen one robot anime, you’ve seen them all. The robots don’t have emotions turned on, nor their reproductive capabilities. They have the potential for these, but they’re turned off. Good thing they turned off the emotions or they’d all kill themselves for lack of sex! Apparently, the humans also built in a fail-safe to the robots: they have to be refreshed every year or so, otherwise they die quickly. There’s also apparently a virus on top of one of the buildings that will kill all the robots too.
We get the usual whining from one of the robots about wanting to know what it’s like to be in love. Yawn. After that there’s some more action that doesn’t suck with your standard cyborg-ninja-hotties. Did I mention the exaggeration? The guys are huge, blocky creatures not to be messed with. The women are all well endowed and incredibly acrobatic. The rest of the story has to do with some humans wanting to destroy all the robots because they need a hug.
Long story and lots of politics later somebody blows up the robot regeneration plant. That means that all the robots will die since they can’t get refreshed. Good thing those emotions are in check or there’d be some serious havoc. Seven crazy old guys decide that it’d make a lot more sense to turn on the robo-nookie to keep them alive for ever. They send our chickie out to figure out where the plans are for this. Turns out our chickie has had the plans in a locket in her gun the whole time. OMG. Didn’t see that one coming. So she takes her pendant back to the seven crazy old guys and they turn on all the robo-nookie. They also turn on some giant robots that will go release the virus.
Apparently the virus will render all the humans infertile. Wow, the classic switch-a-roo. No humans will die unnaturally, they just won’t reproduce. After a couple decades it’ll just be the robots and the planet will be saved. Hooray. Too bad there’s a bunch of humans around that don’t like that plan. Our chickie manages to shut down the giant robots just before they release the virus and doom humanity. Of course.
Basically, if you’ve seen Ghost in the Shell, or Armitage, or any of the other android-anime’s out there, you’ve seen Appleseed. What you haven’t seen is the CGI meets anime combo. This style was attempted before in the big bomb Titan A.E. The animation in Titan wasn’t nearly as crisp, so it didn’t really blend as well. The production values for Appleseed must have been huge. The DVD had a few extras and looked excellent on our HDTV.
It only took us a few hours — 8 to 10 — to get the old tanks broken down and the new tank set up. Since we did so much prep everything went very smoothly. Charles helped quite a bit and so did Jess’ parents.
After Charles went home Saturday night Jess and I decided to play with the plumbing for the new tank. We quickly discovered that there were some things we’d have to do differently, and some extra pieces we’d need. This wouldn’t be so bad since we could pick them up Sunday morning.
Sunday morning we went to breakfast, then ran to Lowe’s to pick up some more plumbing, and run some other errands. By the time we got back home Charles was there with his monster (100g) water container. We loaded that in to Jess’ station wagon and I took off for Scripps. The SIO (Scripps Institute of Oceanography) has a free “clean” seawater spigot at the land-end of their pier. For free you can take water that’s been put through a few sand filters. For aquariums this works out pretty well, until there’s red tide. It took 20 – 30 minutes for 100g to come out of that little garden hose.
By the time I got back home Jess & Charles had already broken down the 55 and were about half way through the 120. Jess had gone to Home Depot to get another big trash can to hold rock and such so Charles and I just bagged up coral and tried to catch fish. By the time Jess got back home I’d got a hold of her parents and they were on their way over. We managed to have the 120 nearly done by the time they showed up and just had to move it out of the way. Now the fun could begin!
We moved the stand and sump in to place and used a level to get it as good as we could. We then put some 1“ styrofoam insulation on top to even out the surface for the tank to sit on. That way it could compress where it needed to even itself out. The next bit was some heavy lifting to get the tank in place. At that point we sent Kurt & Marla home and started putting the plumbing together. A quick change of plans required me to get some more plumbing parts and some more 2” PVC. By the time I got back Jess & Charles were putting the finishing touches on the sump: a little light to make working down there easier.
We loaded up our pitiful amount of sand, then water, then rocks. And more rocks. Then a few more rocks. Then some water out of the containers the rocks were in. Then some water out of the back of Jess’ car. Repeat. I ended up going back to SIO for another 80g of water to get us where we needed to be, and have some left over for water changes. I got back to see a big murky blue tank. I couldn’t tell, but there were fish in there too! We pumped some more water in and called it a day around 9:00 PM.
We finally got the new aquarium set up! Hooray! It took a lot of work on Saturday, then a lot more on Sunday to get everything pulled off. I know it’s horribly cliché, but I could really use another weekend. Jess, Charles and I didn’t get any rest over Labor Day weekend. We had to finish assembling the stand, get all the plumbing taken care of, put together the sump, water test it, tear down both old tanks, get about 170 gallons of water from Scripps, move the new tank in to place, put the new plumbing in, put all the rock and stuff back in, put the water back in, and pray it all worked. Luckily, it did.
We started out Saturday idyllic and ready to go… around 11:00 AM. I’ve learned over a few tank moves (Brahm, Charles, our own once or twice) that they always take longer than they should. You accidentally glue two things together, you don’t measure something out right, you have to stop and go get water, etc. I was determined for very little of this to happen with ours.
We went out to get all the rest of the supplies we’d need, primarily plumbing and such. After we’d obtained everything we came back home to put the sump together, around 3:00 PM. After it was together we put some padding in the corners to keep the pond liner from tearing when it was full. Once the pond liner was totally stapled together (excessive stapling) we put some water in it to test it. One thing we noticed was that the edges bowed out a bit. That’s to be expected, but it wasn’t very bad. That took about half an hour taking us to around 3:30 PM. To let it test for longer than 10 minutes we went out to get lunch. That was the first sign that we wouldn’t get everything done. You NEVER have time for food when actually moving a tank. I was starting to feel like it just wasn’t going to happen today.
We got back to see that the sump was still holding water! Hooray! We moved the four pieces of the stand over to the same vicinity and screwed it together. This was quite easy and so far everything had been going well. Around 5:45 PM we had the stand together and were jumping on it to see how sturdy it was. It held Jess, Charles, and my tubby self without any problems. Great. The total weight it will bear is in excess of one ton.
We picked up the finished stand and put it around the sump… almost. Though we couldn’t tell at the time we’d put it in the wrong way. Though it doesn’t look like it, the sump is actually a rectangle. We decided to drain the sump so we could move it around within the stand and figure something out. The sump is a lot lighter than that stand. Once we rotated it and saw how it would fit there was much joy in the air. We put the refugium in as well to get a good feeling for how it would all work out. We finished all that around 6:00 PM.
At this point it was very clear to Charles and myself that we could not finish today. We still had to glue all the plumbing together, baggie up the animals, take out all the rock and water, break down the tanks and get them out of the way, get Jess’ parents over to help us move the new tank in to position, and restock it. That would take at least another 6 hours, probably longer.
I have no idea what I’m so upset about with respect to gas prices. There are a lot of graphs that show gas is cheaper than it was 25 years ago! Boy, I feel a lot better now.
I mean, that makes the price of gas at the corner station jumping $0.04 in LESS THAN TWO HOURS seem just fine! This is filed under “Silly Freshman” because this place is at the corner of montezuma and college. Because of that they tend to have the highest prices in the area, to exploit the freshman. I expected a rise when school started up, but come on now!
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