ToasterWaffles

Our first Nitrox dive didn’t go as well as it could have This was definitely a learning dive.

First, SDUA gave us aluminum 80 tanks. I hate AL 80’s, they end up floaty instead of sinky at the end of the dive. That’s why we have high pressure steel 80’s. They start off sinky and end up less sinky.

But we (Jess and I) did get to analyze them at the shop using an Oxycheq analyzer. Good experience. One of the tanks didn’t have as much O₂ in it as we wanted so we got it topped off before we left. Awesomeness #1.

Once we got to The Shores we unloaded all the gear and I spent the next 30 minutes trying to find a parking spot. Not so much fun, but it worked out. We re-tested the tanks before we finished gearing up and saw that there was as much as 0.5 percentage points of difference between Steve’s brand new analyzer and the Oxycheq at SDUA. Interesting, but not significant since we always round up (32.1% → 33%) for safety.

We then neglected to put enough extra weight in our pouches to deal with the aluminum tanks being lighter. Mistake #1.

The swim out was fine, there were 3 - 5 ft. waves that we got lucky timing. Getting our fins on and swimming out was just peachy. Once we were out I had a little trouble sinking, getting all the air out of my dry suit resolved it. Jess had quite a bit of trouble getting the air out of her dry suit and couldn’t sink well at all either. When diving aluminum tanks you should sink like a rock at the begging of a dive. Mistake #2.

Jess had to go back up and I went up with her, being a good buddy. Steve popped up and suggested that we just swim down a bit to get under and we’d be fine. We listened to him. Mistake #3.

Once we were down and swimming with the group we got separated as I was checking out a giant flounder. Mistake #4.

Jess was having a really hard time staying down and I didn’t fully realize when she was trying to show me that she was getting low on air. It wasn’t until we were at 40 ft, going back in that I saw she was down to 650 psi. Mistake #5.

At that point we started going up as slowly as we could, but without enough lead it didn’t really work out and we ended up making that rapid ascent you see at the end of the graph. Nothing we could have done about it #1.

Luckily, because of the extra oxygen in the tank our ascent was from the equivalent of around 30 ft on a 60 ft dive. We didn’t have much nitrogen in us at all.

We made it back all right, we weren’t bent and don’t expect to be. We got really lucky and this was quite the wake up call for us. I think we’ll both be better divers from here on out because of this experience.

Depth Profile:

After the adventure of 3 fingers reef we decided to go with a shallower and more relaxed spot: NOSC Tower. My highlight of this dive was controlling my buoyancy entirely with breath control. It worked out really well. I also kept my arms around myself the whole time and only controlled myself with my fins. I also swam through some of the wreckage, instead of the normal go-slow-and-turn-left around it.

All of that and I didn’t run in to the thing once!
Depth Profile:

We borrowed some tanks that we thought were steel 100’s from the dive shop. Turns out that they weren’t, or something. Either way their buoyancy wasn’t what we were expecting and we both ended up being light on the ascent.

We had to hang on to kelp to keep from an uncontrolled ascent!

We’ll be more careful with tanks next time
Depth Profile:

Today we got to visit a kelp forest for the first time. Unfortunately we didn’t bring the camera (drained batteries) and don’t have evidence of the AWESOME dive!

On the way out of the jetty there were ~ 6“ swells, basically nothing. On the way out there was basically no swell. We even saw a dolphin hunting near the jetty mouth. Once we got out to the kelp Jess spotted a bat ray swimming near the surface. It was nice and clear all around and you could see down a good twenty feet!

After gearing up and dropping down we immediately came across some hermissendas, the only nudis on the dive. We puttered around the kelp forrest floor for quite a while and saw a ton of life!

There were at least: two (!!) giant white sea bass, one giant black sea bass, TONS of calico bass, sheephead (including some monstrous males), a few odd garibaldi, one or two california spiny lobsters, a few blacksmith, a school (or two!) of sargo, a few señoritas in the shallows, some blue urchins, a ton of california and warty sea cucumbers, quite a few giant spined star, loads of keyhole limpets and a miscellaneous rockfish of some sort laying on the bottom.

Yeah, it was a good dive
So good that I’ve convinced Jess of two things:

1. We need to buy some high pressure 100 ft³ tanks.
2. We need to take a Nitrox class

I’m quite pleased to say that the first one has been taken care of! We’ll take a Nitrox class with Steve (our open water instructor) some time near the end of June! w00t!

I can’t wait to see what tomorrows two-tank dive has in store for us
Depth Profile:

For the first time in over a month Jess and I headed out to La Jolla shores to see what we could see. After our last dive at the Yukon (and the malfunctioning pressure transmitter) I had to check out my gear. I’d replaced the battery in the transmitter and wanted to see if it would play nice.

It did! We took it all the way down to 98 ft, to be safe
We saw many, many sea hares on this dive. There were a ton of little blackeye gobies, some bay gobies and a few catalina gobies. We also found a spanish shawl, some sheephead, and Jess found a HUGE hermit crab with nice blue claws.

Since this was a “check out” dive I didn’t bring the camera along. The extra task loading didn’t sound like a good idea.

On the way back in, around 15 ft of water, I saw a blue Body Glove snorkel laying in the sand. Watching me make a move for it, Jess dove for it and we both got a hand on it. Being sneakier I pulled her regulator out of her mouth and in the distraction she let go. Yes, I fight dirty now.

Depth Profile:

Went out with Jake to the Yukon this afternoon. This was supposed to be a morning dive but had to get pushed back to 1pm. Honestly, I’m glad it was since we had some time to get Jess’ camera retro-fitted to do InfraRed. It’s very cool and I’m sure she’ll post some pictures at some point
The descent was easy until about 35 ft when my computer decided it didn’t know how much air I had. When we got to the bottom of the mooring we had a brief “discussion” about what to do. Basically, we decided to cruise around a bit and see what we could see, not staying too long. Since on the last dive Jess and I breathed at about the same rate we figured we could guesstimate and come back up early.

While we were down there we saw hundreds of blacksmiths all hanging out on the westward side. The water wasn’t too clear, but there was lots of fish food out for them to eat, so they were happy. I also saw a señorita or two, and one giant male sheephead. Around the time that Jess’ computer read half-way we decided to turn around and get back up the ascent line. I was a little nervous since I didn’t have any way of knowing how much air I had. Really there’s no way it couldn’t have gone well, I always breath slightly slower than Jess so there wasn’t much of a real risk.

On the way back up the mooring we saw nothing but pea soup. At around 15 ft my computer decided it did know how much air I had left — about a third of a tank, I was still doing better than Jess
Since I’ve got my MacBook Pro running Parallels, I can finally download the dive data from my computer. Below is a graph of our depth throughout the dive. Since we didn’t take the camera this is the only pic you’re going to get!

Depth Profile:

Technorati Tags: ocean, SCUBA, scuba diving

Jess and I headed out for a dive after far-too-long without one. It was overcast and drizzly; perfect diving weather. If it had been a nice sunny Easter day the beach would have been crowded. Today, though, we got to park right next to Vallecitos St. Awesome!

We geared up and swam out. On the way out to our drop point it started drizzling again. Believe it or not, this was our first dive in the rain. We swam out for a while and came across some swimmers before we dropped down. We managed to explore a couple bits of the canyon and really didn’t see much life out. Jess thinks it’s just a lifeless barren, I think it was just because of the storm.

I did see a lot of catalina gobies, a couple sheephead, some blackeye gobies, a bay goby or two, and a large halibut at the end. We also came across some squid egg sacs but they looked empty and floppy. I didn’t see any nudibranchs, which was disappointing.

Overall it was good to be out and be relaxed. On the way back to the car we noticed that it had rained pretty decently while we were diving. The swell had picked up too and the waves had gotten bigger. I think we got the last decent dive of the day. w00t!

Once we got home we got to use our new rack to hang up all our gear. We wheeled it over to the car, moved gear from the car directly on to the rack, then wheeled the rack on to the lawn to hose it down. This is a lot easier than dunking it in a rinse tank one item at a time. Hooray being lazy!

John from The Diving Locker called us earlier this week because he was chartering a boat to go out to Pt. Loma. Since we’d never been there before it sounded like a blast.

We showed up (without the camera) to a cloudy, drizzly sky with relatively calm water. Six divers, one captain, and one non-diver boarded the boat and we headed out. The trip out was fine until we hit the channel. There was some pretty monstrous swells and the channel really amplified them. After that it was pretty smooth sailing out to the spot. We puttered around for a little while and eventually dropped anchor.

I was excited because I had two new pieces of gear to try. The first were some thermal undies we got for an upcoming ski trip. But, thermals are thermals and you can never be too warm while you’re diving. The second item was an Apollo BioSeal. This little wonder feels like the stuff those hands you buy in gum ball machines are made of. It’s a collar you put around your neck that makes your neck thicker, and makes a better seal with the neck seal. Between these two features I expected to stay dry.

We were the middle group out and descended through 20 ft of beautiful water into about 70 ft of muck. After checking everything we wandered around trying to find something to look out. We came across some giant purple sea urchins and some really large bat stars.

The real action was in the nudibranchs! We found three Acanthodoris hudsoni (Hudson’s Dorid) within a few feet of each other. The really amazing part of these critters is the bright yellow racing stripe going around the edge! Here’s a pic of the same kind of critter taken by Garry McCarthy:

We also came across one little Acanthodoris lutea (Yello Dorid) on a rock. Here’s a photo of a similar critter taken by Paul Foretic:

On the swim back to what we hoped was the anchor line we came across a snail (four odd inches across) acting kind of funny. Turns out there was really an octopus eating it! Craziness. We ascended next to a very large stalk of kelp and got back on the boat uneventfully. Since the weather was heading south we decided to sit out the second dive and stay warm; I think that was a good call.

Now that the Diving Locker is doing fun dives on Saturdays again Jess and I should be going out much more frequently. We met up with everybody, said hello, and geared up.

Having learned our lesson from last weekend at the Cove we decided that I’d go down with the camera and Jess would go down with both lights. That way she could do the off-camera lighting for me (since we don’t have strobes and robo-arms).

We swam out a ways and could see the bottom all the way until we stopped. That’s quite a feat for any San Diego diving! We stopped at what should have been the edge of the canyon and dropped down. On the way down I couldn’t see the bottom any more (odd) but I did see a giant school of sardines swimming around me! I fumbled with the camera and tried getting a picture. All that came out was cyan with a few little shadows
As it turns out we’d picked a newly formed peninsula to drop into! At 45 feet even! We didn’t have to go swimming over the sand flats at all! So we cruised around looking for stuff to take pictures of for a while. We headed south until we ran into some divers having a hard time and kicking up a lot of silt. The vis was pretty good (closer to the 30 ft I marked above) when we were away from where people had been recently. One of the problems with the shore is that once you kick up some silt it stays in the water for a long time taking the vis back down to 5 ft or so.

We swapped camera/light duty midway so Jess could take some pictures. Since we were underwater I didn’t have a good chance to tell her how all the controls worked. Her pictures came out very well, but not zoomed in enough to make out any kind of detail on the critters. Anyway, she’s now addicted to the camera.

Below are the four pics that came out the best. Tell me what you think of them by leaving a comment!

Having read on the DiveBums email list that conditions were fantastic at The Shores we decided to take a peek at The Cove and see if things would be OK there. The Shores are great, but right now they’re especially barren after all the under water land slides and such. The Cove on the other hand is always full of live, even it’s a little more challenging.

Since we’re not very bright, we didn’t look at a tide chart before we headed out. If we had, we’d have noticed that between 9:20 AM and 4:19 PM the tide was going to go from about +6.3 ft to -1.4 ft or about 7.7 ft of total movement. To put that in perspective, flipping through the calendar it’s one of the largest tide changes this month, in a month of large tide changes.

To understand why this is such a big deal you have to understand the effects a big tidal change can have. When we entered there were little ankle slapper waves that were petting you as you walked into the water. On the way out there were 3 - 4 ft waves which, given the shape and nature of the Cove, pounded you pretty well. All of that in less than half an hour.

In other words, had we looked at the charts and known what to look for, we’d have gone either earlier or to The Shores.

But, I had a camera that I was ready to try out and what better place than The Cove, literally crawling with life. We got in, headed out and descended pretty quickly. I turned on the camera and tried getting some shots in. Below are the results of my efforts:

And finally, a very short video of Jess flying through the water: