ToasterWaffles

We met Jake at the Shores around 8:30pm with our shiny new dry suits in the car. After some fun with the gear we headed out into water. First impression: the squeeze feels “interesting”. Second impression: OMG the water is warm! No hoods & no gloves!

We swam out in to a whopping 8 feet of water to get our weighting adjusted. Since Jess’ fleece fit pretty well she got to drop 2 pounds. Since mine are a size too large (on purpose, but apparently not required) I got to add 3 (I’ll round up to 4). We played around for a while with empty BC’s and got used to the dry suits, a bit. I over-inflated my suit on purpose and then pointed head down forcing all the air into my feet — my fins almost popped off! Jess found some pipe fish and was suitably impressed. I found a rather large somekinda fish.

After ten minutes of playing around we headed out for the canyon for a “real dive”. The water was still calm and quite warm on the surface. On the way down we could see a thermocline coming as the water dropped about 10 degrees. 60° F is still at least 10° F warmer than we’re used to at these depths. Heck, Jake was wearing a 5mm!

Just under the thermocline was a large school of juvenile somekind of rockfish. The usual critters were out including two octopus and one really big bat ray. Naturally that’s when the vis shot down to 0 ft. — it was worth it.

With all the new stuff that was going on with our dry suits Jess and I both got very narced/disoriented. It wasn’t entirely pleasant, but nobody drowned. These suits are going to force us to learn to dive all over again — a worthy endeavor. I had some buoyancy problems and so did Jess. This is stuff that’ll get sorted out pretty shortly.

The best part, of course, was taking off the suit and being dry and in pajamas. omgponies it was AWESOME. I was a bit more impressed than Jess. She managed to do something to one of her wrist seals that made a whole hand go numb. Yikes. Maybe she’ll figure out how to do that with her neck seal next time