Startin' with Scuba

December 11, 2011

Battery frustrations

Time to vent. Batteries are a major source of frustration.

On a recent dive trip we had with us eight cameras and six flash or light systems. All had their own individual batteries, sometimes up to eight of them. Each has its special way of charging. Some need to be plugged in via a USB cable, which means that you cannot use the camera while a battery is charging, even if you have multiple batteries. Others have separate chargers that are never labelled so keeping them apart can be a challenge. I am not sure why even major camera companies do not always clearly mark their own chargers. As is, I usually create a label for each as soon as I get them.

Having all the proper batteries and chargers, however, is just the beginning. If you have video lights that use eight AA rechargeables each, that's already 16 batteries, and it's almost certain that one or the other will be bad. Nothing more fun than figuring out which of 16 batteries is bad. Normally, I also like to carry a spare set with me so that I can simply exchange a spent set with a freshly recharged one. So that'd be 32 batteries for one camera's video lights alone. No can do.

Other batteries are just no good. They either don't charge properly, are they are simply crap. Most cameras, even expensive ones, come with only one battery when any serious user needs at least two. Well, the branded ones are often unreasonably expensive and users are driven to seeking cheaper replacements, of which there are many on eBay. Sometimes what you find on eBay is just as good or better than the branded products (like replacement batteries I bought for my Canon G10). Other times they are useless and crap out at the most inopportune time (like five minutes into a dive).

Some cameras have properly sized batteries, others do not. Older photographers still remember the days when a SLR battery ran the camera for years. Younger ones may still remember the early days of digital cameras where batteries often lasted just a few dozen pictures. Today, a properly sized battery should be good for hundreds if pictures, or hours of video since most cameras now include video. No modern camera, and certainly not those used for diving, should have undersized batteries. And yet, I've had dedicated underwater cameras whose batteries did not even last through two dives.

Then there's the debate over standard batteries, like AAs or AAAs, versus specially designed batteries. The argument for standard ones is that you can get them anywhere. But they are also usually larger and heavier. The argument for dedicated ones is that they are designed for a device, saving space. But they usually are overpriced and hard to find.

As is, despite dealing with batteries every day in my work, on this dive trip I had at least half a dozen incidences where I could either not use a camera for a dive because one of its batteries failed, or a battery expired while still on the dive.

I realize that providing power to the flood of portable electronics we carry and use is not easy. Most manufacturers probably think long and hard about what type and kind of batteries to use. But some simply need to think a bit longer and harder. It's not impossible to minimize the battery hassle by thinking things through and then coming up with a solution that is reasonable. 16 batteries for a set of video lights is not reasonable. Not labeling chargers is not reasonable. And using batteries that barely last through a single dive is not reasonable.

Posted by conradb212 at 07:38 PM | Comments (0)

September 05, 2011

Whale sharks in the wild

Whale sharks are filter feeders and the largest living fish in the ocean. They can be over 40 feet in length, weigh almost 40 tons, and go back some 60 million years. They pose no danger to divers, and they can be observed as they are slow swimmers. And I wanted to see them.

After a good deal of cursing the airlines for their ever more infuriating pricing and scheduling practices we did come across a reasonable deal: eight days at the Riu Palace Las Americas hotel and resort in Cancun. Now Cancun is not exactly known for diving, but it is close to Isla Mujeres, which is where the whale sharks are, at least through about mid-September. Perusing the ScubaBoard.com discussion website yielded a gamut of opinions, but it did seem that Cancun dive sites had lots of fish, and there are plenty of outfits that take you diving and on whale shark tours.

The name Scorpio Divers popped up often, but after reading hundreds of posts we were still not clear how hotel pick-up and drop-off worked in Cancun scuba diving, what with all the gear, being wet, etc. In addition, I do like to have a home base on the premises where we can leave our gear. So after I found that the Riu had a PADI 5-Star shop on location and you could book dives in advance for a discount, that seemed the reasonable approach.

That left the whale shark tour, and after all the praise they had gotten, I did send the Scorpio Diver guys an email and inquired about their tours. Much to their credit, Jorge, one of Scorpio's principals, responded virtually right away, answered all my questions, and the price seemed right. And they would pick us up at the hotel and drop us off there. So we struck a deal for a door-to-door whale shark tour for the third day of our trip.

We agonized over what to bring along, then made sure we were at the front of the hotel five minutes before the pickup window. A van picked us up and brought us to a terminal at Puerto Juarez a bit north of Cancun on the mainland where a good number of people either had prepaid or had one sort of voucher or confirmation or other. There was a briefing where we learned that Cancun was one of only two places in the world where whale sharks come to the surface. And that boats cannot be longer than 33 feet, and that there are only so and so many licenses. Martha of Caribbean Connection, the outfit that actually seemed to own or at least control the boats, cautioned that the plankton the whale sharks eat moves with weather and storms. There is a vast area on the open ocean where the whale sharks could be, so it might take a while to find them.

Eventually we were assigned to one of the boats that held 10 people, had a sun cover, and two big Mercury outboard engines. The water was calm and only got a bit rougher after we passed Isla Mujeres. The ride was perhaps an hour until in the distance we spied a number of similar boats, all assembled in a fairly small area. When we got there it was obvious that we had hit the whale shark jackpot. There were several dozens and perhaps over a hundred, and snorkelers from perhaps 40 boats. The way it worked was that two snorkelers per boat were supposed to be in the water at the same time along with a guide.

It was all quite overwhelming. The whale sharks surfaced to scoop up food, then swam just under the surface. Carol and I got in in our wetsuits, and so were not required to wear a life jacket. We were the only ones on the boat who had brought our own equipment. Just as we were ready to go in Carol's snorkel broke and she had to use one from the boat.

In the water, watching the whale sharks was a bit like a manatee encounter in Crystal River, only the whale sharks move faster, they are much bigger, and this was in the open ocean. Whale sharks do not shy away from people, but also do not seem to have the curiosity in people that mantas have. It was stunning and amazing to be right on top or alongside one of those huge creatures.

The two snorkelers at a time rule first seemed a nuisance, but it worked out fine as some got in less than others. The seas were a little choppy and four of the ten people on our boat got seasick. I had taken a precautionary Bonine before the trip and was fine. I felt bad for those affected, but it also meant that Carol and I had more snorkel time.

We were the last boat leaving for the ride back. Interestingly, we saw numerous yellow butterflies on the water, many miles from shore. Where were they going?

We stopped by the northern tip of Isla Mujeres for some relaxing snorkeling in a shallow reef, then stopped for half an hour on a beach nearby with perhaps the whitest sand and bluest water I have ever seen. In fact, much of the water between Mujeres and the mainland seems that way, just all bright blue-green due to the white sand at the bottom and nothing else.

At the pier, our return transportation was fairly well arranged, and we were back at the Riu around 3:30. Later in the day I received an email from Jorge at Scorpio, asking how it'd gone, and said he'd seen me boarding with my diver crocs. I did wear diver crocs. Amazing. The experience had been such that Carol and I both wanted to go back. Jorge was glad to comply, with an extra discount for repeat customers.

So on the last day of the trip we went back to the whale sharks. This time we knew the drill, which always makes things easier. There were fewer people and the staff actually recognized us and was absolutely thrilled to have us back, going as far as announcing it to the assembly of waiting customers.

Fewer people meant less confusion over who went where, and so we found ourselves on the boat much quicker. On the way we posed for a group picture with a local dressed up in what seemed Mayan warrior gear, then boarded the vessel, which was of a different design and newer than the one we had been on prior. This one even had a toilet on board, and that always comes in handy.

The weather was perfect, the water all flat, even past Isla Mujeres, and so the roughly one hour ride was pleasant for all onboard. No sea sickness this time. When the whale shark boats appeared on the horizon, it was quickly apparent that they were much more spread out and there were fewer, perhaps 25 versus 40+ on Monday. This first concerned me, but it turned out to be a good thing.

This time we did not to bring our own gear except our masks and snorkels. This meant a much smaller gear bag with just the essentials: cameras, wetsuit pants and tops, bio-degradable sunscreen, towels, whatever money we needed, and that was that. The boat had fins that fit quite well, and they actually worked well enough that I am considering adding a pair of full-foot fins to my gear.

Not having to wear a life vest is a big advantage as the bulk of the vest slows you down when swimming and also makes it difficult to put your head underwater. You're much better off with a wetsuit. Even though I had just thin wetsuit pants and a black long-sleeved Liquid Image shirt, that provided still enough buoyancy in the salty water to keep me afloat and comfortable.

Though there were fewer whale sharks and we sometimes had to look and wait for one or two, this meant fewer snorkelers swimming with the animals. At times we had a whale shark all to ourselves, making for an entirely different experience than being in the midst of a thrashing group of snorkelers with fins swirling up the water and making it hard to see anything.

The water was so flat and clear and the sun so bright that we truly could not have wished for better conditions. The whale sharks appeared mostly solo but sometimes in pairs. We also saw a baby calmly scooping up food and apparently unperturbed that a parent was not close-by. Baby is relative here as it was still a good 12 feet long.

Whale sharks are calm and placid creatures. They move at a slow and fairly predictable pace and are not given to sudden changes or erratic movement. For the most part they idle along at a pace that made it possible for snorkelers to keep up with them for a while. If you finned hard you could actually catch up or pass one, seeing its head and mouth. The sharks stayed fairly shallow the entire time, maybe five or six feet at the most. For feeding they slightly angled their body so that their mouth was higher and often at the surface.

Whale sharks move by winding themselves through the water, powered by slow sideways movement of their large tail fin. They have massive gills and all have what at first sight looks like the same appearance: gray with lighter color dots. Their eyes are very small for creatures this size, and they sit just ahead of what appears to be ears, which you first mistake for eyes. Unlike sharks that almost always bear marks and scars, most of the whale sharks we saw were in pristine condition without any scars or blemishes.

Whale sharks don't seem to be either drawn to nor afraid of humans. They don't shy away, but also don't barrel into a snorkeler in their path. They seem able to control their path and bodies so that even when they are close, there is never any contact. In that way they are very much like fish that are almost impossible to touch.

With wetsuits on and as videotaping divers, the captain gave us permission to be in the water whenever and for as long as we wanted when he easily could have insisted on the strict two snorkelers rule. This gave Carol the opportunity to stay in the water the entire two hours we were there, and me the freedom to jump in and get back on the boat however I wanted.

We had an interesting combination of people on the boat. There were four young German women, a Dutch couple, a Hispanic couple, a lady from Oklahoma, and us. The Dutch woman said she was only afraid of three things in life: spiders, fish larger than herself, and being in a deep ocean. Despite that, she managed to go in and be thrilled, as did the woman from Oklahoma who was new to snorkeling and the ocean. The German girls were absolutely beside themselves over the experience, and Carol and I were blown away all over again as well.

This time we, having learned from our mistakes the first time, only took one camera at a time. We had also adjusted our camera settings and the result was much better pictures and video. It is still not easy as the whale sharks do not pose, but we got some great footage.

All too soon we went back, stopped at the reef at the north side of Isla Mujeres, but not the white sand beach, and then back to port. We then got to talk to Martha who gave us some background info. We learned that they are in contact with the Georgia Aquarium and actually will visit there. It's a small community of people in love with whale sharks, and they all seem to know each other.

Posted by conradb212 at 02:23 AM | Comments (0)

June 25, 2011

Diving the Revillagigedos (Socorro): Mantas!

Difficult to pronounce for Anglosaxon tongues, the Revillagigedos are a remote group of islands about 250 miles west of the Pacific coast of Mexico. Exclusively reached via liveaboard vessel from the port of Cabo San Lucas at the southern tip of Baja California, Mexico, the islands are not a group as much as four random peaks of rock poking through the surface of nowhere more or less in the same general vicinity.

After a 24 hour passage at sea (that can be rough), San Benedicto comes into view, a 4-square mile island that is about as volcanic as it gets, with the last massive eruption just over 50 years ago. From there it’s either a 35 mile run to Socorro—with a land area of about 50 square miles the largest island of the group and the one that gives the Revillagigedos its more popular name, Socorro Islands—or an 85 mile ride to Roca Partida, which is not really an island at all, but just a small rock. The distance between Socorro and Roca Partida is about 70 miles, concluding the triangle. There is a fourth island, Clarion, another hundred miles beyond, and not usually on the itinerary of anyone. With the exception of the Mexican Navy that keeps a small garrison on Socorro and an even smaller outpost on Clarion, the islands are uninhabited.

Among divers, Socorro is famous as a remote destination where one can see sharks and, more importantly, giant manta rays. These islands are not for those who seek lush shallow reefs teeming with colorful tropical fish (though color certainly isn’t absent). The volcanic underwater scenery around the Socorro islands is starker and darker, the water is colder, the currents stronger, just what the big fish like. This is what we signed up for when we booked our trip on the Solmar V, a 112-foot live-aboard vessel based in Cabo San Lucas.

I still didn’t know what to expect. From what I had heard, read and Googled, everyone agrees on the sharks and manta rays and the great food on the Solmar V. Everyone agrees that it is a great experience, but other than that, opinions range from wonderful and pleasant to intimidating and only for the advanced.

The green and white Solmar V made a grand first impression, as did the captain who greeted us in a white uniform. Inside, the Solmar is all wood and brass and the look and feel of the main deck is like that of an elegant pub. It reminded me of a more compact version of what you see in old luxurious river paddle boats such as the Delta King or Queen. Seating is in booths or small club-like bar tables for two. Lighting in the ceiling looks like brass portholes and some are colorful stained glass.

We had been warned both by Solmar literature and trip reviews that the rooms were small, and that is certainly true. Compared to them, the cabins we had on the Caribbean Explorer II was very large and the one we had had on the Turks and Caicos Explorer was huge. On the Solmar, our #304 had stacked beds with the bottom not wide enough for the two of us, and the top requiring a good deal of agility and a lack of any claustrophobic tendencies as headroom is virtually non-existent. There is one very small cabinet, a tiny sink, a few cubbies, a few outlets, and nothing more. These rooms are essentially bunks, without any chairs or desk space. Bathroom and shower are combined into one, so you can sit on the toilet while taking a shower.

The Solmar V left port around 4pm to some spectacular landscape with massive rocks, an arch, cliffs, spires, with waves pounding at them. Right outside the port we also passed a humongous cruise ship, the “Carnival Splendor,” that dwarfed to Solmar and seemed entirely out of place and proportion. It reminded me of the huge difference between hose floating cities and diving off a live-aboard. Then we were on the open sea and things instantly got pretty rocky, though it was a sunny day. The Solmar pitches and rolls quite a bit, and spray washes over the bow so that it is not advisable to hang outside while underway.

Then it was time for a briefing. The highlight here is the Pacific Giant Manta. There would be five full days of diving, plus one checkout dive the first day. Maximum depth at any site is 130 feet. Do not touch or chase anything. Any dives from the Panga are max 50 minutes, any dives from the Solmar are 60 minutes max. Nitrox mix is 32% for Socorro and San Benedicto, 28% for Roca Partida so that divers can to down to 130 feet. The only animals that like chasing are dolphins, and they are also the only exception to no-touch rule, but only when they invite us. With hammerheads and other sharks, stay as still as you can so they don't scatter. If you stay still they may come closer. If we were to encounter whale sharks, be careful and get out of the way as their touch can be very strong. They often make passes and then come back.

After an almost 24 hour ride, the island of San Benedicto came into view, and what a view it is. Stark, yet varied, with massive rock formations, visible layers, and probably a geologist's dream. The volcano part is all light gray and textured in a very unique way. What on Google Earth looked like a forested part of the island that had escaped the volcanic eruption is, in fact, just black lava. As we got closer to the island, pods of dolphins followed us, jumping out of the water and racing around the bow of the Solmar. The weather, unfortunately, was overcast and breezy.

The water wasn't nearly as warm as expected, perhaps in the high 60s. We worked our way down the anchor line, then followed the divemaster around for our check-out at the El Fondeadero dive site, which is three coral blocks sitting on sloping sand.

Dive site the next morning was El Boiler, a terraced seamount with three levels, the highest of which goes to 20 feet within the surface. There was very strong current and we had to hang on to the anchor line for dear life. Once down the viz was quite decent, though still no more than perhaps 75 feet. Our group of seven began a clockwise pass around the structure, at times against strong current and surge. Two or three dolphin swooped in, then quickly disappeared. The water was warmer than on the first dive, with warm and cold currents. As for depth, we were mostly in the 80s. We didn't see anything extraordinary, and definitely no mantas. Getting back on the boat was a bit tricky due to the waves.

The third dive was a hit. We had moved to another San Benedicto location, called Cape Fear. The current was fierce on the way down the anchor line, and at the bottom as well. First I thought we'd have to go right back up. But then we clawed ourselves over some cliffs and coral, and it was fairly clear that we would not end up at the anchor line for the way back. The pangas would pick us up. The reef was very nice and visibility had improved to very good.

Then we saw the first giant manta. It lazily flew by, then came back for a second pass. We ascended to get a better look and perhaps see more of it, but the creature had vanished. We settled for the safety stop when another manta appeared. And then another. They hung around, glided, flew, turned, twirled, sometimes almost at the surface. Everyone was in awe and so we watched the spectacle for another 20 minutes until we ran low on air.

With an ear ache, I skipped the first dive the following morning by what was now Socorro, dive site Cabo Pearce. Socorro is a much larger island than San Benedicto, and there was a spectacular sunrise. I did snorkel, though, in very clear water, watching the divers’ bubbles. Wearing just long swim pants and a long-sleaved top, I didn’t get cold though I was in the water for almost an hour.

I did the second dive at Cabo Pearce though there was current. Down the anchor line we went, then along some nice reefs. The water was much warmer here, mid 70s. Towards the end of the dive, giant mantas showed up, and it was a near perfect situation, with the mantas coasting around us in shallow, brightly lit water. They came very close, almost touching us. There is an awesomeness factor here that you cannot find anywhere else. According to one of the dive masters, Socorro Cabo Pearce has been the best manta place as of late.

Back on the boat, we motored over to the Mexican base where a boat with six or eight Mexican Navy personnel boarded us, machine guns and all. The crew said they simply came to check us in. They were served soft drinks, checked for half an hour or so, then left. We’re told the personnel there stays for a month, then serves somewhere on the mainland before they return.

After dinner the Solmar V began the eight or nine hour trip to Roca Partida where all diving will be off the pangas. We'll be using Nitrox 28 there because the dives will be as deep as 130 feet. The trip was very rocky and it took us a long time to get to sleep with the Solmar heaving and rolling. In those conditions, it often feels like you are are awake when, in fact, you are not. At some point the boat dropped anchor and we were there. I slept through it.

When my alarm went off at 6:30am, the sun had just come up over the endless horizon. I looked for Roca Partida, and there it was, smaller than I expected, and certainly not a hundred meters high as some sources claimed. More like 15 meters or 50 feet. The two peaks are joined and the upper three quarters are all white from the guano. The lowest part shows how far up the waves wash.

The sea was fairly calm, but with large slow swells. All diving at Roca Partida is off the pangas. It is quite a bit of logistics to get 11 BCs with tanks and weights and fins, as well as 11 divers in each of the pangas. Our panga driver, Geronimo, was a real pro, friendly, funny and competent.

Being at Roca Partida gives you this sense of really and truly being away from civilization, and it is. Some 300 plus miles out in the ocean, just a small rock, and far away from any shipping lane.

We got in the panga after listening to the dive briefing, headed towards the rocks, and then, on the count of three, all plunged into the water backward. It was fairly clear and so we followed the dive master (Erick) towards the rock which looks very much larger and more impressive underwater than above. It is just sheer cliff plunging down to a bottom at 220 feet or so. First we encountered a lot of current, then a terrific place with tons of fish including sharks above us and below us and around us.

I would have loved to hang around there, but our dive master, using long freediver fins, was moving on and we breathed hard to keep up with him. On the other side of the rock was clear water (though nowhere near as clear as I had expected), and there were those ledges where white tip sharks laid. In one they rested together with a big moray, all in one place. Again I wanted to stay and take it all in, but the DM urged us on and we came to another calm place with sharks of all kinds. Unfortunately we didn’t stay there either and the group was led into blue water where there were no more sharks, albeit a lot of small fish. So there we then hung for another 15 minutes, away from Roca Partida, away from all the sharks. None too happy over all the rush, I reentered the panga after a 44 minute dive, with a max depth of 95 feet. Two more dives hinted at the potential of this site, but this time the conditions just weren't very good.

We had a smooth ride back to Socorro and I slept so soundly that I didn't even hear the anchor. Awoke to a nice day at Socorro where we anchored at Cabo Pearce. The good news here was that the water temperature was an acceptable 75 degrees and that the current was fairly mild. Visibility however was mixed. We went down the anchor line to the 40 foot top of the reef, then Carol and I decided, somewhat wary of long blue water power swims, to go by ourselves and explore the reef. It is rocky and volcanic mostly, with lots of trumpet fish, angels, and a good number of urchins and sea cucumber like creatures. I dove off a spectacular wall to score another 100 foot dive, is time on Nitrox 32 again.

All divers used nitrox on this trip, meaning I almost never had to worry about bottom time. The average depth on Solmar dives is fairly deep, and I can only imagine the limitations of air diving. It just makes no sense to miss parts of good dives having to go shallow (which here often means into blue water with nothing in sight).

I skipped the final panga ride at Socorro, which was at Roca O'Neil, a small island/rock off the northern I think tip of Socorro. Apparently they had tank and o-ring problems that delayed things, and there wasn't much to see. I spent the time on the top deck, enjoying the vista and reading a book.

This morning we awoke to the breathtaking vista of San Benedicto, with the sun lazily coming up and burning through the haze. The dive site was El Canon, a horseshoe canon with a number of reefs. The idea here is to hang on to a reef or rock at the edge of the deep water and then have the animals swim by you.

The boobie birds here are very tame. You can actually make them sit on your hand or arm. They have a hard time landing on the boat when it is moving and seem to appreciate a bit of help. They had flat, webbed feet and sort of grab hold of your hand, then just sit there and hang, not even pooping much.

With El Canon not offering much, the captain moved up to Cabo Fear. And that turned out to be the trip's best dives. The water was fairly warm, there was little current, and the visibility was quite good. As soon as we'd descended the anchor line the Mantas arrived, mesmerizing everyone with their majesty and effortless gliding. We followed the mantas who circled above us, and soon found ourselves in 100 feet of water! They tend to lead you, or rather, you tend to follow. Seeing a manta appear and then glide by is certainly unique. At times there were three or four gliding by, circling us, looping together, and very obviously eying us. Common wisdom has it that e mantas like the tickle of divers' air bubbles, but I did not find that to be true. In fact, they seemed to avoid the bubbles, carefully gliding around them.

Then it was time for the last dive on this trip, again at Cabo Fear. We settled in a nice, leisurely pace. The Mantas were the again from the start, and so we had a most enjoyable 45 minutes with them. Certainly a great conclusion.

The final morning was a bit bittersweet. It was in some way good to be in port again, with firm land just a few feet away, but no one wanted the trip to end. From here, we'd soon disperse into the seven countries we'd come from to spend these unforgettable nine days (Canada, US, Portugal, Poland, England, France and the Philippines).

Posted by conradb212 at 08:07 PM | Comments (0)

June 17, 2011

Milestones

I finally had my 200th dive, and just like #100, it was at a memorable location. Much went through my head as I plunged into the ocean backwards off a panga at Roca Partida, as remote and wild a dive location as one can find. More remote even than the tiny island of French Key off the coast of Providenciales for my 100th.

200 dives in five years doesn't sound like much, just 40 dives a year. But considering that a local dive outing adds just a dive or two, and even a dedicated dive vacation usually no more than 10 to 20. The most I ever did was 28 on a nine day trip to Honduras, but a week in Northern Florida yielded just seven.

Where does the fascination with numbers come from? Most divers seem to have it, and "How many dives do you have" is asked among divers as often as by dive operators. Even PADI's official dive log has inserts that suggest becoming a rescue diver after 25 dives, and considering a professional career in diving when you hit 50. Scuba boards and forums classify posters by how many dives they have.

How many dives is a lot? That depends. Carol amassed over 2,500 dives in her 12 year career as an active scuba instructor. Dive masters in tourist destinations can easily reach thousands as well. But how about regular folks who just go on a dive vacation every other year or so and also want to do some sight seeing and not just diving? That way, it might take decades to reach a couple of hundred.

Me, have I truly become a diver with my 200 dives? By most standards, yes. I have been diving in a very wide variety of settings, from springs to rivers to caverns to lakes and the ocean. From cold water to warm, from shores and from boats, and in good conditions and bad. I have a couple dozen dives a hundred feet or deeper, explored wrecks, and taken thousands of photographs and many hours of video. I've swum with sharks and giant mantas, and played with dolphins and sea lions. I have some extra certification cards. I know my gear inside out.

But am I now a truly experienced diver? No, I am not. I learn something new on almost every dive. And while I've been fortunate enough to dive in many different settings, compared to tech and extreme divers, my diving has been almost routine. No decompression diving, no dives deeper than the recommended 130 foot recreational diving limit, no caves, no rebreathers, nothing extreme.

After 200 dives, sometimes I feel quite accomplished, certain that I know what I am doing. Other times, especially when I get pummeled around by current or surge, I feel like a total neophyte.

What I do know is that diving has opened a new world to me, a world of adventure and places few ever get to see, and my life is definitely the richer for it.

Posted by conradb212 at 04:09 PM | Comments (0)

May 25, 2011

About prescription dive masks

As scuba divers we need to be able to see and read our instruments at all times, so how do people who wear glasses cope? For a long time, glasses simply weren't an issue for me, but then came a day where, infuriatingly, I had to squint my eyes to read something small. I thought it was just an eye allergy, but no. For me it was welcome to the world of reading glasses. How does that affect diving?

Obviously you can't wear your regular glasses under a diving mask. One option is contact lenses, but they can get flushed out if you need to clear your mask or get splashed on. Not likely, but it can happen.

Another is getting a mask that can be fitted with optional optical lenses (most masks can be equipped with special lenses made with your prescription), or may even have separate optical windows downward. Many can easily be equipped with optical glass from -1.5 to -8.0 diopters in .5 increments.

Me, I found myself in the category of divers who have good vision but need reading glasses, so I looked into stick-on reading lenses. Stick-on lenses come in many magnifications, are re-usable, and leave no residue, so I tried them first. They usually look like soft plastic segments of a circle. You figure out where they should be in your mask, make sure the mask is totally clean, and then you apply the lens onto the wet mask and let it dry.

I did that before a dive trip to Florida a few years ago. On my first dive at Devil's Den I realized that I couldn't see a thing. I somehow had misinterpreted the instructions and the lenses totally obstructed my normal field of vision. That was so annoying that I took them out and made do without lenses for another two or three years. That's actually possible because water magnifies by about 33%. The magnification effect can be significant and you may find that you can read your instruments or dive computer while diving even if you can't on dry land!

But like most who need reading glasses, I found that I rapidly graduated through magnifications, and soon even the different optics underwater could no longer compensate. So I tried stick-on lenses again. First they just wouldn't stick. That can happen because for some hard-to-understand reason, many dive mask manufacturers insist on engraving their company or brand name at the bottom inside of the glass. Which means the lens is much less likely to stick. I asked around for a solution, and found a dive master who swore by glueing the lenses with something called liquid glass or such.

I bought a tube of it, followed instructions meticulously, but with awful results. The glue smeared, and while it was indeed clear, there was so much optical distortion as to render the inserts useless. Out they came, and I set the font size on my dive computer to maximum.

At DEMA 2008 I came across the folks at Prescription Dive Masks in La Mesa, California. They specialize on dive optics and nothing else, and they even have licensed opticians on staff. I saw them again at DEMA 2010 and decided to give them a shot. With just a week and a half to go before a big dive trip, we sent in our masks, having been assured they'd be back in time.

Not only were they back with time to spare, but the quality was just outstanding. Not only did we get much better optics and a larger viewing area than from generic stick-ons, but Prescription Dive Masks also custom-fitted them to our masks. See the difference between their solution (left) and generic stick-ons (right) in the picture below.

Getting optical inserts done professionally is more expensive than buying generics, but it's well worth it. Not being able to reliably see the data on your dive computer is foolish, as is missing that once-in-a-lifetime shot because you can't quite see the controls or settings on your camera.

So if you find yourself in a vision predicament with your mask, check what Prescription Dive Masks has to offer on their site. Or you can call and describe what you need at (619) 698-2878.

Posted by conradb212 at 08:53 PM | Comments (0)

May 08, 2011

Visiting and diving the Georgia Aquarium

Encountering sharks in the wild is rarer than one might think. Many divers never see a shark, and for many others it is a once in a lifetime experience. But if spotting any shark underwater is an uncommon occurrence, the chance of encountering a whale shark is practically nil unless you go on special whale shark trips, and even then success isn't guaranteed.

There is, however, a way to not only see whale sharks, several of them, but also more sharks than most divers will ever see, all in one dive. That's when you dive the Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta. They have a 6.3 million gallon exhibit with thousands of fish, including tiger sharks, hammerheads, zebra sharks, rays, guitarfish, humpback wrasses and whole schools of tarpon, pompano and cownose rays. And whale sharks. Four of them.

I got to experience diving the Georgia Aquarium, the world's largest, on my birthday. For the occasion, Carol had organized a weeklong trip that took us first back east to see her parents, then on to Atlanta, Georgia, in a rental. I had no idea what was on the agenda but the destination became clear soon enough.

The exceedingly attractive Georgia Aquarium, which first opened in 2005, is organized as a collection of exhibits around a huge open center hall. There's the Georgia Explorer where you can see and touch rays and learn about underwater life in and off Georgia. Next to it is River Scout where you can see what's going on in rivers, from the bottom. That includes piranhas who don't look nearly as intimidating as their reputation suggests. The wow! factor then ratchets up a few notches with the Cold Water Quest with a huge beluga whale tank, a hilarious penguin exhibit, spooky spider crabs and more. Tropical Diver is next (last, actually, if you go through the exhibits clockwise), and its centerpiece is a stunning reef with live coral. Seeing all this color and underwater life behind invisible viewing glass larger than most movie theater screens is a total mind blower.

Then there's the big 6-million gallon Ocean Voyager tank, designed to illustrate life in the Mesoamerican barrier reef system. You experience this walking through a 100-foot glass underwater tunnel that offers probably among the most breathtaking sights ever. I mean, where else could you sit down and watch tens of thousands of fish parade by and over you? It's of course, the big game that makes your jaw drop and wonder if you're in some kind of vivid dream. Mantas flying by, hammerheads cruising, huge groupers, too many incredible creatures to count.

And then the whale sharks. Whale sharks are the largest fish on the planet. Though they are technically sharks, they are entirely docile and only eat (vacuum would be a better term) plankton. The Georgia Aquarium has four of them, purchased from Taiwan where they had been captured under a quota system (since closed, see here) and would have been killed and eaten had the aquarium not purchased them. Now there are, of course, some questions as to whether an aquarium, even one as large as Atlanta's, should have creatures as huge as whale sharks, and there was also a learning process both for the whale sharks (how to feed from buckets, etc.) and for the aquarium (the logistics of relocation, care and feeding are enormous), and two of the original four whale sharks expired early on. Their replacements, and the other two originals, seem to be doing fine.

Watching those giants glide by is an unbelievable sight. I just stood there, mesmerized. Then Carol asks me how I'd like to dive with them. I said I'd probably be a bit intimidated. She smiles and pulls my scuba mask out of her purse! Talk about being at a loss for words.

So we did dive the Georgia Aquarium. It's a great experience. We had a small group of just four, us and another couple. We got an intro and look behind the scenes, then suited up in gear supplied by the aquarium (you can bring your own mask, but they'll first disinfect it for the safety of the fish). While from below, walking through the underwater tunnel, the tank looks like the bottom of the sea, from above it looks like nothing but a giant swimming pool. Above where the tunnel is, huge fans blow on the water so visitors cannot see through the surface.

We sat down by the edge of the tank, with instructions to descend feet-first to the bottom, stay close to our dive buddy, and strictly follow the dive guide. Before we could even get in, Carol almost stepped on a whale shark who'd come to investigate. Then we both needed some extra weight. Finally we descended into the tank.

I had no idea what to expect. To most, descending into a tank filled with sharks doesn't exactly qualify as a desirable experience, but I actually wasn't afraid. I figured that since the aquarium does those tours, there was nothing to worry about. Once at the bottom and following the dive master, it became like being inside a particularly intense 3D IMAX movie. It was definitely information overload. Instead of looking out for wildlife, the sharks were everywhere. Hammerheads buzzed by, with one almost bopping into us by accident (or we into him). Ferocious looking sand tigers, the distinctive zebra shark, the exceedingly odd wobbegong, blacktips, giant groupers, sawfish, and a whole bunch of rays. Mantas are particularly majestic, gliding like space craft, looping in the water.

The underwater tunnel separates the tank into two halves and swimming over the tunnel was an experience in itself as visitors, and particularly kids, seemed as interested in us divers than in the fish. Little boys and girls were pointing, waving or, in one instance, running away in fear.

Then there were the whale sharks effortlessly cruising by and above us. As far as whalesharks go, the four in the Georgia Aquarium are not very large, perhaps 20 feet max (they can get to be 40 feet), but that's relative. Being in the water with not one, but four 20 foot sharks is an experience that almost defies explanation. It's awe-inspiring, majestic, unbelievable. And it was also over much too soon. The dive lasted 30 minutes or so, though with so much happening, there was no sense of time at all.

Diving the Georgia Aquarium isn't inexpensive (US$325 or so), but if you want to swim with whale sharks, mantas, and more other sharks than most divers will see in a lifetime, it's a total bargain.

Note that there are no cameras allowed, though a videographer accompanies every dive and the video of your dive will be ready after the debriefing.

Posted by conradb212 at 03:58 PM | Comments (0)

March 21, 2011

Compatibility -- the bane of underwater photographers

Only a very small percentage of the general population are scuba divers, and of those, only a relatively small part takes pictures underwater. And of that small number, only one in ten or so uses a "big rig," i.e. a digital SLR with a special housing and externally mounted strobes. When we go on dive vacations, we're usually among those, and we pay the price in terms of lugging around a lot of extra equipment and being held up by the airlines with ever larger fees for transporting all of our essentials.

Yet, the thought of going on a single dive without camera equipment and risk missing whatever there's to see down there is unthinkable and on the rare occasions where I do not take a camera on a dive, my hands feel strangely empty and I don't know what to do with them.

Going through all the trouble with the cameras is weird because I know that no matter what exotic critter I see and capture, a thousand others will already have done so, and usually better than I. Carol, on the other hand, does some outstanding underwater photography, and when I see her pictures, I feel it's all been worth it.

Anyway, as if lugging all the big gear around weren't bad enough, the manufacturers themselves seem intent on throwing as many monkey wrenches into the project as they can. True, they've finally more or less settled on SD cards for storage, so I won't have to carry around an assortment of different cards and adapters anymore, but there's still a ways to go. I am finding that out again while trying to put together a workable rig for Carol's Canon T2i dSLR.

You might wonder what the problem is, given that Canon pretty much rules supreme these days, and a good portions of the cameras I see on dive trips are now Canons. The answer is cost. If money is no object, you can simply order a full rig from one of the (actually not so) many places that specialize in underwater camera gear. But getting a housing with brackets and lights for a dSLR is expensive, quite expensive. So it would not seem unreasonable to expect photographers to mix and match and take advantage of expensive gear they already have. I mean, we're talking an industry where a single extension arm can cost hundreds of dollars, and housings can cost thousands.

Apparently it is unreasonable.

The story on trying to set things up so we could take the Rebel T2i underwater began many months ago. While every single camera ever built, no matter how similar they are, requires its own, dedicated housing, at least housings are available for the Canon T2i, a rather popular dSLR that replaced the Canon 1ti and reigned as perhaps the best buy in dSLRs until Canon quickly replaced it with the T3i. Still, housings are quite expensive and so I was thrilled to find one that was reasonable (i.e. less than twice the cost of the camera itself). So I ordered that for Carol and its delivery was expected for Christmas.

Which, of course, was optimistic as it had to be flown in from Japan. When it finally arrived, it did so without a zoom ring or lens cap. The former makes it possible to actually use the camera inside the housing, the latter keeps a very expensive lens dome from getting scratched. Not including the ring is somewhat excusable as each lens needs a different one, but one'd expect a dealer to at least ask.

Anyway, one would also expect some sort of system where expensive camera housings can be screwed onto expensive brackets using some sort of system. In computers, everyone's using the VESA mounting system that precisely describes the spacing of mounting holes and all. Well, not so with cameras. So it was off to a local machine shop to drill and thread a couple of extra holes into our Olympus bracketry.

Next, lights. We have Olympus lights and while the new housing for the Canon did not have fiber optics ports, I felt fairly confident that I could rig something up to secure the optical sensors to the housing. After a good bit or trial and error, a piece of foam did hold the fiber optics ports in place in front of the housing's flash window. But the flash did not trigger the external strobes.

So we needed to figure out how this whole fiberoptics cable system works. Simply shining a light on the sensor does not trigger the external flash, not even if you use a laser. However, another flash, even from halfway across the room, does trigger it. So it must be the brief flash that triggers the external light.

Unfortunately, the Canon uses an often annoying pre-flash to help its auto focus do its work in low light. The pre-flash can make the external flash go off, or at least it kept the external from working properly. After much searching I found how to turn the AF preflash off and the Canon's flash now did trigger the external flash. However, pictures were either greatly overblown, or it looked like the flash had not gone off at all. Email back and forth with my friend Shawn, who works at Imaging Resource, revealed that there is actually another preflash, one so close to the actual flash that the eye really cannot distinguish the two. The preflash apparently figures flash exposure and white balance, and it means it won't play ball with the Olympus flash units.

Bummer.

Canon's T2i replacement, the T3i, seems to have a second preflash that deals with external flash control, and in a perfect world you could simply download a program to make the T2i do that also. As is, that's not the case, and obviously we can't just ditch everything and buy yet another set of expensive camera equipment.

So how about using another way to connect the external flashes to the camera? There are what's called TTL ports on both the camera and the flash housings but, of course, they are different. Turns out that the Olympus flash has special "Olympus"-style ports whereas the housing has a "Nikonos" port, named after the old Nikonos underwater film cameras. Now there are Nikonos-to-Olympus adapter cables but they alone cost as much as a good 14-megapixel consumer camera. And since we have two external flashes, we'd need to find a 1-into-2 splitter adapter. So I checked with my friend Shawn on that. "TTL won't be possible from the T2i to the Oly flash. The TTL technologies are incompatible," he said. Sigh.

So, so far, the moral of the story is that as if underwater photography were not already expensive enough, components are also mostly incompatible, forcing you to buy new expensive lights if you don't stay with your brand and technology. That bites. It really does.

Carol's upset and wants to send the housing back. She feels we should have been told of all the various limitations, caveats and pitfalls before we were sold the goods. Me, I feel like we still may find a solution.

Stay tuned.

Posted by conradb212 at 04:48 PM | Comments (0)

December 27, 2010

New (and lighter) gear for Christmas

For Christmas this year I was led on a treasure hunt that ended in the garage of my home where I found a gear bag with new fins and a new BC. And not just any new fins and BC, but a set of Scubapro Seawing Novas and a Scubapro LiteHawk BC. While I had hinted I wanted the fins, the BC was a complete surprise. I had seen it at DEMA in Las Vegas a couple of months ago and liked it, and Carol had picked up on that.

What's remarkable about both is that they are lighter than the gear I use now (and have been using ever since I started scuba). My black Scubapro Twin Jets weigh 5.5 pounds whereas the new Seawings weigh just 4.3 pounds. My trusty old Scubapro KnightHawk weighs 8.7 pounds, the new LiteHawk just 6.2. So between them, there's a weight saving of almost four pounds. I never thought this would even matter, but it does in this day and age of ever more strictly enforced luggage weight limits at the airports. Yes, in a few short years we've gone from being able to shlep along a virtually unlimited amount of gear to having to pack and repack to make the weight and not pay another king's ransom for a second bag.

The airlines' efforts to squeeze ever more fees out of travelers has led to changes in the scuba industry. Aqua Lung has been advertising their "Travel Light Package" that includes BC, fins, mask, snorkel, regulator, computer and a carry-on bag that combined weigh less than 18 pounds. So if you travel really light, you may not even need another bag. That assumes, of course, that you travel to warm places where you don't need a bulky wetsuit and such, and then there are the dive boots that alone can weigh several pounds. As is, my gear bag usually comes in at 49.5 pounds by the time I have all my dive gear packed (and that doesn't even include my regulator, computer and mask that always go in my carry on) and enough clothes and toiletries to last me a week.

Problem, of course, is that I also always take along a good bunch of underwater camera and video gear for testing, and that makes the airlines' weight and luggage count limits even more infuriating. It's become a frustrating exercise in playing triage with equipment and gear, carrying along my own luggage scale, limiting the souvenirs I buy, and building an ever bigger head of steam against an airline industry whose purpose for being increasingly seems harassing customers into avoiding air travel altogether. Add to that the ridiculous lengths the increasingly surly and condescending TSA goes in viewing even little toiletry items as threats to national security and suspicious potential means of terrorism, making going through "security" an increasingly stressful and humiliating experience, and sometimes I truly wonder how many divers have simply given up on the sport because it's too much of a hassle to deal with getting there and back. And let's not even get into things like taking along a potentially life-saving dive knife and such. And I have no idea how tech divers and those who use rebreathers and such do it. But I digress.

Even without pesky air travel harassment, lighter gear is good and I cannot wait to try out the new fins and BC. The Seawing fins are a radical departure from any earlier fin design, with what Scubapro calls "variable blade geometry" and a "power plate" in an attention-grabbing design that everyone else is already trying to emulate and copy. The reviews I read are good, and if nothing else, the fins show that Scubapro is making efforts to stay upfront and in the news. The company still enjoys a good reputation among seasoned divers, but these days much of the competition has it all over Scubapro in terms of marketing and cool factor.

The LiteHawk falls into the category of "travel BCs." This means less weight, less size and less bulk. This means that straps are narrower, there are no pockets, and trim and padding are smaller or missing altogether. Perhaps the biggest difference is the weight pockets that are much smaller than the large pockets in Scubapro's other weight-integrated BCs. For me, that's always been an issue against travel BCs as I tend to need a lot of weight, ranging from 14 pounds in a dive skin all the way to 30 or so in cold water with a 5-mil shorty over my 7-mil wetsuit. The LiteHawk's small pockets are officially meant to be accessories pockets, though apparently everyone uses them as weight pockets. If so, they do not seem to hold more than perhaps a maximum of six or seven pounds each, so a second set or some weights strung onto the weight belt-like integrated strap may/will be necessary. The LiteHawk, though, makes no concessions in areas like bladder and tank band, which both seem identical to those on my heavy-duty KnightHawk. Lift capacity of the LiteHawk, in fact, is higher than that of the KnightHawk.

I have no idea what to expect from the Seawing fins. I've never used a fin other than my big and heavy black Twin Jets. They get the job done, but are bulky, very negatively buoyant, and a pain to put on with their unwieldy rubber straps. Since I am not a power swimmer and much prefer finesse and the ability to make precise movements, I wonder if the Seawings will help me in that regard. They also have a totally different foot pocket, which to me is important as I am given to foot cramps and need a sturdy pocket with no pressure points. And there is a pull strap instead of the ratcheting rubber straps, which should make putting the fins on much easier.

So there. I cannot wait to check out my new gear!

Posted by conradb212 at 03:51 PM | Comments (0)

October 23, 2010

Las Islas Coronado, and back to the Yukon

To be honest, after a week of facing muddy, choppy waters in the usually crystal-clear Caribbean, I wasn't exactly looking forward to the three days' worth of diving the usually cold and murky waters of the Pacific off Southern California I had signed up for months ago. I had done enough anchor line diving to last me a while, and by that I mean conditions that require following down the anchor line so that you don't end up somewhere in No Man’s Land.

However, in a prime example of equalizing justice, everything turned out great. The weather -- which is usually iffy in San Diego, with fog and clouds every morning that don't burn off till almost noon -- cooperated with sparkling sunshine, temperatures that were just right, and water flat enough to get places without being rocked around.

For this trip we drove down from Sacramento to San Diego. I was reminded how different driving is from making it through airports and having to pack for flights. Whatever you think you might need is stowed in the vehicle and brought along. Makes no difference what and how much. When you drive you don't pay extra fees and charges and no one X-rays and snoops through your bags. No lecturing that a little pair of cuticle scissors is a deadly weapon and must be confiscated for your own protection. And the trip itself is always an adventure, what with all the cool truck stops, sights, and opportunity to just sit and talk for hours while driving.

This time we passed on paying premium dollars for not-so-premium accommodations and service as we had on our last trip to Wreck Alley. Instead, we set up camp at a lowly Heritage Inn, saving a bundle. It was still just a few minutes away from Waterhorse Charter.

I really didn't know what to expect from the Coronado Islands that were on the agenda for Day One. We got to the marina bright and early at 7:30AM, signed in and completed all the paperwork and wavers, then set up our gear on the boat.

The Humboldt is a marvelous vessel and just about perfect for diving. It can handle some 18 to 20 divers and so the 12 of us from Fisheye Scuba had ample room. There is a cabin with seating on each aide and a kitchen bar in the center. It's small but perfectly adequate and cozy. The dive platform is as good as it gets; you simply step into the water, no big drop here, and no hassle to get to and from the dive platform, or onto the boat for that matter. The Humboldt also has its own compressor, so no need to carry tanks on and off the boat. There's a small upper deck where the captain has his wheel and instruments plus room for a couple of passengers.

On a speedy boat, the Coronado Islands are just over an hour south of San Diego's Mission Bay. They are in Mexican waters, and you're advised to bring along identification, though a passport is not needed. After making sure everyone was on board and ready, we motored off at 8AM, into bright sunshine and a gorgeous morning. The trip was nice and calm, and I spent much of the time examining the coast line in the distance, wondering if it was already Mexico or still Southern California.

With the mainland still faintly in sight, the Islas Coronado came into view. There are four of them and they are small, ranging in size from just a few acres (the Pilon de Azucar, or Sugar Cone), to about three quarters of a square mile (South Coronado). What the Islas Coronado lack in size, they make up in dramatic appearance. They are tall (soaring up to over 700 feet) and rocky, and actually reminded me of what we saw at Saba with its rocks and spires and volcanic look. No one lives here but birds. There are some ranger and research stations, but nothing year-round. The Coronados are very picturesque with a stark beauty.

Our first dive site was between two of the islands in a fairly shallow area of about 70 feet. The water didn't look too clear, and it wasn't. For protection I was wearing both my 7-mil wetsuit and a 5-mil shorty with hood on top of it. That also meant a full 30 pounds of weight. Even so I still had to pull myself down the anchor line. At the bottom all that neoprene compressed so much that I had to put what felt like a few hundred psi of air into my BC just to stay afloat. I felt clumsy and gulped too much air. The dive site itself was a small ledge/wall and there was quite a variety of starfish. We didn’t see any kelp, which surprised me. So we swam back and forth the little wall in cold water and modest visibility. Since the site was fairly deep I quickly drained my tank and it was time to get back up the anchor line. The group declared it a good dive. I certainly liked the surroundings, but my taste was for something a little clearer and warmer.

The Humboldt then moved closer to one of the small rocky islands to a place called the Keyhole, named after a small swim-through between the rocks. I had actually seen that before the trip on a YouTube video. After a bit of deliberation, the captain decided it wasn't calm enough to do the site and instead we'd go and play with sea lions. That site, called the "Lobster Shack" (a misnomer as there weren't any), was quite shallow and close to a sea lion rookery. We could actually see the bottom there, which meant the water was reasonably clear.

This turned out to be one of the great dives ever. Almost as soon as we got in and descended to the rocky bottom at less than 20 feet, a sea lion appeared and effortlessly darted around us. He left and came back a friend. Now both swam around us and this encounter alone would have made for a great and unforgettable dive. But this was just the start. Soon several more young sea lions appeared, playing with each other, checking us out, and just generally having a grand old time. I was mesmerized by the display that was getting better and wilder as time went on. The sea lions put on a show that I'll never forget, frolicking, darting, playfully pecking at each other, all at fluid, breakneck speed. Occasionally, one would examine us, come closer, then dart away. Some came right at us but then veered off at the last moment to avoid collision. None of that felt threatening, though. They were so much faster and more mobile in the water than us divers that all we could do was watch the spectacle.

While the sea lions stole the show, there were a lot of other interesting things to see in the shallow and brightly lit water. An abundance of orange garibaldis were not afraid of divers and came very close. At one time I videoed one as it swam around me a full 540 degrees. And there was the usual assortment of urchins, sea stars and nudibranchs.

Eventually we did get cold and went back up to the boat, laughing, comparing notes and reliving the thril. I'll never forget this dive.

The ride back to San Diego was equally wonderful. Sunshine, calm water, perfect temperature, and the Islas Coronado slowly disappearing in the distance. But there was more. The captain stopped the boat. Whales. We saw the telltale red plumes of krill that whales like so much, and then some large blue whales breaching the surface. We cruised a bit to get a good position to see the whales while keeping a lawful distance, and there they were, scooping up krill, blowing air, and even doing the telltale whale tail flip as they descended. But even that wasn't it. Soon we were followed by dolphins that sprinting and jumping through the wake of the speeding Humboldt. The boat moved fast and we could see the dolphins' athletic bodies working to keep up. Eventually they fell back.

The next day was all wrecks. But what a difference conditions can make. The last time I went down to see the wreck of the Canadian destroyer Yukon, the visibility was poor, the weather dark and gray, and the water miserably cold. This time we again had to descend through 30 or 40 feet of greenish murk, but underneath the water was remarkably clear. The big wreck was far more visible and with that we got a sense of the sheer size of the sunken destroyer rather than just parts appearing out of opaque water. I felt far more relaxed in this kind of visibility, and at 56 degrees Fahrenheit the water mercifully was almost ten degrees warmer (though still cold). This time we could do some actual exploring and seeing the sights. No penetration, though. Not with just a single 80 cubic feet aluminum tank full of air at 90 feet. So I enjoyed the spectacular sight and the growth on the wreck, most noticeably the large white plume metridium anemones and the incredibly colorful strawberry anemones that really look more like coral.

Predictably, my bottom time was cut short not by a lack of air, but by rapidly diminishing nitrogen time. 25 minutes into the dive I was down to three or four minutes and we had to start our ascent back up.

45 minutes later we were in the water again for another dive to the Yukon. By now I felt almost comfortable with the big wreck, but the time for exploring again was short. On this second dive dive to 85 feet, I ran low on nitrogen time after just 20 minutes. I crossed over to the radio tower buoy line, signaled Carol, who was on Nitrox and had much more bottom time, that I had to go up. Then Tom, the owner of the Fisheye Scuba dive shop that had arranged the trip, and I slowly made way back up the line.

Our luck with the weather held up for a third day as we were again greeted by bright sunshine and nearly flat water. Since part of the group was doing a wreck diving class and they weren’t quite done with their training requirements, we went back to the Yukon for one more dive. There is a total of five anchor lines, and this time we descended down to the radio tower that's roughly in the middle in the ship. The visibility wasn't quite as good as the day before, but still in the neighborhood of 40 feet, which meant we could see things. We swam towards the stern of the ship and then over it, and saw the massive propeller assembly that is almost completely covered in white metridians. Interestingly, while every inch of the top of the ship is covered in anemones and other growth, the bottom/outside/hull often still shows the unmarred paint. There is also kelp on the exposed hull. It sways back and forth and helps divers to see current.

As a wreck specially prepared for divers, the Yukon has large rectangular cutouts all over the ship. This makes for easy access for those qualified to enter wrecks. There is, however, fairly strong surge -- strong enough in places to suck you in and spit you back out.

Each dive trip adds to experience, and what I took away from this one are some thoughts about depth and temperature.

When you first start diving, water temperature and what to wear for any given dive is hit and miss, and the difference between a thick wetsuit and a thin one seems academic. You then quickly learn that wearing the right suit is one of the most important decisions to make for a comfortable, enjoyable dive. For example, diving the Yukon with just a 7-mil suit last year was a miserable experience where being cold was all I felt. So cold that I was shivering and had to skip dives, which is never something you want.

This time I wore a 5-mil shorty with integrated hood over the 7-mil wetsuit, and that made a huge difference. My body stayed warm through all the dives in the mid-50s water. The shorty had a zipper from the bottom all the way up to the hood, which meant it was also quick and easy to put on.

On the flip side, this added another thick layer of compressible neoprene, and that greatly affects buoyancy. While on top, you are buoyant enough to need a large amount of weight. Even with a full 30 pounds, which is as much as my Scubapro NightHawk BC can accommodate, I still had to pull myself down the anchor line. At depth, all that neoprene compressed so much that I became very negatively buoyant and had to add a lot of air into the BC, and even relatively small changes in depth affected buoyancy. You can, of course, go with less weight and simply pull yourself down the anchor line, but then there's the risk that you may not find the line to go up and have to ascend without line, and then you do not want to be so light that you lose control of the ascent speed.

I also learned that a good seal on your gloves makes a big difference. While wetsuits provide protection by allowing in a small water layer that warms up, gloves that do not seal well allow in too much water and your hands quickly get cold. This time I wore a new set of gloves that were thin enough to allow me to operate the cameras, but had excellent sealing via a velcro wrist band. This worked great. While the 3-mil neoprene was on the low end of protection against the cold, the seal was so good that my hands stayed just warm enough.

Another observation was the great impact of dive profiles on air consumption and allowable bottom time. When I look at most of my dives once they are uploaded to the SmartTrac software on my PC, I see a descent to the maximum depth of the dive within the first few minutes, staying at that depth for just a minute or so, then usually a linear and gradual ascent. That's because in most dive sites that include slopes or reefs, you drop to the lowest point, then work your way up the wall or slope and then play around on top of the reef or wall until it's time to go up. You could call this a "stairs" profile where you take the elevator to the bottom, then walk back up the stairs.

With "stair" profiles you can go to 120 feet and still have a dive lasting more than an hour on a standard 80 cubic foot tank. That's because the average depth of the dive will be just 30 to 50 feet, depending on the depth of the top of the reef where you spend most of your time.

With deep wrecks (or deep reefs or any dive where you have to first drop a long distance), you dive a "square" profile, which means you drop down to your maximum depth, stay there for the duration of the dive, then come back up the line. This way you spend much more time at depth, drain your tank much faster because you breathe air that is more compressed, and accumulate nitrogen more quickly, reducing your bottom time.

In each of my dives to the Yukon the factors that determined the length of my dive were first, my remaining nitrogen time; second, temperature; and only third remaining air in my tank. All my dives were between 30 and 40 minutes. On each I used up all my allowable nitrogen time even though I never went deeper than 85 feet, and on each I returned with plenty enough air left in my tank.

I also noted that just as nitrogen accumulates in your body, exposure to the cold also seems to accumulate. I didn't feel cold on three wreck dives the second day, but on the third I was already shivering after the first dive. And so I skipped the final dive which was to the wreckage of the NOSC tower, a structure built in 1959 and used through the 1980s until it was toppled during an El Nino storm. Today it is a twisted mass of girders sitting in about 60 feet of water and reaching up as high as 30 feet. Carol reported it a fascinating dive site with wondrous colors and teeming life, including an abundance of some of the largest starfish seen anywhere.

I should add that Waterhorse Charter experienced tragedy when a diver died on the Yukon in September of 2010. It was a 39-year-old with plenty of experience who did the dive by himself. He was last seen apparently photographing something in the sand on the bottom by the Yukon. Upon return to the boat, it was noticed he was missing but by that time it was already too late. This tragic event will undoubtedly hang over the operation as a reminder that accidents can and will happen, and that diving is serious business that as adults we engage in knowing the risks. Quite obviously, dive operators must observe and practice the highest standards, but beyond that it would be most unfortunate if lawyers and grieving parties sued and regulated diving out of business. As is, dive operators offer fewer and fewer services in order to protect themselves from being held liable, essentially reducing themselves to being "taxi services." Insurance companies, which once drove muscle cars out of business and are now making healthcare increasingly unaffordable with ever-rising rates, may also end up making dive operations economically unfeasible. So let's hope reason will prevail.

Posted by conradb212 at 08:38 PM | Comments (0)

August 04, 2010

Hoi An Hoard -- an amazing tale of a buck well spent

So I went to the 1-Dollar Store a few weeks ago to get a couple of things. When I am there, I always see what books they have. Sometimes there are real finds from mainstream authors, stuff that still costs a bundle on Amazon.

Not that much this time, but there's a book called "Dragon Sea" and it has a scuba diver on it. It looks like adventure fiction and so I buy it for a buck.

I start reading and it's really much better than expected. It's actually about underwater archeology and written by a man by the name of Frank Pope who assisted one of the world's foremost underwater archeologists, Mensun Bound, with marine excavations. So this is real.

The book deals with the clash between treasure hunters who plunder, and marine archeologists who seek to record and preserve. The story is of an effort to form an alliance between a treasure hunter who needs the legitimacy of an archeological team to get permissions and such, and the archeologists who need the funding the treasure hunters can provide. It turns out to be an uneasy partnership, with each side distrustful of the other's motives and intentions.

The subject is a sunken 15th century junk that apparently carried a massive amount of early Vietnamese ceramics, over a quarter of a million pieces. The 1998/99 recovery is hellacious with long 12-hour shifts in deep water (220 feet), requiring saturation diving and a good deal of innovation, and the artifacts become known as the Hoi An Hoard. It is historically very relevant as records of Vietnamese culture are all but non-existent due to centuries of occupation and influence by China and other colonial forces, and no one knew that Vietnam actually had its own fleeting period of glory where they almost rivaled the Chinese in ceramics.

So all this is real. The moneymen have their treasure, and the archeologists tons of material to catalog and publish. In 2000, the investors did an auction in San Francisco, and used a relatively small auction house, Butterfields, owned by then just emerging eBay. The auction is not a big success as there's just too much stuff and not enough demand for a virtually unknown category of collectibles, and a lot is just mundane pottery that had been at the bottom of the ocean for almost 600 years. Supposedly, the initial auction brought in only about three million dollars, versus 14 million spent, though that latter number is up for discussion.

Now get this: it's still on eBay. I put in a bid, and for US$88 I won the auction for a large painted dinner bowl, properly registered and recorded in the Hoi An Hoard inventory. It's beautiful and its history given me bit of the shivers. I put it on display in my house, next to Frank Pope's book that I picked up for a buck at the 1-Dollar store.

I wrote a book review of the superbly written "Dragon Sea," too (see here) and the antiquesandarts.com website describes the mixed results of the 2000 auction.

But the story doesn't end there. In "Dragon Sea," the author makes reference to a book that fueled his goal on pursuing a career in marine archeology, "Archeology Under Water" by George Bass. The book is long out of print, but I found a used one that was as good as new on Amazon. Turns out that book came from another diving legend, Jennifer Carter, who is a member of the Women Divers Hall of Fame. Carter was the first woman to dive the Titanic in a submersible, authored a book on it (Titanic Adventure), was a National Geographic producer and has her own experience in hard hat saturation diving and diving the world over. The book was accompanied by a kind note, and Mrs. Carter, who seems a delightful person, helpfully guided me to some other rare books on diving history.

Amazing story, and the best dollar I ever spent.

Posted by conradb212 at 03:10 PM | Comments (0)

July 29, 2010

Back to Roatan

When you're a diver, you're always torn between wanting to explore new places you've never seen, and going back to places you know and love. And sometimes you simply end up wherever you get a good deal on airfare. This time we booked on very short notice, three days or so, using our frequent flyer miles. And went back to CocoView on Roatan, a place that I really love.

Booking with those frequent flyer miles was a pain. Not only are the airlines doing their darndest to make it as inconvenient as possible so as to discourage you from actually spending your miles (how'd you like to leave for a destination and get there two days later?), but seats and flights suddenly become unavailable if you so much as wait ten minutes or so. And when you finally find something that works, you learn that the airline is now charging a US$75 per person just for you booking the ticket, and then they add more fees and taxes. And should you fall a bit short with miles and need to buy a few more, those cost very, very dearly. Not a pleasant experience at all, and even less so when you find that on flights where they only showed one last middle seat available, half the plane is empty.

At Roatan we found Liz, the formerly ever-present manager, gone. Wonder what happened. A lot of new faces, too, though the dive staff seemed unchanged. Doc Radawski was still there and told me what happened during the earthquake that struck Roatan in May of 2009. Apparently, the fault that caused that 7.2 earthquake is on the same fault line as the one that ruined Port-au-Prince in Haiti. The epicenter of the Roatan quake was awfully close to the island, and Doc said had the quake lasted just 20 or 25 seconds longer, everything would have been leveled. As is, there was only fairly minor damage. Some piles under the cabanas broke through the floor, and some had to be replaced. Some pipes broke and power was lost. All in all, they got off easy.

Though we were exhausted from the red-eye flight from California, we hit the water within an hour upon our arrival, and it turned out to be a wonderful dive. The water was a balmy 84 degrees, visibility around the wreck of the Prince Albert was terrific, and though we had set out to examine CocoView Wall, we ended up at what’s left of a sunken DC3 near the shipwreck for most of the dive. The earthquake really pummeled the Prince Albert, with big cracks in its sides, as if plates had been torqued off. Things also look muddier and less colorful than I remember, but life is coming back. Same on the coral heads on CoCo View’s “front yard,” some of which were broken off or toppled over. A good deal of mud on everything, but you can see new growth coral, and there are a lot of fish.

Anyone dreaming of vacations on tropical islands probably has visions of staying in one of those bungalows right on, or even over, the water. It became real for us as for the first three days we get to stay in one of the tropical bungalows. Each has two very large guest rooms and is just charming. I wish we could have stayed in one for the entire trip!

I was instantly reminded of something I didn't like so much about Roatan: biting insects. Unlike on Cozumel where it's obvious what bites you, on Roatan you have both the dreaded "no-see-ums" and almost equally undetectable flying things, and they both bite often and with very noticeable and very itchy results, almost no matter how careful you are. Bug spray and long pants and sleeves hardly seem to help at all. This is one little, but rather important, thing where liveaboards have it all over land-based locations.

Interestingly, the local time in Roatan is only one hour ahead of California in the summer. They don't use daylight savings time, and so it's dark at 7pm instead of 9:30, and in the morning it is light at 5am.

The first full day of diving (4 dives) showed remarkably little damage from the 2009 earthquake. I had halfway expected much of those wonderful hanging and overhanging wall formations to be destroyed, but they were all still there. There also wasn't a lot of damage to fans and sponges; apparently they can handle an earthquake better than a hurricane. Everything looked pretty much as before, which means lots of colors, lots of diversity, and all those vertical walls.

The water was surprisingly rough, with even CoCo View's large dive boats in for a ride. Between the two morning dives we actually had to find sanctuary behind Fantasy Island.

Electricity! Whereas we had to make do with two electrical outlets at the Wyndham in Cozumel, and the Occidental Grand there wasn't much better, CoCo View knows that divers need a lot of outlets! Our Bungalow D had no fewer than 12 electrical plugs, enough for all of our camera and computer gear. And the standard rooms are not far behind. Now if they'd only supply WiFi to the rooms.

The bugs are a total nuisance. You don't remember this much afterwards, but they can really make you feel uncomfortable and paranoid to even go and enjoy the wonderful outdoors. Even with great precautions, we ended up itching like crazy after just a day, to the extent where it affected our mood and comfort. This alone can tip the scale in favor or against a location. Fortunately, at least, no flies here to further annoy you.

When you check the weather report for Roatan, you almost always see thunderclouds. That doesn't necessarily mean bad weather. It just means you never really know what to expect. Our first day was mostly nice and sunny. The second morning it was overcast, and the night before it looked like rain, which never came. The rest of this July trip alternated between overcast and bright sunshine, and occasional rain, especially at night. The seas alternated between quite rough and almost glass-smooth.

Dive masters are very important. Almost all dive masters are good at what they are doing and genuinely try to be helpful, look out after everyone, and make sure every diver has a good dive experience. However, styles differ, and there will always be dive masters that you particularly like. And feeling confident and comfortable with a dive master down there is important. When we made our reservations, we had asked to be assigned to one dive master who worked really well for us. There was no response to that, and when we got there no one knew of our request. We did get on his boat after a discussion with the manager of dive operations, but only for a day and a half. After that we were told we'd been reassigned to another boat and dive master because a large group was going to come in. That can happen, of course, but I did not like it and felt the resort handled this poorly. This is the kind of stuff that guests remember—requests handled with care, or simply ignored and brushed aside. And as it turned out, the boat we wanted to be on was never more than half-full and there'd been plenty of space for us.

As it turned out, on Saturday morning there was a major rain storm, a typical tropical pounding. I was certain the dive boats would not go out, but, surprise, they did and left right on time. And unlike on Cozumel where dive boats would only go to really close sites in inclement weather, Dive master Eddie (who captained this time) and relief DM Marcos took us to a couple of fantastic sites quite a ways away (Connie's Delight and Sponge Garden). Visibility was fantastic and we probably saw 150 feet. When the viz is good, Connie's Delight easily rivals Cozumel's famous Santa Rosa wall, and then some.

You always try to remember to bring everything that you could possibly need on a dive trip, but inevitably there'll be something you forget, or something you suddenly need. We had such an emergency after the resort's gifts and a bit of everything else shop closed, and even the office couldn't help. That'd be the end of that in most places, but not at CoCo View where the office quickly organized a boat ride to the landing and then the resort's van to get us to the closest store. The store turned out to be an apparently brand-new super market every bit as well stocked as one back home in the US, with all the familiar brands and goods. And the cashier had no problems at all accepting and handling US Dollars. So emergency handled, and there wasn't even going to be a charge (though we tipped the friendly boat and van drivers).

After having had ample opportunity to survey the wreck of the Prince Albert, we also got a chance to revisit the wreck of the Mr. Bud, a 90-foot fishing boat sunk by CoCo View Resort as a dive attraction in 2004. There was no obvious earthquake damage, but time, in this case the year and a half since we were here, had taken its toll on the little ship. It looked noticeably grayer and older, with some of the steel now broken and rusted through. Also missing were the schools of little fish filling the bridge; this time it was just a solitary grouper. We stayed at the wreck for the entire dive, passing on exploring the wall on top of which the Mr. Bud precariously sits.

As it had on past visits, the resort put on a well-attended Buoyancy Clinic. Dive shop owner Patty Grier explained how too much weight, and improperly positioned weight, can really take the fun out of diving and making everything more difficult. The recommendation is to test proper weight by locating a shallow spot of around 15 feet towards the end of a dive, dump al the air from then BC and then see if one is neutrally buoyant. If not, one either carries too much weight, or not enough. I checked, and I carry too much. Also, the weight is apparently located too low on my body as it takes an effort for me to assume the fully horizontal swimming position. I tried to fix that by putting 8 of the 16 pounds I carried from the main weight pockets in my BC into the two small BC pockets behind me. That didn't make much of a difference in my trim and it made me feel somewhat less stable, so that is apparently not the solution.

I was also reminded how a bad dive can be a downer and a good dive a delight. We did one where we swam against a strong current for a good half hour, then turned around and somehow found ways to yet again swim against currents almost all the way back to the boat. That was no fun. On the other hand, a return to one of Roatan's star attractions, Mary's Place, was spectacular. Swimming through those very tall canyon like cracks with the light shining way above you is an experience like few others. It feels like an underwater Tolkien Middle Earth. And since the site wasn't busy and we only had a small group, we even turned around and made it through the crack from the other direction. Add to that the depth of 85 to 90 feet, and it was an incredible experience.

There were diving kids at CoCo View this time! They ranged in age from 12 to 14 and did amazingly well. For two of the youngsters it was their first boat dive, and they never missed a beat. Going through Mary's Place on one of your very first dives at such an early age must certainly give you a head start. I am not sure how comfortable I'd be having my son, who is 14, diving, though he's close to being certified. Yet, one of the diving kids, just 13 years old, not only had terrific air consumption, he even went on the shark dive! Not every kid will take to it equally well and progress varies from individual to individual, but by and large, these kids did great. By the end of the stay, some looked like experienced divers and had no air consumption issues either.

On this trip I had my 150th dive and my 160th, too, and then almost my 170th. Now when I meet divers who look relaxed and confident in the water, it seems like they usually have somewhere close to 200 dives, so I suppose the number of dives you need to have until you feel like you're among the advanced is a moving target. I'll never come close to having as many dives as Carol already has (almost 2,600), but that's okay. Scuba diving has truly opened new worlds for me and it has changed my life.

Lion fish are becoming a problem in Roatan as almost everywhere else in the Caribbean. They are rapidly spreading and nothing seems to stop them. In the ten years since they supposedly were accidentally released from an aquarium in Florida during a hurricane, they invaded almost the entire east coast and Caribbean. They are beautiful and exotic to look at, but are in fact fierce predators that not only propagate like rabbits, but also hunt in ways unknown to the local reef creatures and without natural enemies in the territories they invade. We had a lecture by Julia, a Ph.D. student from the University of Alabama who spent time at CoCo View doing lion fish research. It was interesting to learn more about the invasion, and some hard data and facts. Julia's main field is examining the bacterial cultures of lion fish which are very different firm those of local species. This could potentially lead to possibly detrimental infections of local species, or it might in some ways be used to fend off the invasion. Julia pointed out that lion fish invasions could have serious consequences beyond the threat to local species: since they are poisonous, beaches coiled be closed, divers may stay away, or word of mouth and bad press could negatively impact the tourist industry.

CoCo View has this system where you go out on the dive boat twice a day. The first dive on each trip is a "boat dive" and the second a "drop-off" dive. The boat dives are on different dive sites each day, and you follow the dive master. You return to the boat and stay on the boat for your surface interval. The boat then heads back towards the resort and drops you off at a location close to shore. That's usually either CoCo View Wall directly in front of the resort, or Newman's Wall across the cut where the wreck of the Prince Albert lies, in front of Fantasy Island. After being dropped off, you then work your way back to the "front yard" and then up to the shallows and the beach directly in front of the CoCo View bar and clubhouse.

Initially I didn't have much use for the drop-off dives as it was always the same dives. What I didn't consider is that wall diving is three dimensional and the same dive will be very different depending on what depth you are at. At 15-25 feet along the top of the wall, things look very different from say 45-50 feet, or at 80-100 feet where the wall meets the first of several sandy ledges and steps before dropping off vertically once again.

One afternoon, for example, we explored the top of the reef instead of the wall, and it was an almost magical experience. It was a sunny day and the afternoon sun illuminated the shallow reef for an effect that was warm and dramatic at the same time. Since it was very shallow, just between 5 and 15 feet, you could see all the colors, and that makes a huge difference. So we leisurely explored all the many chutes and channels that often make the top of a reef a fascinating maze. Due to the ever-present surge, shallow reefs close to the beach tend to be very clean and you see a lot of hard coral (as opposed to the soft, swaying life in less exposed areas). A word of warning: hard coral is hard and very sharp, and it's easy to get scraped and cut.

There is also a big difference from a boat dive where you must follow the dive master so as to get back to the boat. This means you can't linger behind when you see something interesting, and you can't move ahead when you're ready because underwater you can lose a group or a dive master very quickly even in decent visibility. You don't have that problem with a drop-off dive because you can set your own pace, and you know where to go. So each has its pros and cons.

Another thing I noticed this time is the large difference between healthy and damaged reefs. A healthy reef will have a diverse mix of strong and powerful colonies of different plants, sponges, and corals in vibrant colors. A damaged reef generally has much less color, a lot of dead and damaged plants and corals, and often a green sheen of algae in various forms, shapes, and sizes. Damaged reefs also do not look neat and clean; they often have silt and mud on them, and just generally look a bit like a garbage dump. I don't know how a reef goes from healthy and vibrant to sickly and damaged looking. Frequently, the two are close to each other. You can instantly tell which is which.

Those who remember the TV show "Fantasy Island" will see an uncanny resemblance between it and the Fantasy Island Resort across the channel from CoCo View. It's an island, it has awesome beaches including a cove, a bridge to it, a harbor, a seaplane, monkeys in the trees, hundreds of beach chairs and umbrellas, and a grand entrance. Unfortunately, everything looks sort of run down, and I hardly ever saw anyone there. Granted, this was the middle of July and thus probably not high season for the tropics, but CoCo View was pretty full. Is Fantasy Island losing it? I hope not as it wouldn't bode well for neighboring CoCo View. Fantasy Island wasn't always struggling. I was told that in the mid and late 1990s, still under the leadership of the late founder Albert Jackson, the place was packed and "a moneymaking machine." Then there came foreign investors and things went downhill. Now there's talk of new investment.

It was interesting to witness fish behavior. Little damselfish will aggressively defend their territory, leaping at divers and biting fingers and even your face when you get too close. Some speculate that lion fish stay in the walls because they don't want to risk being attacked by the damsels. Creole wrasse cruised right off the top of the walls in huge schools, with dive masters sometimes using their regulators to herd them with curtains of bubbles. Spade fish seem to cruise in gangs always seeking trouble, at times ganging up on divers and nipping at their fins, wet suits, and even regulators. They have the looks to go with their harassing behavior. Giant crabs are using their claws to pick up food stuff in front of them and then leisurely putting it into their mouths in amazingly humanlike fashion. Schools of little squids hover, occasionally burp ink, and dance in unison without apparent fear of divers. No fish will ever be touched, no matter how close they come. And it is amazing, as long as you don't harass them, how non-aggressive underwater creatures are. While mosquitoes and flies buzz you on land, dogs bark at you, and a number of animals are considered dangerous, underwater everything just goes their way. You can get within inches of a big lobster or crab, and it won't lunge at you. And when we saw 7 or 8-foot Moray Eels swimming we pursued them to get pictures rather than recoiling in fear. As long as you respect their territory and homes, you have nothing to fear from underwater life.

The water temperature in mid July was between 84 and 86 degrees Fahrenheit. That was warm enough for many to dive in just a bathing suit. I always wore my 3-mil wetsuit. Even 84 degrees is still 14 degrees below body temperature, and so it is possible to get cold on long dives (and all of our dives were between 60 and 90 minutes). The 3-mil worked just fine for me and a full suit also offers protection from scrapes and stings (we did encounter very small jellies when coming up a couple of times, and in wrecks it's also a good idea).

Since we're always testing underwater equipment on our dive trips, we used different cameras almost every day. This time we encountered an unusual number of glitches and also made a few mistakes. One of the two battery housing covers on our video mask cracked, rendering it unusable. I somehow forgot the charger for the G-Series Canon and relied on another friendly Canon owner for charges. I also recorded a lot of precious video on the Canon without switching the camera to underwater white balance, assuming automatic would be smart enough to recognize and adapt to underwater conditions. It wasn't. Our Flip HD video recorder that we tested inside an Ikelite housing stopped recording altogether and nothing we tried could revive it. This means we've had extraordinarily bad luck with Flips underwater, and they are usually rock-solid. A dSLR began displaying nothing but blur 20 minutes into dives, though camera operation seemed unaffected, and there was no noticeable fogging anywhere. Another camera fogged the lens of its housing about half an hour into each dive, and continued doing so no matter what we tried. Sometimes it cleared up later in the dive, sometimes it didn't. We always pass these experiences on to manufacturers. Some appreciate the reports and use them to improve their products, others view them as unwanted criticism.

When you're a new diver you constantly worry about air consumption and wonder how experienced divers use so little when you use so much. After a number of dives anxiety levels go down and you learn to control your breathing, and a bottle lasts longer. On this trip, a combination of things made air last longer for me. The resort consistently provided good fills. Unlike during earlier stays where fills often barely registered 2700, this time they were always at least 2900 psi and often over 3000 and up to 3200. That makes a difference. We also generally stayed shallower and I was definitely more relaxed, now that I have a decent number of dives to my name. So the typical one hour dives no longer ended with just 400 or 500 psi left over, but generally quite a bit more. A couple of drop-off dive went a full 100 minutes. Carol's air consumption is still much better than mine, and she used a small 60 cubic foot tank the whole time, as compared to the standard 80s. That way our air lasted about the same time.

Roatan seems an odd mix between English-speaking and Spanish-speaking people. Being part of Honduras, the official language should be Spanish, but those from English towns on the island were usually brought up speaking English and many only speak broken Spanish. And they insist that English is the official language. My guess is that Spanish will win out, and that may or may not be an advantage for an island that pretty much lives on tourism.

A few words about equipment. Ever since my dive computer conked out in the middle of a live aboard dive trip, I've been wearing two, one on each wrist. That way, if one fails I still have one left, and if Carol's fails, she can use one of mine as we will have the same dive profiles. As mentioned, wearing a full 3-mil wetsuit and dive boots worked well for me. Apart from staying comfortable, a full suit also provides protection from stings, scrapes and bites, and all those can happen with bare skin. The Roatan Marine Park does not allow the wearing of gloves so as to discourage divers from handling things underwater or grabbing sensitive coral and plants, and that's fine, but there are situations where you'd like to have gloves, such as around and inside a wreck with sharp and rusty metal. I also tried a new ultra-low volume Aqua Lung technisub micromask with split lenses. It worked very well and provided a great viewing angle, almost like not wearing a mask, but it was so small its skirt left marks in my face for hours after each dive. I did not bring a snorkel and regretted that, not so much on dives, but for during surface intervals when we often just played in shallow water.

On one of the dives I came across something that cannot be. Red at 60 feet. It cannot be because the color red disappears at about 15 feet, orange at maybe 30, then yellow. It's just a fact of diving physics. Yet, there it was, bright red at just over 60 feet. I took a picture of it without flash, and the camera saw the red as well. I took another with the flash on, and on that one, the flash brought out all the colors as it usually does. So far I have not come across a good explanation of what that red was, and why I could see it.

On the way back to California I again realized the folly of computerized booking systems that suggest flights with just half an hour or so to make a connection at an international airport. You need at least an hour and a half, what with the lines at immigration and customs. The frequent flier miles tickets also had us go from Roatan to Houston, then to Wichita, then to Denver, and only from there back to Sacramento. I am not sure how this could make financial sense for the airline, but then again we’re talking an industry that routinely loses billions while seemingly determine to harass its customers until they’ll simply stop flying altogether. As is, the Wichita flight was way late, and after a 45 minute palaver with airline service, we ended up on a direct flight from Houston to Sacramento. Why didn’t they do that in the first place?

Posted by conradb212 at 05:11 PM | Comments (0)

July 01, 2010

Watching "The Frogmen" (1951)

It's always interesting to watch old movies showing scuba, and recently I came across a mention of "The Frogmen," a black & white 1951 film produced by Samuel Engel and distributed by 20th Century Fox. The movie supposedly featured ground-breaking underwater video almost a decade before the series "Sea Hunt" with Lloyd Bridges popularized scuba on TV, and also five years before Jacques Cousteau won an award for his movie "The Silent World" at the Cannes Film Festival. In fact, the cinematography even earned an Oscar nomination. Amazingly, Netflix had it. I put it into my queue and watched it last night.

"The Frogmen" features Richard Widmark, Jeffrey Hunter, Dana Andrews and Gary Merrill, and tells the story of a Underwater Demolition Team (UDT) deployed in World War II in the Pacific Theatre to clear beaches for landing. The UDT was an actual elite special force of the US Navy, and the movie begins stating that "this is a true story based on incidents which occurred in the latter part of World War II..."

The plot is about a UDT team that had lost its beloved leader, and is now reluctant to accept a new commander, especially since the new guy had a different, no-nonsense style. There's excellent footage of how the UDT team, in just swimming trunks, masks and fins, reconnoiters the shallow waters of an enemy beach for mines, records data on slates, and then places explosives. The divers are deployed, one by one, from a landing craft type of fast boat into a Zodiac attached to its side. Most impressive is how they are then picked up again after the mission is complete: they line up in the water, and are retrieved, again one by one, via a rope loop as the boat speeds by them, sort of as shown in the movie "GI Jane" where actress Demi Moore attempts to join the Navy SEALs.

Scuba does not make an entry until the final part of the movie where the UDT team deploys from a submarine to lay mines onto a Japanese sub in a base. The team now wears drysuits and triple tanks, cuts its way through netting with trip wires and successfully performs the mission, though not without accidentally setting off the trip wires and having to engage in an underwater knife fight with Japanese free divers. His leadership in this mission finally earns the new commander the respect of his team and all ends well.

Even almost 60 years after it was shot, the movie is eminently watchable, with a good plot and, for the time, excellent footage. The underwater shots are better and more extensive than I expected.

Problem, though, is that it's not a true story as far as equipment goes. While Emile Gagnan and Jacques Cousteau did invent and test the demand valve regulator in 1943, the Aqua Lung didn't actually hit the market until 1946 in France and the early 1950s in the US. The US Navy definitely did not use scuba in WW II. In addition, for a mission as shown in the movie, the Navy would have used rebreathers, but even those were supposedly not yet used by the US Navy in WW II either. Which means that "The Frogmen" shows scuba technology that was not actually used until several years later by the UDT, probably in the early 1950s (see Wiki on Underwater Demolition Team).

Nonetheless, it was certainly interesting to watch "The Frogmen," and I can highly recommend it to anyone interested in military underwater deployments.

What's interesting is that the opening screen states, "This film could not have been produced without the active cooperation of the Department of Defense and the United States Navy", both of which certainly knew that the UDT had not used scuba in WW II. Perhaps, since this was during the era of the cold war, endorsing the impression that the US military had used such weapons was part of a scheme to discourage the enemy out there.

Posted by conradb212 at 06:06 PM | Comments (0)

June 15, 2010

Diving the California Channel Islands

When you want to go on a live aboard but don't quite have (or want to spend) the time or money, you can always go on a shorter charter trip. That's what we did when we boarded the good ship Conception in Santa Barbara, taking off for a three day dive trip to the California Channel Islands. What we're talking about here is a chain of eight islands off the coast of Southern California, roughly 15 to 30 miles away from the mainland. Most of the islands are part of a national park and uninhabited except for perhaps a campground or lighthouse. These are tall, rocky islands with a stark, dramatic, albeit not barren, beauty.

We got on the trip through our local dive shop (Fisheye Scuba in Folsom, Calif.) and the cost was remarkably low, probably less than a quarter of what it costs to be on a Caribbean live aboard for a week. No hassling with an airplane trip either. Instead, we packed the car with dive gear and whatever else we thought we might need without ever weighing a bag or agonizing of what to leave behind. We even took our own tanks and weights. Tanks was a bit of an issue because Carol likes to dive Nitrox, and there wasn't any on the Truth Aquatics boats. So we took along three tanks filled with Nitrox, with the intent of Carol using one per day, topping it off with air after each dive. Me, I lugged along my big old low-pressure Steel 95.

The drive down Interstate 5 was uneventful and gave me a chance to check out my latest GPS, a Magellan with a big 7-inch screen. It turned out to be as crotchety and infuriatingly inflexible as most of its predecessors, and was also no help at all in finding our way into and around Santa Barbara's massive marina. Mapping app on the Apple iPad to the rescue. We finally made it, ran into two other couples who were going on the trip, and, since it wasn't time yet to board, walked over to Stearns Wharf, a massive wooden pier jutting out many hundreds of feet into the ocean. Here we learned a bit about Channel Island cruising basics from our new friends.

These boats are considerably smaller than your average full-size live aboard, but still large enough for dozens of divers (or kayakers or fishermen or anyone else). There aren't individual staterooms, but single and double bunks in the bottom of the boat. The Conception is about 80 feet long (as compared to 110 to 130 feet for most Caribbean live aboards).

After an early dinner at a pizza place, the Conception was ready to board. Boarding meant hauling all our gear from the marina parking in rickedy push carts and then hefting it all on and below deck. No crew waiting here to help like on the big live aboards; it's all self-service. In fact, we didn't see the crew until later and relied on tips from experienced Channel Island travelers instead to find our way around. The bunks below deck at first looked claustrophobic, without any place to stow away stuff, but since the boat wasn't full we had space to spread out a bit and it actually turned out to be a nice and cozy experience. The bunks came with mattresses, pillows and blankets, but travelers brought along their own sheets and bedding (or sleeping bags).

Looking around revealed a bathroom section with sinks and two large showers, three toilets up on the main deck, a large dive deck where we set up our dive gear, a large dining/hangout room on the main deck, and upstairs the wheel house with space to enjoy the view. We signed the requisite waivers, then settled for the night (but not before taking a Bonine and some ginger against potential sea sickness).

The Conception left Santa Barbara sometime during the night and the seas were rather choppy. I was quite aware of it, but apparently never really woke up as when I did open my eyes, we were already there, there being Santa Cruz island, the largest of the northern islands. It's almost a hundred square miles or so of rock, jutting out of the ocean in ragged peaks and soaring to almost 2,500 feet at its highest point at Devils Peak. The boat was milling back and forth, something we'd come to experience many more times over the three days of the trip as the captain was either trying to find a good or better spot, or getting the anchor to bite.

The crew introduced themselves, there being a captain and assistant captain, two deckhands/dive masters, and Jill, the cook. We learned the law of the land, covering the basics of safety, use of bathrooms, food, diving, schedule and the weather situation. Unlike on "full" live aboards, everyone's on their own for diving. A safety diver is standing by, all suited up and ready to go, but there aren't any dive masters guiding the dives. Tanks would be refilled after each dive from the ship's compressors, the crew would hand you cameras when you went in, assisted in getting back on the boat, and meticulously kept track of all divers, but no more than that.

Our first dive was at a dive site called Frys, close to the shore (as all dives would be) and with plenty of kelp. The water wasn't quite as cold as the captain had said it might be, but still a chilly 56 degrees. I was wearing a 5mm shorty with hood over my 7mm wetsuit, and that made the cold water bearable, though hands and feet got cold quickly. All of our group wore wetsuits, other guests wore dry suits, mostly DUI.

Visibility was marginal, perhaps 20 feet or so. This meant descending along the anchor line until we hit bottom close to the shore. There was a good deal of kelp, making for a magical underwater forest. Kelp is probably something that's impossible to describe to non-divers. It looks just like ugly seaweed floating on the surface. Underwater it's graceful, beautiful strands and leafy structures streaming up from the sea bottom like magical trees. It's beautiful to see and swim through, and though divers may occasionally get snagged a bit, it's no problem at all to swim through the forests and around individual plants.

We didn't see a lot of fish, though on those first two dives at Frys we encountered both a Horn Shark and a Swell Shark, both smallish sharks that like to hang out in rocky reefs and kelp beds. We also saw a sea hare, a huge variety of different star fish, some colorful nudibranchs, and a trillion urchins, both of the large black variety and the smaller blue kind. One type of fish was abundant: sardines. They swam around us in huge schools, a silvery dance of little fish, darting and weaving in unison.

Orientation was difficult due to the poor visibility, and so it was good that we were always close to the shore and the boat, and in fairly shallow water. In fact, all dives were in just between 30 and 50 feet, but without being able to see, it might as well have been a hundred. As is, staying shallow meant more light, whatever there was, and also never having to worry about running low on air. In fact, I never came close to using up my big 95-cubic foot tank.

We ended up skipping the two afternoon dives as the visibility was only getting worse and it was quite cold. The dry suit divers, of course, went, but their reports afterwards showed that we hadn't missed anything. No night dive either; the conditions just weren't there.

Dinner was a treat. Cook Jill barbecued massive slabs of tri-tip steaks on the Conception's outdoor grill. The food was terrific for the whole trip, with breakfast made to order for each diver, ample sweets and snacks between meals, fresh salads, and enough variety and accommodation of special requests to satisfy everyone onboard. For dessert there were strawberries, cheesecake, ice cream and cake.

Had anyone told me I'd have perhaps the best few nights' sleep in a long while, I would not have believed them. Yet, I slept like a baby in our bunk in the bowels of the gently rocking Conception, and also slept more and longer than I usually do. And that was not out of boredom, but just the pleasant exhaustion from diving and being on the sea.

While the weather wasn't bad and we had sun during most of our trip, including a breathtaking sunset, the captain had to hustle to keep us in reasonably calm waters with a degree of visibility and free of current. So on the second day we moved on to Anacapa, the smallest of the northern islands. It's just a square mile or so of rock with a lighthouse and dramatic arcs and peaks. Anacapa, too, soars up to almost a thousand feet straight out of the sea, making it perfect for birds of all kinds.

And also for sea lions. Our first dive was at The Rookery, named after the small colonies of sea lions inhabiting the narrow strips of sand in the numerous small coves. Turns out the current was quite a bit more than expected, and so we never let go of the anchor line until we hit the rocky reef close to shore at no more than 25 feet or so. Even that provided little sanctuary from the ripping current and so, after a brief excursion in search of calmer waters, I returned to the anchor line and hung on, taking a close-up look at all the urchins, stars, garibaldis and plantlife there. At times, sea lions appeared out of nowhere, darting around us with almost impossible speed and grace. It was a short dive, though, and after no more than 35 minutes or so we had pulled ourselves back to the boat. The crew had actually deployed a long surge line so that divers blown away by the current could swim to it and pull themselves back to the boat. Amazingly, no one lost their way and no one had gotten blown off-course.

After a good deal of hunting and searching, the Conception anchored at another Anacapa dive spot, this one called The Aquarium. Visibility was no better (around 20 feet), but at least there was no current and so we explored the sandy bottom with kelp and rocks at around 40 feet. You can find all sorts of interesting critters on kelp and that's what we did. This would have been a spectacular site had we only had a bit more viz. As is, we moved on to The Bat Cave instead.

Here we were, once again, close to the impressive rocks that drop almost vertically into the sea, forming small coves and shallow caves. We followed the anchor line through thick beds of kelp, enjoying the swaying of the plants with its many colors and dancing lights. Close to the rock we got into heavy surge moving and heaving us back and forth through an almost exotic wealth of kelp and plants. The surge got to be a bit much and so we headed away from the cliffs into deeper water, weaving through kelp and rock in what was by far my most favorite dive of the trip. We took pictures and shot video and enjoyed ourselves despite the still cold water (low 60s).

After another great night's sleep in the bunk (and an evening spotting humpback whales), the Conception returned to Santa Cruz island and finally dropped anchor at the Scorpion Anchorage where there are two spires jutting out of the water. They're simply named Rock 1 and Rock 2, peeking out of the water by no more than 15 or 20 feet. Here we saw a couple of other boats,a pier, and some structures on land -- apparently part of a ranger station and a campground. They'd even planted palm trees.

Diving Rock 1 once again meant following the anchor line in murky viz, and then diving around the rock, which broke out of a sandy bottom at perhaps 30 feet. Thanks to varied rock formations and plentiful sealife, this was a lot more fun than it sounds. We circled the pinnacle three times or so, each time finding new things to watch and photograph, then used the compass to head back for the boat. We passed on Rock 2 and had already started packing our gear when the captain, perhaps making up for the missed night dives, stopped over the wreck of a World War II mine sweeper. The dry suit guys all went in, and most found the wreck that apparently was remarkably well preserved, with most of the metal parts still intact.

After a smooth crossing of the Santa Barbara Channel, which I spent dozing in my bunk, we were back in the marina by 5 o'clock or so. That was the end of a truly enjoyable trip with interesting diving, great camaraderie, terrific food, and a friendly, helpful crew. We'll be back for sure.

Posted by conradb212 at 02:37 PM | Comments (0)

May 03, 2010

Experimenting with dive gear

When I first took my certification classes a few short (it seems) years ago, I had absolutely no idea what kind of gear to buy. So I asked for expert advice and bought my first snorkel, pair of fins, mask and boots list in hand. It was good advice as, 133 dives later, I am still using that exact same set of gear. In fact, I am also still using the same BC, regulator and dive computer.

This, however, does not mean I'm not experimenting with dive gear. That's because while you get used to your gear, it's certain to have some annoyances and inadequacies you'll never get used to, and if you're the inquisitive type you'll also feel a strong urge to try out whatever new stuff the dive industry comes up with each year.

The first thing I started experimenting with was masks. That's because an ill-fitting mask can make you miserable, and because masks are inexpensive enough so that picking one up every now and then won't break the bank. I probably bought half a dozen masks to find out for myself how split lenses work versus a single lens, whether masks with panoramic side windows can improve peripheral vision, whether masks with a larger lens can reduce the sense of tunnel vision you can get with small lens masks, whether purge valves work, and whether there's much of a difference between clear silicon skirts and opaque ones.

In the process I found that my original mask worked best for me and the only thing I liked better was the same shape and design, but with a clear skirt. I also learned to never use a new mask on a real dive without making absolutely certain that whatever protective coating the manufacturer applied to the lens had thoroughly been removed, and that finding the right anti-fog is worth its weight in gold.

Experimenting with gear also showed me that I need dive boots with rigid soles because I inevitably get cramps in my feet when I use boots with lighter, more pliable soles. And that, for me at least, having a regulator mouth piece that fits just right is a must unless I want to suffer through three quarters of every dive, with a hard, recalcitrant mouthpiece loosely between my lips.

Unfortunately, trying out dive gear isn't always easy. Sure, you can put on gloves and see how they fit, but you won't know how well they truly work for you until you wear them on a real dive and see if you can still operate your dive computer at 100 feet when the water is really cold. And trying out a new dive computer means you have to find a shop who'll let you try it (not so likely with expensive new gear).

Of my original gear, my first wetsuit was first to be replaced; it was simply too hard to put on, and being a size medium on a medium-tall body, its arms and legs were too short. I knew about the arms and legs when I bought it, but I'd simply not had the will to try on another in sweltering heat. And I had not knowd that I'd literally end up hurting my hands and fingers from wrestling with the thing on real dives. Only experimenting with several other wetsuits showed me the (for me) proper balance between elasticity, size and design that made a suit do its job while still being comfortable and reasonably easy to put on. In essence, if it's too tight you're miserable. If it's too loose water will slosh in and you get cold.

There's also another aspect of wetsuits to consider: how easy they are to pull down when you need to pee! That's one of those things no one talks about, but every diver knows what it feels like when you suddenly know you have to go five minutes before a dive, or when you come up from a dive and badly need to go in the tiny head (boat speak for bathroom) of a crowded dive boat. Why wetsuits don't have zippers is beyond me. So when my local dive shop had a special sale on shorties with a whole body zipper, I picked one up for a song. These shorties are actually meant to be worn over a thick wetsuit and they have a built-in hood. But I figured they might also come in handy in warm water without wearing a wetsuit underneath.

So I decided to try gear in the pool in 64 degree water. I wore the shorty just over a bathing suit and it worked exceptionally well. It was a bit too large to keep water from coming in, but it still kept my torso and head nice and warm, and it was super-easy to put on and take off. So I bought a second one a size smaller so I have one for its original purpose (to be worn for extra warmth over a thick wetsuit, and one for use in warm water for convenience).

The primary reason for the pool test session, however, was trying out the SpareAir bottle Carol had given me as a Christmas present. There's plenty of debate on whether it makes sense to take a pony bottle on a dive and I wrote about it in an earlier entry. For me, though, the fact is that I often find myself diving and suddenly being very aware that it'd be a really bad thing if something were to happen to my air supply. I look at my dive buddy or the closest diver and wonder if I could actually get to them in time should something happen. You can't holler to people underwater if something goes wrong, and you can't move very fast. Add to that the fact that if the next breath out of a tank doesn't come, you're already in need of a breath, and the thought is quite scary. So I always felt redundancy in the form of a small pony bottle made sense.

My SpareAir is a small yellow bottle a bit over a foot long, including the second stage and mouth piece that's part of it. Pressurized to 3,000 psi, the little bottle holds three cubic foot. The Spare Air package comes with a yoke adapter that lets you fill the SpareAir from a regular scuba tank (you can, of course, also have it filled at a dive shop). But how easy is it to fill the bottle yourself, and how long will it actually last underwater?

Filling it is easy. The SpareAir has a thread for the supplied yoke adapter. You screw that into the SpareAir, then attach the yoke to your scuba tank the exact same way you put on the regulator. You then slowly open the air valve on the tank to start filling the SpareAir. There is no pressure gauge on the SpareAir. Instead, there is a small adapter with a bolt that sits in a groove. Pressure pushes the bolt out, and you know the bottle is filled to its rated capacity of 3,000 psi when the bolt is flush with the surface of the screw. Imprecise for sure, but it will give you an approximate reading on how much air is in the bottle.

Which isn't much. Three cubic foot is just about 1/27th of the content of a standard 80 cubic foot tank. So if one of those tanks lasts me anywhere from 45 minutes to 75 minutes, depending on depth, water temperature, and stress, the SpareAir would theoretically provide an additional two or three minutes.

Before you take a SpareAir along, you need to figure out where to mount it. Scuba gear is infuriatingly bulky as it is, and adding anything only serves to further increase your drag (and stuff that can fall off or get you snagged). The SpareAir documentation shows several ways to attach the bottle in its yellow canvas case to your gear. It's small enough to fit about anywhere, so I ended up clipping it onto my chest.

A the bottom of the pool I removed the SpareAir from its case (easy enough) and began breathing from it. First impression: damn, that goes hard! But air did come out, and after a few breaths it almost seemed normal. I sat and slowly swam around, holding the bottle in my hand. It's actually about neutrally buoyant and you can swim with it without holding it. I was wondering if having to suck this hard would contribute to panic in an emergency situation, but probably not; at least there is air.

With each consecutive breath I wondered how long the little bottle would hold out, and what would happen when it was empty. Ten, twenty, thirty breaths, and no difference. I also looked at the time on my dive computer. I figured I normally take between six and ten breaths a minute. 40 breaths, and there was still air and I did't have to suck harder. It finally gave out at 50, and I had been on the Spare Air for five or six minutes.

Now using the SpareAir in a pool at seven feet is one thing, using it on a real dive another. Air that lasts 50 breaths would only last 15 or so at 100 feet or 25 at 30 feet. And that's not taking into consideration panic or having to work hard. But the little bottle does work, and if push comes to shove, having a few more breaths to figure out what to do seems a whole lot better than having none.

Posted by conradb212 at 03:42 PM | Comments (0)

April 29, 2010

No longer a beginner

I liked diving in Cozumel so much that we went back there in February. Going back to a familiar place is always nice, though when I do it I also always feel like I am missing an opportunity to explore something new instead.

As far as diving goes, returning to Cozumel was a bit of a coming-of-age trip for me. With the 15 dives I did with the Sand Dollar dive shop at the Wyndham there, my total is now 132 dives. That's nothing compared to enthusiastic divers who’ve been at it for years and decades, but still more than most.

I no longer feel like a beginning diver. I am no longer nervous before every dive. I usually, though not always, have more experience than most on a boat. That made me feel much more at ease. I also found myself helping others, offering suggestions, was asked for advice and even saw other divers imitating my form underwater.

Most of the time I felt completely in control, most of the time my buoyancy was just fine, and I knew that when I went through narrow swimthroughs I would neither bump into things nor kick up sand. I felt comfortable following the guide inside a wreck and didn't kick up silt in there either. When I descend I no longer anxiously dump air and then drop down feet first. Instead, I reach to my right shoulder and dump air from my BC through the valve there, then do a jackknife and dive down head-first. When my mask fogs a bit, I simply let in a bit of water and swirl it around so I have a clear field of vision again. I no longer spend every moment of a dive painfully aware that I am deep underwater and, should anything go wrong, I cannot breathe. I still think about it every now and then, but mostly I just enjoy the dives.

I found again how very important it is to equalize your ears properly, always. As you gain more experience, you do this pretty much automatically, but there will probably always be times when pressure sneaks up on you, or your body does not respond they way it normally does. I don’t know what I neglected to do that caused my left ear to not properly equalize during one of the dives, but two weeks later there was still residual rumbling in there, so something must have happened. Just like during my first ocean dives in Roatan where I didn’t slow down a descent during a sinus pain and paid for it with nose bleeds for several dives.

It’s also amazing what difference little things like the right regulator mouthpiece can make. This had been an issue for me almost from the start of my diving career. The standard mouthpiece hurt my gums and I felt like I was constantly fighting it as the air hose from the tank tried to twist it into a position that was not comfortable for me. The latter was addressed by replacing the standard hose on my Scubapro second stage with an Atomic Comfort Swivel hose, which must be one of the all-time greatest ergonomic innovations in scuba. The former was fixed by replacing the hard, one-size-fits-all mouthpiece with a custom mouthpiece by SeaCure. It’s made of a special plastic that you heat up, bite on it, then let cool off. Presto: custom mouthpiece. That made a huge difference as well. Between the two, all discomfort is now gone.

130 dives is nothing compared to Carol's 2500, or the hundreds that many recreational divers compile over the years, but it did make a difference.

Posted by conradb212 at 04:17 PM | Comments (0)

November 18, 2009

Drift diving in Cozumel

When people think of diving in Cozumel, they generally think of drift diving. That means the current is such that the dive boat drops you off in one location and then picks you up at another. Drift makes everything a little different from diving in places where the boat is moored and you’ll always get back to the boat in the same spot. It also means there is no anchor line that can be located on the way back and back up. So how does drift diving in Cozumel work?

First, there are only a few ports or marinas along the west coast of Cozumel, which is where almost all hotels and also the one and only town (San Miguel) are. So the boats all start out from a few dispatch places and then go and pick up divers at resort, hotel and dive shop piers. Divers buy individual dives or sign up for multiple dives to get a better rate. Generally, it’s about US$32 per dive. You don’t necessarily have to sign up with your hotel or resort’s dive shop.

Once a boat arrives, prepare for some stampeding and general confusion as no one ever seems to be quite sure what boat they are supposed to be on or are allowed to be on. Sometimes you get a “boarding pass,” sometimes someone simply takes your money and tells you where to go. Reservations seem to mean very little, so look out for yourself.

Chances are you won’t do all your dives on the same boat or with the same dive master, though sometimes a dive master will make efforts to book good customers (i.e. those who aren’t a nuisance above and under water, and who also tip well). Boats come in many different sizes. Before this trip I thought Cozumel dive boats were either big, sluggish “cattle boats” or speedy little boats, each with its inherent pros and cons. In fact, you see the whole gamut from massive catamarans to standard boats with room for 16 divers or so, to smaller pontoon boats for eight or so, to really small boats where you have to enter the water via back-roll. Some boats are fairly new, others are pretty beat up. A particular menace are boats that do not have adequate tank retainer systems (tired/broken clips instead of recessed round holes) and no windshield in the front. This means that tanks are in constant danger of falling off, doing damage to equipment and people. It also means you’re getting sprayed constantly even in moderately rough water.

Cozumel is not a large island and there really are only a few reefs and dive sites. It is, however, still large enough so that where you stay pretty much determines where dive boats will likely take you. Since most boats return to the docks after each and every dive, but certainly at noon time, they don’t like to go to remote dive sites. This means that if you stay in San Miguel, you’ll likely be diving the sites that are fairly close to town. If you stay in a hotel or resort farther south on the island, you’ll be closer to some of Cozumel’s most famous reefs, such as the Santa Rosa wall and the several Palancar reefs and walls.

As for drift, the current varies from barely noticeable in some locations to quite strong in others. Unlike the surge you might experience on some islands close to the beach, the current off Cozumel is constant and steady. You’re not getting buffeted around at all. It’s more like being on a conveyor belt or escalator. You just go along for the ride.

This means that divers need to stay together in groups with their dive master, or at least stay within viewing distance. You get in together, go down together, then follow the dive master as only he will know where he’ll be going and when he’ll be going back up. When the dive master decides to go up, he’ll inflate a safety sausage on a line that signifies to the boat where the divers will come up. If you miss the dive master here, you may end up surfacing a distance away from the dive boat. They’ll likely find you, but it’s not a good idea to take a chance. It can also be confusing because some of the more popular dive sites can have dozens of dive boats in close proximity and it can be difficult to figure out which one is yours, or for the boat captain to figure out which surfacing divers belongs on his boat.

The disadvantage of this system is that you can’t just stay down a bit longer if you still have enough air. It’s frowned upon even if there is almost no current, and if there is current, you’ll drift away from the boat.

As for the dive sites, some are truly spectacular. Be aware, though, that you may not see the same scenery someone else will see on the same dive. That’s because those reefs are fairly large and unlike other places where boats moor, the boat never seems to drop divers off twice in the same location. So depending on your drop-off, you may be treated to spectacular sights or to unexceptional sand chutes and plains and not much else. We did, for example, three dives to the famous Santa Rosa wall. On the first dive, after a ten minute swim/drift we got to see the wall/slope in all its splendor and it was a breathtaking experience. On a second dive, we saw no wall at all and simply labored against the drift over unexciting and mostly flat sea bottom for the entire time. On the third dive I specifically asked to be dropped off at the wall and, presto, instant wall.

In fact, you cannot even be totally sure you’ll be taken to the site you’re told you’re going. While sometimes the destination is agreed on beforehand, most of the time the dive master(s) will ask the group where they want to go and it’s then decided by consensus. What happens then seems to depend on traffic, current, or the mood of the captain. For example, an otherwise splendid dive to the Palancar Brick dive site yielded plenty of great scenery and swim-throughs, but no bricks at all. A next day’s dive to “Colombia Deep” showed bricks but wasn’t deep at all.

The above, and many other instances, require an understanding of the local mentality that differs quite a bit from what Americans may be used to. It’s almost impossible to get a definite answer, you have to take a lot on faith alone, and you really never know what is actually going to happen. You may be asked to arrive at 8:30 and then boat leaves at 10. Or you may be asked to get there by 9 and the boat has already left. Reservations mean nothing as they are usually lost or not honored. Add to that the occasional language barrier and things can get a bit frustrating.

That said, the diving can be spectacular. The strong current along the island means the water is constantly moving and so visibility is better than in most places. 150 to 200 feet is not uncommon. In some places it’s like swimming in an aquarium, it’s so clear. Those accustomed to vertical walls (like in Roatan or other Caribbean islands) will find the Cozumel reefs quite different. The reefs are composed of huge heads and formations that have numerous cuts, gullies, tunnels and swimthroughs. That makes for a dramatic, interesting and very attractive diving experience. As of November 2009, the reefs were in splendid health and condition. We saw a little coral bleaching here and there, but almost everything is in full bloom and without damage or silting or wear.

In terms of critters, some of them are plentiful, others less so. There’s the usual Caribbean variety of parrot fish, damsel fish, angel fish, groupers, spiny lobsters, giant crabs, moray eels, French grunts, Southern stingray and spotted rays, etc. You also see the occasional splendid toad fish peeking out from under a rock, an octopus, a turtle or two, and, if you’re lucky, a nurse shark. We didn’t see any other sharks, though some divers claim they’ve seen some.

Posted by conradb212 at 04:41 PM | Comments (0)

November 06, 2009

Cozumel

For once, I am off to a new trip before I even reported on the last one. That's weird bcause I wrote about 10,000 words (no kidding) and shot many hundreds of pictures and hours of video on my August trip on the liveaboard "Turks & Caicos Explorer II." But that'll have to wait until I get back from a week in Cozumel, a small island off the Eastern coast of Mexico, and a drift diving Mecca. As usual, I have no idea what to expect, except that it may be pretty wet. Yes, a tropical storm is supposed to hit the area a day or so after my arrival. Well, we'll see.

So all the bags are packed. Which is no mean feat these days what with the airlines' 50-pound limit per piece of luggage. I had no idea a couple of extra T-shirts weighed that much. And then there's the camera gear, of course, and that always weighs a ton.

Posted by conradb212 at 12:56 AM | Comments (0)

September 20, 2009

Fallen Leaf Lake

When I talk about diving Lake Tahoe or other local venues, people inevitably ask about the water temperature, which is usually in the mid to high 60s in the summer and late summer. That's apparently too cold for many divers to even consider. That's unfortunate as they are missing out not only on some good diving, but also on the adventures that come with each and every dive trip. I thought of that again after spending an unforgettable day diving Fallen Leaf Lake near Lake Tahoe.

The water level at Fallen Leaf Lake, whose name originates from an Indian legend, is at about 6,370 feet, as mentioned in a prior entry. There isn't much information on the lake itself, though American nature writer and lecturer George Wharton James described the area in "The Lake of the Sky," published around 1915 (where he describes the water level as being 6,300 feet, 80 feet higher than Tahoe). A small dam was built in 1934 and some sources refer to the lake as a reservoir, although the water level appears to be constant. Despite Fallen Leaf Lake's proximity to Lake Tahoe and Route 89, it's a remote area where a very narrow and only marginally paved road leads part-way around the lake. There are small (albeit very expensive) cottages along the east side of the lake, and the tiny community of Fallen Leaf at the south end has a post office, but it's only open a few months of the year as is the one and only shop.

Remote though the area is, it has an amazing history. In 1863, a man by the name of Nathan Gilmore discovered mineral springs a couple of miles west of Fallen Leaf, just past a tiny body of water now known as Lily Lake for the water lilies on it. Gilmore eventually built a wagon road from Fallen Leaf Lake, set up a summer camp and log home so he could bottle and ship the carbonated water from the spring, and by 1880, "Glen Alpine Springs" had become a resort. By 1910, the resort, which now even had a post office, could be reached by automobile (it can't anymore). In the 1920s, noted architect Bernard Maybeck designed no fewer than 20 buildings for Glen Alpine Springs, though only six were ever built. The resort was open until the mid-1960s, then eventually became a Federal Historical District.

Today you can drive up to Lily Lake on an impossibly narrow mountain road where you literally have to get off the road if someone comes at you. At Lily Lake there is a small, tidy parking lot nestled into the terrain. There are only about 20 very tight spaces, and if those are taken there is nowhere to go and you have to return. Some sort of "Lot Full" notification system would greatly reduce traffic to and from the area. Anyway, the views around Lily Lake are spectacular and, in my book, compare favorably even with Yosemite, especially if you factor in the complete absence of Yosemite's crowded tourist atmosphere. From Lily Lake it is a short one-mile hike to Glen Alpine Springs, which we didn't do as we got there after our dive when it was already getting late.

But to the diving itself. We parked at the lot by the Fallen Leaf store (and Post Office when it is open) and carried our gear down to the boat ramp. You can unload down there, too, but then have to move the car back up on the lot. It was a beautiful mid-September day with the temperature in the low 80s, and the water a nice 67 degrees on the surface. This was going to be not only our first dive in Fallen Leaf Lake, but also the first with our new Uwatec Galileo Sol dive computers.

The water looked absolutely gorgeous, but as soon as we got under it became apparent that this was not an ideal dive site. The beach instantly falls off at an almost 45 degree angle (James had indicated a depth of 380 feet in his book). The bottom is all silt and gets stirred up if you so much as whirl a fin within two or three feet or so. Once we got underway we found ourself at a depth of almost 60 feet just a few dozen feet away from shore. The water temperature quickly dropped, too, and there was one of those massive thermoclines you can actually see as optical distortions, as if the water were some gelatinous mass. Visibility wasn't nearly as good as I'd expected and it was already getting darker. The steep, featureless silty slope made me feel somewhat disoriented and I also found that I could not easily see the very detailed display of my new Galileo.

We slowly made our way along the slope, ascending to about 30 feet where we found all sorts of discarded beer bottles and soda cans (including a special bi-centennial one from 1976) but not much else. There was driftwood and a few massive tree trunks, but overall it was quite uneventful. Between having to constantly try not to stir up silt while looking for things and the steep slope, I never really got into it, although we actually stayed down for a full hour. Carol emerged with two baskets full of cans and bottles and other assorted trash (though it really wasn't bad at the bottom), and I went up to take my gear off and bring the car down to the dock.

The Fallen Leaf store makes decent burgers and chicken strips (and serves nice, big portions of ice cream), and so we munched on those on the establishment's veranda overlooking the lake. We then made our way up to Lily Lake, taking in the breathtaking vistas.

Even though the dive itself wasn't spectacular, we spent a wonderful day exploring, seeing new things, discovering nature, and realizing once again that you really don't have to travel far to see great things and have a wonderful time. The Sierra Nevadas are spectacular, and diving in some of those lakes is not only an adventure, it is also absolutely free.

Posted by conradb212 at 04:09 PM | Comments (0)

September 08, 2009

Tahoe and Fallen Leaf Lake

I've been meaning to dive Lake Tahoe again ever since late Spring, and here it is September again before I actually got around to doing it. Tahoe is only an hour and a half from my house, max, and I should take advantage of going up there much more often, even if there really isn't much to see in the lake. But the breathtaking scenery up there alone is worth a trip, and the water is cleaner and clearer than almost anywhere.

So once I got my dive computer back from Scubapro and my gear was back from the annual service, there really weren't any more excuses to put off a day trip to Tahoe, especially since we wanted to check out our new High Pressure 100 cubic foot steel tanks. We decided on Meeks Bay on the California side of the lake because of its easy access. I prefer the Rubicon site at D. L. Bliss state park, but hefting equipment down from the parking lot to the little beach there is just brutal, and getting it back up even more so. So Meeks Bay it was, and it's always nice there.

We went on a Friday and, worrying about having to hunt for a parking spot with the pre-Labor Day crowd, tried to get there bright and early. It got to be 10AM anyway, but our fears were proven wrong; not a car in the lot and we had the beach pretty much to ourselves. It was a gorgeous day but, this being early September, it was quite fresh and so we waited for the sun to warm things up a bit. The water seemed in the mid to high 60s as it usually is in late summer at Tahoe.

After half an hour or so two more divers arrived and we got to talking as we donned our gear. They were old friends and career military, one an experienced diver, the other having just a few dives. I shared what I knew about Meeks Bay and the lay of the land. We took our time and they were in first. Our new Steel 100 tanks made a good first impression. They had the same circumference as the standard Aluminum 80s we had used in Turks and Caicos, and so there was no need to adjust the tank straps on our BCs. And though they were quite a bit taller than Carol's smaller steel tanks, they were lighter and handier than I had expected. We wore 7mil wetsuits, hoods and gloves, and I decided on 14 pounds of weight whereas Carol took 12 (you need a bit more weight than you'd expect because the lower surface pressure at altitude means the closed-cell foam of the wetsuit expands).

The water was wonderfully refreshing and didn't feel cold at all. I used the Liquid Image VideoMask instead of my Scubapro Frameless. We were about ready to go when I realized that our new acquaintances had some problems. One of them was on his back and calling for help. He did not seem in imminent danger and his friend was closeby, but we hurried over there anyway. He had an asthma attack and could not breathe. He'd dropped his mask, snorkel and weight belt and we recovered that. Fortunately, the attack quickly passed, but that was it for his diving plans. It must be very frustrating to have something like that happen, but certainly better above water than during a dive.

So we finally got ready and... Carol's dive computer errored out. Its battery had been down to the mid 50%s and we had contemplated sending it to Scubapro for a battery replacement, but decided against it since it takes Scubapro weeks to get the computer back. So that came back to bite us. I got back out of the water and to the car to get Carol's backup computer. It's not air-integrated and we didn't bring along a pressure gauge, but since she uses less air than me anyway and we had two big, full 100 cubic foot tanks, we decided to go.

The water was clearer than last year, but not as clear as it had been two years ago. It actually seemed fairly murky to me, though Carol later said it'd been in the 50-75 foot range. The southern side of Meeks Bay is quite shallow for the first ten minutes of the dive or so, barely 15 feet. Then, all of a sudden, you see a steep incline and we worked our way around boulders down the slope. Within just a few minutes we were at 85 feet and I saw what looked like a man-made structure. It turned out to be the wreck of a small motorboat. I didn't want to go any deeper but Carol went down to the boat at about 100 feet and took pictures. The temperature had dropped into the 50s, but it still didn't feel cold.

The steep slope probably goes down to well over 1,000 feet and so the temptation was there to descend a bit more, but we were on Nitrox 32 with a MOD of 116 feet, there wasn't much light, and there wasn't much to see. So we did slow ascent back up to 30 feet and swam around the huge boulders, took pictures of crawdads, and looked at schools of silvery fish shooting around the rocks. Diving is always wonderful, but I really did miss all the plants and life of the ocean. Without it, there is just... nothing.

Technically, things went well. My replacement computer worked as it should, the steel tanks felt good, and I probably would have been fine with 10 or 12 pounds of weight. I had started the dive with 3,300 psi and had 1,500 psi left after a 54 minute dive. Carol started with 3,400 and ended with 2,200. So these tanks are good for two dives.

We had a leisurely lunch at Rosie's in Tahoe City, then decided to check out Fallen Leaf Lake on the way back. Fallen Leaf is just a couple of miles off Route 89 that goes along Lake Tahoe, but the lake level is at 6,370 feet, about 150 feet higher than Lake Tahoe. It's a small, longish lake maybe three miles long and less than a mile wide. The road along Fallen Leaf Lake is very narrow and barely paved, and it can be quite an adventure when someone comes at you. There isn't any public parking either, except for a few spots at the village of Fallen Leaf where we stopped and had ice cream. There's a little marina and a small public beach, and we instantly had a great desire to dive the incredibly clear lake. The guy at the boat rental place said the bottom drops off quickly, with the end of the marina already at 100 feet. It was too late in the day, though, and so we decided we'd come back some other time.

Posted by conradb212 at 02:33 AM | Comments (0)

August 20, 2009

What do you do when your dive computer fails?

On the whole, dive computers are fantastically reliable. In an era where iPhones and other assorted high-tech gear run for a few hours on a battery charge, dive computers can go for years on the same battery. And while I often have to reboot even my Mac several time a day, dive computers never seem to crash. That is remarkable.

Nothing, however, is infallible, and my Uwatec Smart-Z dive computer finally quit on me. Unfortunately right in the middle of a dive trip. One day it was happily humming along, doing its thing, showing a remaining battery charge of 72% after just over three years and over a hundred dives, the next it displayed a little wrench symbol and nothing else. This means it needs service or repair. Not good when you're on a live-aboard in the Caribbean.

Fortunately for me, my dive buddy had been wearing two computers on every dive, and so I was able to use hers. Both of us had used Nitrox, and both of us had gone on the same dives, so using her computer was okay as we were both on the same nitrogen schedule. The backup computer wasn't air-integrated, but the boat had some spare/rental pressure gauges, and so we attached one of them onto my first stage.

I was still ticked off at my dive computer as I had not yet downloaded the day's four dives when it quit. I always use an infrared adapter to download my dive data from the dive computer to my notebook. I then go through the dives, add commentary and annotations, check average depth, average and peak air consumption and so on. For the rest of the week, none of that for me.

On some dive computers you can change the batteries anywhere. A guy on the boat had his done right before a dive, no big deal. Changing the battery on my liquid-filled Smart-Z with its soldered battery is a much bigger deal, one that requires sending the computer back to Scubapro. Not even Scubapro dealers can/are supposed to do it. And without a special rush order, sending and getting the computer back takes weeks.

I really missed my dive computer. The backup worked just fine, but it didn't record my dives so that I could later upload them, so there'll forever be a ten-dive hole in my electronic dive log.

I also realized once again that the plastic dive tables certification agencies use are really relics. Almost no one still uses them for actual dives. They probably still serve a purpose in making students better understand the concepts of nitrogen absorption and how it affects repetitive dives. However, even there PADI with its surly, heavyhanded legal staff is making sure divers remain uneducated by threatening anyone who uses their precious dive tables in an non-sanctioned manner (like explaining them on a website). Shame on them.

Anyway, my dive computer is now at Scubapro and I should have it back within a few days (yes, I paid the rush charge). I am not sure if the computer quit because it ran out of battery despite still showing 72% remaining charge, or if something else went wrong with it. I have come across other references suggesting that some dive computers quit with a lot of charge still remaining. If that is so, then the software should be fixed to display properly.

Postscript: I called the diveshop eight days later when I didn't hear from them despite having paid the rush charge. They told me Scubapro would give me a new replacement computer. It arrived at the diveshop 11 days after the rush was sent to Scubapro. It is certainly nice to have a new replacement computer, but it still cost shipping, a US$45 rush charge, and unfortunately Scubapro didn't report what was wrong with the computer or retrieve any of my data from the computer, so the six dives that I had not downloaded yet are lost forever.

Posted by conradb212 at 01:01 AM | Comments (0)

August 19, 2009

Sharks, finally

After thinking about sharks, reading about sharks, watching TV programs about sharks and wondering if I’d ever actually see a shark, it finally happened. I saw sharks and I swam with sharks while diving from the Turks and Caicos Explorer II. Ryan from Fisheye Scuba had told us there’d be plenty of sharks at Turks and Caicos, and he was right.

The first encounter came at a dive site called Thunderdome off the Northwest coast of the Turks and Caicos island of Providenciales. The site was named after an underwater dome that had been put in place for a French TV show in the early 1990s. The steel dome, which is at a depth of 35-40 feet, is collapsed now and was perfect for taking one of our waterproof test cameras along, the kind that do not need a waterproof housing. The segments of the formerly hemispherical structure have broken apart and collapsed, but the pieces are arranged such that you can swim inside and underneath. Visibility was excellent and there were hundreds and hundreds of fish, with large schools of yellow French grunts.

I ventured away from the main structure to explore a large piece of the dome that had broken off completely. That’s when I saw my first-ever shark – a five-foot nurse shark that was laying on the sand under a piece of the dome.

Nurse sharks are very different from almost any other shark in that they like to lay motionless on the sand for lengthy periods of time. I was very excited to see the shark and slowly approached it, taking a bunch of pictures. I wanted to alert Carol who was exploring another part of the dome, but was afraid the shark would swim off and I wouldn’t see it again. I also didn’t know what to expect. This was, after all, a shark. So I stayed my distance, taking pictures. At some point the shark moved a little, then some more, but didn’t swim away.

I went to get Carol and she took more pictures. I had wondered for so long what it’d be like to see my first shark, and here he was.

We did another dive at Thunderdome, a night dive. I had expected to be nervous descending into the black ocean, but I wasn’t. We all had green lights to our tanks so we could easily be located, and we all had two divelights. Lights were clearly visible and so it was easy to locate one another. Diving around the dome in the dark was fun and the divelight spectacularly illuminated the structures. We saw the nurse shark again, swimming with a big turtle. Carol later said she saw it hunting and it was quite ferocious.

The next day we did another dive at the North-West side of Providenciales. The site was called “The Amphitheatre,” referring to a smallish patch of sand sitting at the bottom of a first wall at perhaps 85 feet. When you look at the walls surrounding it, it looks like you’re on a stage looking up at the bleachers of an amphitheatre.

This I where I saw my first “real” shark. As we were reaching the edge of the reef and began dropping down the wall, a sleek reef shark cruised by in the distance, elegantly and effortlessly. It didn’t come close, it just cruised by to take a look. I felt no fear, just awe. I only saw the shark for a few seconds, but it gave off this aura of effortless power, purpose and confidence that I had never seen in any other sea creature. It was instantly clear that the shark considered itself on top of the food chain.

We didn’t see the shark again on this dive and the boat moved on to the island of West Caicos where at a wonderful divesite dive site named “The Gully” there were several sharks, just appearing out of nowhere. You'd turn around and there was a real life shark just cruising by, only feet away from you. They circled around, swam right up to us and under us, but never displaying aggressive behavior. It was an awesome site seeing those sleek creatures cruise around us.

And they didn’t just appear for a bit and then leave; they hung around and stayed with us the entire dive. Interestingly, they stayed even though we had about 10-12 divers in the group. Apparently they are used to people. I expected to be hugely nervous and my heart pounding, but none of that happened. It does get a bit disconcerting as they tend to cruise toward you then sort of turn around you, disappear, then appear again and swim a closer circle. It was an incredible experience, and unlike at some of those places where they feed sharks for special shark trips, the ones I saw were totally wild.

We did a second dive at “The Gully,” and this time it was all about sharks. They were there, circling around us from the moment we entered the water, just swimming and circling. Overall there must have been six to eight sharks, and they were between five and eight feet long. They’d come in fairly close, then slowly disappear again into the distance. Next thing you know, the shark is right back. This was a bit spooky, knowing when you get in the water, the sharks are right there. I was not afraid and neither my heart rate nor my air consumption went up, but I must say it can feel eery when a predator this large heads for you, circles around you, swims away, then comes back and swims a tighter circle.

When I later looked at the pictures I’d taken I noticed that almost all the sharks had bite marks on them and Joe, one of the divemasters, said that those marks were new and had not been there a couple of weeks before. The only thing that could leave such deep marks might be mating rituals, or they were inflicted by larger sharks in a shark feeding frenzy. Opinions were voiced as to what might have triggered such a frenzy, and none of them were comforting.

I saw sharks again at a second West Caicos dive site named Rock Garden Interlude. This time a reef shark followed us and circled around us. I got some good video of it, but stayed close to the dive master. One thing that’s interesting is that none of the other fish appeared perturbed by the presence or approach of the sharks. Each of the smaller fish would have made a quick meal for a shark, but apparently there are some rules down there.

We then moved on to the small island of French Key. There were reef sharks in abundance and also a most accommodating nurse shark. The reef sharks did their coming and going routine whereas the nurse shark sat between coral heads, then lifted off and moved around a bit, just to rest again.

Seeing sharks was an incredible experience, and that alone made this trip worthwhile. In Roatan you sign up for a shark trip and then go see a bunch of sharks that are there because they know they will get fed. On Caicos, and especially the island of West Caicos, the sharks are simply there and part of the ecosystem. Seeing both nurse sharks and reef sharks up close was something I’ll never forget.

After a lifetime of reading about sharks, seeing them in person and diving with them was incredible. It’s also clear that while most sharks have common characteristics, the different types of sharks act very differently. The nurse sharks lay in the sand, resting or perhaps sleeping, and then cruise around close to the bottom for brief periods of time. They neither seem afraid of humans nor do they show any interest. Reef sharks, on the other hand, constantly cruise and may come very close. They seem quite interested in divers and sometimes seem on collision course. I am not sure what may trigger one to take bite or become aggressive. None of the ones I’ve seen on this trip showed any aggression.

Posted by conradb212 at 08:22 PM | Comments (0)

August 18, 2009

The Liveaboard experience

I finally got to experience a liveaboard! What does “liveaboard” mean? It means instead of staying in a hotel during a dive trip, you stay right on the boat. You travel to your destination, board the dive boat, and then live on it for the entire dive trip. Many seasoned scuba divers swear this is the best way to dive, and you get in more diving than any other way.

So we booked a trip with Explorer Ventures for seven days aboard their Turks and Caicos Explorer II. To be honest, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. I have never been on a cruise, I’ve never owned a boat, and I’ve hardly ever been on a boat larger than a dive boat. I had absolutely no idea what to expect. What would it be like? Would I get seasick? But it all sounded interesting and so we decided on the trip. The Turks and Caicos Explorer II would be our home for a week.

Getting there is never a lot of fun. We got up at 3AM to catch a 6AM American flight and finally arrived after a long three-leg ordeal when it was already dark. The airport on Providenciales, the most touristy of the Turks and Caicos islands, is small and homey. Immigration was quick and hassle-free, and our bags arrived promptly. We had to fill out three instead of the usual two forms, the additional being a swine flu questionnaire. Fortunately, neither of us felt sick or had had any recent contact with pigs.

Outside the airport, things were quite well organized. A uniformed transportation guy asked where we wanted to go and led us to the proper line. Another one took our luggage and made smalltalk. How was your flight? First time on the island? And so on. Though there were quite a few people, it took less than five minutes for us to get on a standard size van with one other party. The lady driver of a beat-up van was courteous enough and the ride from the airport to the Turtle Cove Inn where we would stay for the first night was less than ten minutes. The fare was a hefty US$26. I gave the cabbie lady US$30, but she glared at me and clearly wanted more. I handed over another five.

The hotel looked wonderfully tropical, but the office was already closed. Amazingly, there was a sheet of paper stuck on the door, all neatly printed and addressed to us, long name spelled correctly and all, directing us to pick up our materials at the bar and complete the check-in in the morning. The bartender apparently expected us. It was about 8:45Pm and the bar wasn’t crowded, but food was still available. After dinner we walked around the marina and marveled at the awesome yachts moored there. Many had big-screen TVs with people watching.. what? Satellite TV? The water in the marina was clean and absolutely clear. The underwater spotlights on the yachts lit up the water to the bottom and you could see fish. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a marina with such clear water.

The next day we had some time to kill and walked down to the beach, which was marvelous, with clean, white sand and the clearest bluest water I’ve seen on any beach. The sand had little pieces of red coral in it and all the rock was also old coral. The water was perhaps 86 degrees and felt wonderful. Back at the Turtle Cove Inn, we were picked up by a van from Explorer Ventures. We picked up one final guest, driving through some very impressively luxurious developments and then headed for the Caicos Marina that turned out to be a much more utilitarian and industrial affair than the snazzy Turtle Cove Marina where we had stayed (and where Explorer Ventures’ competition, the Aggressor, anchors).

The 140-foot Turks & Caicos Explorer II, however, is a larger boat than the Aggressor by some 30 feet and an impressive craft indeed. After unloading and taking off our shoes and socks and putting them in a box, we boarded the vessel and met the staff. Nissa, a young divemaster from Canada showed us our room, stateroom #7 on the main floor, right opposite the kitchen/mess. The room was small, of course, but big enough for two double beds combined into making a large bed. The bathroom with shower was small but adequate. With all of our electronic gear, I had been concerned about power outlets. No problem there as I found a total of four outlets.

The next couple of hours we set up our dive gear, got weights, put cameras onto the camera table at the rear of the boat, put away our clothes, arranged stuff, and so on. Then it was time for dinner and we got our first taste of chef Stan’s exquisite cooking. Eating on the Turks and Caicos Explorer is buffet style, three tables with six chairs each. The dining room/salon was much larger than I expected and even had a 37-inch flatscreen TV.

After dinner, Captain Ken introduced himself and the crew. There was Sandie, the purser; Doug, the engineer and Sandie’s husband; Stan, the chef, a local from Salt Cay; and then dive masters Nissa, Joe and Dave. Captain Ken himself is a retired oil field guy who’s now living in the Florida Keys, acting as a relief captain for a number of boats. He explained the law of the land, being both humorous and concise.

We learned that the boat doesn’t have a keel but a considerable draw due to its size, so getting in and out of marinas requires careful timing with the tides. It also means that the boat swings while anchored, left to right, so hanging onto the 15-foot stop bar when you come up can make for a wild ride. He also explained that the boat’s water is from onboard reverse osmosis systems, meaning it is completely safe to drink. And that the cooling system, with individual controls for each room, uses an air washing method and not a conventional A/C compressor/condensor, so it wasn’t going to get icy-cold. As it turned out, temperature was never an issue. Speaking with the captain I learned that the boat has a 5,000 gallon tank for diesel fuel. A week-long trip like ours burns about 1,000 gallons. The boat has a septic tank processing plant that should reduce everything to just clear water. The boat can be steered from the top deck, from a remote station on the forward side of the middle upper deck, and, of course, from the bridge.

Later, we socialized and got to know each other. I took advantage of the marina’s WiFi to catch up on email and such. Others talked or watched a movie. Three additional guests joined, meaning there were a dozen guests and seven staff. The T&C Explorer II can handle 20 guests, so we had plenty of room to stretch out.

We went to bed at 11:00PM, with the boat now moving from the marina towards its first destination off Providenciales’ Northwest Point. There was a bit of side-to-side movement, and the vibration from the big diesel engines was quite noticeable. It felt a bit like in an airplane at night, except for the extra light side motion. It took me a while to fall asleep. The bed was amazingly comfortable, and cabin temperature was fine. At some point the ship was pitching a bit more and I felt that in my sleep, but not enough to wake up.

I woke up Sunday morning at 6:28AM, two minutes before the alarm went off. The sun had just come up and was starting to burn through the haze, and the moon was still up. By 7AM we were having breakfast. Stan cooked ham and eggs to order, and there was also toast, English muffins, yoghurt and cereal.

Dive master Dave, a good, humorous presenter, explained the overall dive rules and law of the land (or boat as it were). Maximum depth is 130 feet on air, 110 feet on nitrox. Maximum dive time 70 minutes, and come up with at least 500 psi left. Everyone must have a buddy unless they are solo diver certified (which no one was). The boat has two ladders and also two weighted lines for 15-foot safety stops.

Then it was off to the first dive briefing. The crew draws a dive site map onto a whiteboard and uses that as a visual. One of the three dive masters comes along on each dive. Divers can join the dive master, or they are free to go by themselves.

The first dive site was Eel’s Garden on the northeast side of Providenciales. The reef there was 40-45 feet deep, and there was a wall going down to perhaps 120 feet. Right on the first dive we saw several lionfish. They are beautiful but an invasive species and apparently a real menace as they propagate very quickly and have no natural predators. As a result, they take over and decimate the native species. They just kind of hang around in crevices and don’t seem to swim around very much. They are clearly related to scorpion fish, though they look much nicer with their colorful feather-like plumes. I can see why people shy away from killing them. The water temperature was a pleasant 84 degrees Fahrenheit or so, and my 3mil suit was plenty enough. The 80 cubic-foot aluminum tanks we got (each marked with our name) should generally last for an hour or so, depending on depth and individual consumption. I hit 101 feet on my first dive.

The boat did indeed swing from left to right and back, appearing and then disappearing from view. Going up required listening to the boat’s motor and timing your ascent. As we surfaced, a crew member helped with cameras and fins, and then they recorded our maximum depth, dive time, and remaining tank pressure. And a batch of delicious hot brownies was waiting, too. Yum.

The second dive was to the same location, but this time we turned left at the wall. With the exception of the lionfish that I had not seem before, this first divesite was a little short on the usual sponges and gorgonians and seafans and all the other cool and healthy stuff we were used to seeing in the Caribbean. Like in most places there was some coral bleaching, and it was clear that some areas were still recovering from hurricanes that had hit the area a couple of years prior.

For lunch, chef Stan cooked up some delicious curry soup and served cold cuts for sandwiches. There was hardly enough time to upload pictures from our Olympus and Canon underwater cameras and replace batteries before it was time to dive again. The captain had moved the boat close to the location of the “Thunderdome,” a leftover of a French adventure TV show named “The Treasure of Pago Pago” that ran in 1993/94. The dome had been ripped off its foundation and was damaged during a hurricane and the whole thing now looks very different from the pictures in dive site books. Awesome dive though, and I saw my first ever shark.

After four one-hour-plus dives, dinner couldn’t come too soon and this time chef Stan came up with awesome steaks and baked potatoes, vegetables and salad, all topped off with berry pie and ice cream. We ate with captain Ken who told us a bit of the history of Caribbean liveaboards. Apparently, they all got started when so called “crew boats” that ferried workers to oil platforms in the Gulf went out of service during the oil crises in the early 1980s. Many were repurposed, and some became liveaboards. One problem was that crew boats generally were a bit too small, just under 100 feet and 100 tons, and so many were added on to. I learned that our boat, the Turks & Caicos Explorer, has additions to the front and back, and almost the whole super structure was added as well. These additions are one of the reasons why the boat swings so much when moored. The propellers are not all the way in the back either; they are where the boat originally ended.

What happens is that the boat swings back and forth within maybe a 60 degree angle. Others have written about this phenomenon, but I couldn’t quite picture it until I experienced it myself. As you get back to the starting point, you may see the boat, but it may move away and out of sight before you can catch one of the lines. The crew recommended to just wait until it comes back, as it always will. You can also grab the line and go along for the ride, which means you have to hang on to your hat if you had one (I did have a do-rag that almost came off, I was dragged through the water so quickly).

After dinner it was time for a night dive and we went back to the Thunderdome. I had expected to be nervous descending into the black ocean, but I wasn’t. We all had green lights attached to our tanks (the boat sold them at a small cost) so we could easily be located, and we all had two divelights. The lights were clearly visible and so it was easy to locate one another. Diving around the dome in the dark was fun and the divelight spectacularly illuminated the structures. We again saw the nurse shark we had seen in the afternoon, now swimming with a big turtle. A moray eel was hunting in the beams of our lights. A lot of big jacks swam around us. When it was time to return to the boat I wasn’t sure what direction to go. Carol wrote on my slate “Look for the boat’s strobe!” We found that and swam toward it, with the strobe appearing and disappearing with the boat’s swinging. I eventually managed to grab the weighted line.

So that was five long dives this first day, and, if you were up to it, five dives every day. That’s one of the great things about being on a liveaboard: you can dive to your heart’s content without ever having to heft around your dive gear, hang it up to dry, or even worry about your tanks. That’s all taken care of, always.

The T&C Explorer II’s crew was delightful. Dave, a Brit from Liverpool, is ever friendly, witty and helpful, and does excellent dive briefings and presentations. Of his two colleagues, Joe is very friendly and personable, too, and a total expert at locating small critters. He is very pleasant and patients. Purser Sandy is friendly, personable, helpful and very pleasant, too. They all act like friends going out of their way to be good hosts rather than staff. Chef Stan doesn’t talk much, but the man can cook.

At night we uploaded pictures and then went up onto the two upper decks to watch the stars. That was an amazing experience. Even with the boat lights still on, we could see millions of stars. There were what seemed to be clouds, but it was the milky way AND numerous galaxies. Quite different from watching the sky in suburban California where city lights light up the sky and all you can see is a few stars of the major constellations.

Early the next morning, perhaps 4 o’clock or so, the boat started for West Caicos, an uninhabited island that’s southwest of Provo. It’s a rocky, flat 6-mile strip of land that is protected both inland and along its shores where it is a marine park. You can see some old structures on it, and apparently there have been renewed efforts at developing, but they fell victim to the bad economy.

One thing that really impressed me was the spaciousness of the vessel. I had expected everything to be small and cramped. Instead, the dining room/salon was very generously sized and didn’t look like a cafeteria at all. You felt instantly feel at home here.

The beds were exceptionally comfortable. Maybe it’s because you sleep well after four or five dives, but I have hardly slept better. You get two pillows each. The crew makes up your bed while you have breakfast, and in the evening they even put a chocolate on your pillow. You get new towels every day. They differentiate between inside and outside towels. The ones outside you just take and use to dry off after diving, or after having taken a hot shower on the dive deck after a dive.

The shower in our room was good, though I must admit I hardly ever used it. When you dive all day and shower outside after each dive, it just doesn’t seem necessary. I mean, why shampoo and blow-dry your hair when it gets wet again instantly anyway?

Even though I brought as few clothes as possible, I still brought too much. All you really need on a liveaboard is underwear, T-shirts and bathing suits. You always walk around barefoot. You really only need to pack what you wear for travel.

Money, likewise, is not needed, at least not during the week. All food and drink is provided, and that includes beer, wine, and even hard liquor from the liquor cabinet. No one in our group abused that, so I am not sure if there are limits.

Cabin doors mostly remain unlocked. You don’t even have a key, or at least I never used one. You can lock them from inside at night or when you’re inside so that the crew does not inadvertently walk in on you.

Our airfills were always done on time, with green caps meaning you wanted nitrox, and red caps air. Nitrox was reliably at just about 32%, and air fill pressure didn’t vary by much. The lowest I saw was perhaps 2,900psi, the highest 3,150psi. There was always someone waiting to help you when you came up, the name of the diver coming up was communicated, and once you were out of the water you were asked your depth and remaining air.

My dive time was generally just about an hour, and I usually came up with 500-650psi. Finding the boat often ate up some time as the reefs/sandy bottom were generally fairly deep (45-60 feet) and the boat could be hard to see. Watching the individual dive patterns and styles was interesting. Some almost always go deep whereas others never do. Some almost always come up with less air than they should whereas others keep it on the safe side. Some are hot-dogging underwater whereas others try to move as efficiently as possible. Some are elegant, others less so.

On Thursday I woke up to some pretty heavy rolling and decided I probably better take a ginger candy, just in case. The ride from West Caicos to French Key is perhaps 15 miles and takes less than three hours. The trip is along the fringe of the shallow Caicos bank, but it is open water, and so things get a bit choppy even in good weather. I eventually got up and went on the top deck, sitting in the captain’s chair letting the wind blow through my hair, and seeing nothing but water all around. A bit later French Key came into view, a small, uninhabited sandy patch that barely sticks out of the water by a few feet.

The water was rougher there, so getting in and out of the water was a bit trickier. The dive entry dock at the rear of the boat is almost level with the water, so when it gets rocky, waves just wash over it and the crew has to make sure to close the two doors to the utility room of the dive deck.

With some 20 dives under our belts, we actually skipped the second dive Thursday afternoon because the seas were pretty rough by now. One of the truly nicest dive sites I’d ever seen, and I skip an opportunity for a second dive! I suppose that’s what a total of 20 hours underwater within five days will do. Carol simply fell asleep while watching our latest dive pictures. Those who went on the dive didn’t have a great time due to very strong surge and current at the bottom, and then the heavy seas when getting back to, and onto, the boat. One diver actually missed the sinkerline and had to use his safety sausage.

As it turned out, the Thursday dive was to be my last on the Turks & Caicos Explorer II. The weather that had turned pretty rough in the afternoon got worse and no one went on the night dive, despite its reputation as the best night dive off the island.

The captain gave a farewell briefing and announced there’d be a dawn dive (5AM) Friday morning that would give you a chance to see all the sea creatures go the other way after a night’s feeding and activities. At 8:30AM there would be another regular dive, the last, at a French Cay site named “Rock & Roll.” As is, we had plenty of rock ‘n roll Thursday night while moored at the G-Sport site off French Cay. The captain had said he might move the boat behind French Cay so as to at least get a reprieve from the wave action. There wouldn’t be much to break the wind as the Cay is small, bereft of all vegetation, and only a few feet above sea level.

The rocking and rolling increased as the evening wore on and it became almost impossible to walk. Cans and bottles in the fridge banged around like crazy and the crew used duct tape to secure cabinet doors and such, and also secured the kitchen. In our room, everything that was on the table was thrown off onto the floor, despite the lip that surrounds half the table. A soda fell off and drenched the carpeting.

At 11PM the captain announced he was going to move the boat behind French Cay. The water there was only maybe 8-10 feet, and that required some precision navigation by the captain and the crew. We dropped anchor around midnight. Carol and I went up on the top deck. The waves had calmed down some but it was still quite windy. We went to sleep around 12:45. I felt the rocking motion once or twice, but soundly slept through the night.

Overall, this was a wonderful experience and I am very glad we did it. I have nothing to measure it against, so I don’t know if the little glitches are par for the course, or if the overall family-feel of the crew is normal. I don’t know if everything is supposed to be polished and gleaming or if signs or wear and tear are normal in a vessel that spends most of its time at sea.

The Lonely Planet book on Turks & Caicos said, “many experienced divers believe the Turks and Caicos islands offer the best diving in the Caribbean. They certainly offer a world-class diving experience. Excellent visibility, unspoiled reefs, spectacular vertical walls, and an abundance of marine animals both big and small attract divers from around the globe.” I can mostly agree with that, though the hurricane damage will take some more time to heal.

Some observations: don’t worry about bringing sunscreen and bug repellents unless you have special needs. There is a box with just about anything. I suppose guests leave theirs here. Also, there are dozens of book to read should someone get bored (which I cannot imagine). For entertainment there was the big flatscreen TV, two DVD players, and a Sony sound system. No need for shoes on the boat. You go barefoot the entire week. And though we didn’t bring a lot of clothes, we brought way too much.

The last morning I felt sort of strange. The trip had gone by much too fast. The crew was busy beginning to ready the boat for the next group of guests, and also used their computers to follow the predictions for hurricane Anna, the first of the season. The captain made arrangements in case they had to cut the trip short and seek shelter in the marina.

So that was a week on a liveaboard. It’s a wonderful experience.

Posted by conradb212 at 03:35 AM | Comments (0)

July 28, 2009

How to deal with sharks

Recently I came across the following piece of advice on how to deal with sharks.

"Divers have fierce encounters with sharks," the writer observed. "The only safe course is to turn on the sharks and frighten them. For sharks fear men just as much as men fear them, which means that in deep water they have an even chance. When the diver reaches the surface the situation is critical for him, because he loses his means of attack as he tries to get out of the water, and his safety is completely dependent on his shipmates. These pull on a rope tied to his shoulders. He keeps up the struggle and tugs on the rope with his left hand, as a danger signal, while his right hand holds his knife and is busy fighting."

While one might argue with these observations and suggestions, they are not unreasonable and I've probably read similar in dozens of modern books. I mention "modern" because the above passage was written almost two thousand years ago by a Roman author and philosopher named Gaius Plinius Secundus, also known as Pliny the Elder. I've been reading Pliny's "Natural History," which is sort of an overall compendium of pretty much everything that was known at the time of the Roman Empire, which was quite a bit. Some (though by no means all) of it is spot-on and sounds amazingly contemporary. It really surprises me that I can go to Amazon and order, or download, what a man wrote almost two millennia ago when so much of history has only survived as hearsay or vague, archaic-sounding translations of translations.

Pliny also wrote of dolphins, whales, pearls, sponges, oysters, crabs and many others. Of course, Pliny, who died in 79AD while trying to rescue friends from the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, was also of the opinion that "shellfish are the prime cause of the decline of morals and the adoption of an extravagant life style." Take that, you guys on "Deadliest Catch"!

Posted by conradb212 at 03:01 AM | Comments (0)

July 06, 2009

A great dive trip, for less

Sometimes I wonder why people go on expensive dive trips far away when for much less they can explore all sorts of terrific diving much closer to home. There's nothing wrong with planned trips to exotic locations, but if at times they seem a bit too dear, the traveling a bit too exhausting, and the venues a bit too crowded, there are great alternatives that don't compromise on diving and cost much less. I realized that again on a recent trip to Florida that combined business and pleasure and let me enjoy seven wonderful and varied dive locations all within an hour or two of Orlando. The round trip from Sacramento to Orlando was just US$220, diving cost little, as did staying in some nice places in central Florida. Cost was probably a good deal less than half of a "real" dive trip, and that includes renting a car, tanks and weights for the week.

Crystal River, Florida

Snorkeling with Manatees in Crystal River, which is about 90 miles northwest of Orlando on the Gulf coast, is such a unique experience that I’ll take every chance I get to see those gentle, wonderful creatures again. Mid June didn’t seem like an optimal time for manatee sightings, though, and Captain Chris at the Birds Underwater dive shop and tour operator confirmed this. The manatees migrate up the rivers and springs when the seawater gets cold but then leave again when it gets warmer. It might take quite some time to locate a manatee or two, said Chris, and the water conditions were not optimal, with a very noticeable amount of dead algae clumps floating on the surface. There was none of that early morning mist hovering on the water either as the sun was already high up in the sky at 7AM this time of year. Still, the freshwater King’s Bay area was as majestic and serene as ever.

We got lucky with the manatees, though, as Captain Chris spotted the tell-tale small bubbles that signal a manatee grazing at the bottom. Sometimes the bubbles turn out to be just fish or a turtle, but soon we saw a manatee surfacing to take a breath. You never see more than the top of their nose with the two nostrils while the rest off the animal stays underwater.

Everyone pulled up their wetsuit and donned fins and mask and in we went. Visibility was very marginal, perhaps five feet or even less. That was disappointing and I wondered why exactly it was that they called this place “Crystal River” when at least for now, and also on my first visit here, it was anything but. I mean, King’s Bay is where all the water of Crystal River originates is one giant spring, so you’d expect it to be clear.

Despite the murky water we did see manatees. A dark shape would slowly materialize in the water and all of a sudden I’d see the animal within a foot or two, slowly moving through the water, never bumping into me or touching me. I had a chance to touch its skin that felt a bit like rough neoprene. There were a mama manatee with two calves, the younger one perhaps four to five feet long and very curious and playful.

We followed the manatees for half an hour or so, then got back on the boat and headed for the entrance to Three Sisters, one of my favorite snorkeling areas with what usually is truly crystal-clear water. Snorkeling up through the picturesque rocky entrance I saw finned and bare legs and feet stirring up the bottom and couldn’t refrain from reprimanding one of the offenders. He first thought I was just making conversation, then realized that I was chewing him out and quickly turned away. I later felt bad for having done that as I surely didn’t want to ruin anyone’s experience of that magical spot. It just seems so unnecessary to spastically flail around and ruin visibility for everyone else when it’s so easy to stay flat in the water.

Three Sisters was the great experience I remembered, though it’d been infested by wispy green algae that clung to things like giant cottonballs and looked entirely out of place. Carol said she wanted to grab some of the green stuff, ball it up into ugly, nasty clumps and remove it from the water. Captain Chris had said this was normal for this time of the year and I sure hope it’ll go away again.

Back on the boat people took their wetsuits off a bit too soon as we saw another manatee, this time in clear water. I still wore my suit and got to go back in and follow and watch the manatee, which seemed to be a large male. Unfortunately I had left my camera on the boat and could not take pictures.

Rainbow River

Drift diving means that you enter the water in one place and exit at another. Which means you need someone to drop you off or pick you up. Last time, early in my dive career, I had been with a tour where the boat dropped us off somewhere in the upper part of Rainbow River and then collected us again at the end of the dive. Since the boat had been located in Crystal River, some 20 miles away from K.P. Hole State Park, the logistics of getting the boat there (on a trailer) and back were a bit difficult. Our friends at Bird’s Underwater don’t do that anymore, and so this time they made a call and arranged to have a boat take us upriver and drop us off.

Captain Bill awaited us and soon we were on his boat, getting helpful tips and explanations along the way. The trip upriver for our planned hour-and-a-half drift dive seemed very short and so we asked the captain to take us up a bit farther before we jumped in the water.

The dive itself was pretty much as I remembered, with depths varying from just a couple of feet or less all the way down to maybe 20 feet, water temperature a pleasant 75 degrees, and the current anywhere from barely noticeable to quite brisk. Visibility wasn’t great, but good enough to see where we were going. We resolved to stay close together.

A river drift dive is like river rafting, only there's a lot of scenery and up and down as you dive between, through and around what’s at the bottom. It’s easier to stop and look around, and there’s lots to see. There are meadows of sea grass separated by sandy runs and chutes, gulley and valley like rock formations of varying size, little springs with cold water boiling up through the bottom in numerous spots, impenetrable bamboo-like gardens and more. Apart from inquisitive small fish and some funny looking baby turtles we didn’t see much wildlife, though once Carol ran into an alligator gar.

About halfway through the dive I heard a strange sound that Carol later described as like bacon frying in a pan. It was rain, one of Florida's sudden downpours. We were looking up to the surface from maybe eight to ten feet and saw the rain drops hitting the surface, and we could clearly hear it. I'd never experienced that before.

You’d expect a drift dive to simply take you downriver with you going along for the ride, but in reality it isn’t that easy. You tend to meander this way and that, and sometimes there is no obvious current to follow. I’d watch for the eel grass leaning in the direction of the flow, but sometimes it just stands up straight and you have no idea where to go. So you just go forward until there’s a current again.

One time I followed Carol through thick eel grass and it just got shallower and shallower. Carol finned through the grass in an effort to find deeper water again and even her expert technique couldn’t keep things from getting stirred up quite a bit. That quickly turned into a partial and then total silt-out with my world turning all brown. By now I was perhaps in a foot and a half of water but it felt like getting stuck in all the brown and the grass. Though I knew that all I had to do was turn around and stick my head out of the water it wasn’t a very pleasant experience.

Soon the water was deep and clear again and we came upon a powerful spring that rushed out of a cavern. It was so strong that we could barely swim up to it. I forced myself close, holding on to some rocks, when I saw what seemed like glittering yellow nuggets in the sand and rock. I picked some up and they seemed heavy and did not flake. I thought it couldn’t possibly be gold, but who knew what might blast out of the earth and so I picked up a few and put them in a pocket in my BC. It later turned out to be thoroughly ordinary pebbles and I have no idea why they had looked like gold to me down there.

Carol surfaced several times to get directions and make sure we didn’t miss our exit on the river. What had seemed to be just a short distance turned out to be an almost two hour dive. It's shallow, though, and I actually still had air left in my 80-cubic foot rental tank at the end of the dive (and felt pretty good about that). It’d been fun and I’d do it again, but I’d do it on a sunny day. Without the sun shining through the water and illuminating things, the river seemed somewhat flat and a bit dreary.

Chiefland, Catfish Sink, Manatee Springs State Park

After staying at the historic Island Hotel in scenic Cedar Key, it was on to another of my favorite dive sites. Nine out of ten divers would probably take one look at the Catfish sinkhole at Manatee Springs State Park near Chiefland and then quickly pass, or maybe more like 99 out of a hundred. That’s because the entire surface is covered in a half inch thick layer of duckweed, those tiny plants that get everywhere without feeling slimy or unpleasant. Me, I wouldn’t miss a chance to dive into that layer and see the magical landscape underneath. Catfish is also the major entrance to one of the world's longest syphon caves at over 11,000 feet of explored passage.

When we checked in at the ranger booth there was only one other dive party listed up on the board and so the chance for clear water was good. Donning my 7mm wetsuit in 96 degrees and probably near 100% humidity was remarkably less painful than I expected, but getting in the 72-degree water still felt good. An open water diver asked us what it was like in there as he was going to dive the sink the next day. He said he’d been diving all over the world and with all sorts of creatures, but he didn’t know whether he’d like to dive in this dark weed-covered sinkhole. We reassured him that it was quite bright and really wonderful once you broke through the cover.

I went under first and it actually did seem much darker than I remembered. Visibility was marginal for a spring-fed sinkhole, with everything cast in an intense shade of green that I did not recall from prior dives. We headed down for the dark cavern entrance at the side and bottom of the sinkhole. I saw Carol fiddling with the SeaLife DC1000 that we took along for testing. She was frustrated with the unfamiliar menus and buttons, and so we switched cameras. There wasn’t much light down there and the syphon from the underground river that passes at the bottom of the sink was quite strong. People had gotten sucked in there and died, and so I was extra careful not to go too far, making sure I always had something to hold onto.

A party of three divers passed us, heading into the cavern with their dive lights. Using lights is a strict no-no for anyone not cavern- or cave-certified at Catfish, and these three did not appear to be cavers. I saw the dim beams of their lights deep inside the cavern and hoped they knew what they were doing. I made it down to 69 feet, a bit deeper than on prior dives. Looking up to the surface from the entrance of the cavern is one of my favorite views. This is the exact view Sheck Exley had seen many times during his explorations of the Manatee cave system and even included in his book “Caverns Measureless to Man.”

The rest of the 45 minute dive was uneventful as it was just too murky to really enjoy and experience the scenery. There seemed more silty sediment at the bottom and all sorts of stuff was floating around. Getting rid of the duckweed once you emerge from the water is almost impossible, even when using the shower next to the sink. Experienced divers will use a blast of air from their regulator to clear a patch of surface from duckweed before they emerge, but the little weeds will still be everywhere. All you can do is keep enough air in your tank for a second dive in the clear main basin a hundred yards away from the sink.

Chiefland, Manatee Springs main basin

The main basin at Manatee Springs is a popular swimming and snorkeling watering hole just a short distance away from the Suwannee river. The water is usually crystal-clear as the bowl is fed by the same underground spring that passes by Catfish sink. We both had over a thousand psi left in our tanks and so welcomed the chance to play in the clear water, washing off the duckweed in the process. It’s great fun to go down to the bottom where the underwater river blasts out of the rocks. The flow is so great that it’s hard to swim up to the entrance or even holding onto something, and your hair gets blown back and your mask would come off if you held your head sideways. Amazingly, some sort of mossy stuff grows on logs there, getting nearly ripped off 24/7, yet apparently thriving. The mouth was at perhaps 30 feet, yet freedivers came down and even stayed a bit to poke around, I don’t think I could ever do that.

I breathed down my tank to about 250psi, then surfaced, leaving all the duckweed behind. On the walk back to the car to get changed I was looking forward to a serving of delicious chicken strips from the concession stand, and then perhaps a leisurely stroll on the wooden boardwalk down to Suwannee river. Unfortunately, there was a brand-new concessionaire who had just moved in a week ago and was still only selling a few items from a table. So no delicious chicken strips. And by the time we were all done with stowing away our gear, it was too late for a walk.

High Springs, Ginnie Springs

Ginnie Springs, near the small town of High Springs, is a Mecca to cave divers for its massive underground network of mapped-out caves and tunnels. It’s also very popular for certification dives thanks to the gin-clear water it gets its name from and the year-round 72 degree water temperature common to all Florida springs. We arrived on a very hot and sunny Sunday with lots of people enjoying the campground and the main basin. The check-in procedure at Ginny is on the cumbersome side, with youthful staff directing you around to sign releases, pay for things and so on. There seems quite a bit of unnecessary overhead, not all of the staffers seemed on top of things, and it seemed odd that divers had to pay $30 and cavers only $22 when the cave system is world famous and massive whereas open water divers have much less real estate to play around in.

We needed to have our tanks filled, which only cost US$5 a pop. Again, staff was milling around but no one offered to help with the tanks. I finally grabbed one of the guys and he went to get help. Filling didn’t take long and we spent the time perusing the large shop filled with interesting gear, snacks, apparel, books and all sorts of stuff, but hardly any caver gear. Carol said this was because there was an excellent caver dive shop in High Springs.

Carol wanted to show me Devil’s Eye and Devil’s Ear before diving. Those are the two main entrances to the Ginnie Springs cave system, though you’d never know. Both are near the mouth of a small sidearm of the Santa Fe river, with the eye being a bit inside the small inlet and the ear just about where the river meets the spring inlet. The sidearm is extremely clear whereas the water of the Santa Fe is an opaque tannic brown. It's not dirty, it just looks like someone had swirled a giant tea bag in it. The two waters swirl and mix around the entrance, with the tannic waters winning out near Devil’s Ear, which was invisible in the tannic water as opposed to Devil’s Eye just a few yards away. There was a steady procession of cavers returning from their dives, most using rebreathers and lots of tech gear. I was watching two of them slowly finning up the inlet where they could exit at the end, making the walk to the parking lot with all their gear as brief as possible. I was fascinated (and a bit intimidated) by all their complicated, professional-looking equipment. I also thought that this was where Mark Fyvie had entered the Ginnie cave system one evening in March of 2008, never to emerge alive.

We then parked near the Ginnie Springs main basin and geared up in the stifling 100 degree heat. 7mm Scubapro wetsuit for me whereas Carol wore her 3mil. Getting in the water brought much welcome relief from the heat. A lot of happy, splashing, shouting people were swimming and snorkeling, and so the basin wasn’t quite as clear as the liquid from which it derived its name.

At one end of the basin, at a depth of about 18 feet, lies the entrance to a largish cavern called “The Ballroom” for its generous proportions. The cavern is wedge-shaped and at an angle, so there is a substantial drop to about 50 feet at its far end where a thick steel grate prohibits further penetration. The grate was put in a good while ago as too many divers had gotten lost and died in the cave system behind. I don’t know if maps exist of that part of the system, or whether it is connected to the main Ginnie cave system that one enters via the Devil’s Eye/Ear.

The flow of fresh spring water from the grate is very strong. I hung on to the grate, using my divelight to shine into the area beyond while the flow blew back my hair. It’s a great feeling. The rock inside the cavern, which, amazingly, we had all to ourselves for the entire 35 minutes we were in there, is all white and immaculate. I began exploring the nooks and crannies and even entered a side chamber that beckoned. A small dive light is enough to light things up in all the white rock.

The view from inside the cavern towards the entrance is spectacular, with sunlight streaming in, framed by the rock. It’s a sight that seems perfect for pictures, but is quite difficult to catch as the dynamic range between all dark inside and very bright outside is so large.

The water inside The Ballroom was indeed gin-clear. It felt like it wasn’t there at all, without any of the ubiquitous floating debris that’s almost always present in water. My gear worked very well, as it did throughout the trip, but I still feel like I am having tunnel vision and it’s difficult to look anywhere but straight ahead. I resolved trying a clear-skirt mask again to see if it makes a difference.

As we left The Ballroom a good half dozen divers came in. We’d been lucky. After we dried off and got out of our gear and into dry clothes we drove back to the lodge. Though it was still early, the snack bar was already closed, so, again no chicken strips (somehow I associate those with diving). Overall, things seemed to be closed a lot during this Florida trip. Diners closed on Sunday afternoons, snack bars closed, restaurants open only for minimal hours. I’d have thought shops would be extra-eager to serve and sell during tough economic times, but apparently not.

Ginnie Springs left a mixed impression. Carol, who doesn’t like crowds and was put off by the increasing commercialization of the once pristine place, had little patience with the uninspired staff and college spring break flavor of the place. So I am not sure if we’ll be back there. Once we got back to the hotel, the neon-emblazoned Fleetwood diner (formerly Floyd's) was, of course, closed. Which was just as well as we ended up having a truly delicious dinner at the historic The Great Outdoors Café in town.

Williston, Blue Grotto

Like Ginnie Springs, Blue Grotto near Williston, just 30 miles or so from Ginnie, was new to me. It’s located within a quarter mile of Devil’s Den on the other side of the highway. The approach is extremely low key, just a dirt road through a rural neighborhood with a small house here and there. A rickedy sign and poster announce Blue Grotto and the cost of diving there (US$40 per diver). There’s a home on the right and a shack to the left.

The man inside the shack is Ed Paradiso, owner and operator of Blue Grotto. Ed doesn’t say much at first and it’s almost a bit awkward standing there. He recognized Carol after a bit and seemed surprised. Somehow he thought she had died at Ginnie Springs some years ago--clearly a case of mistaken identity and Ed was glad that the news of Carol’s demise was greatly exaggerated.

While Carol and Ed catch up on what’s been happening I watch the very good orientation video, starring Ed himself. I must say that the video intimidated me a bit, what with Ed talking about the bottom of the cavern’s loop dive being at 100 feet. We get our tanks filled and Ed suggests we take along a cleverly designed dive light contraption consisting of two powerful lights attached to a hefty battery. It doesn’t have a mount or anything and so we use plastic zip ties to attach the Canon G10's housing on top of it and then head for the grotto.

The Blue Grotto cavern is another natural geologic formation carved by water from the Florida aquifer into the limestone. It’s part sinkhole and part wedge-shaped underwater cavern going down to over a hundred feet. The sinkhole part, however, is sort of like an open amphitheater on the one side, facing a vertical rock face on top of the cavern entrance. Steps go down from the park/picnic area to above-water decking. Large retaining walls hold back the apparently much softer slope opposite the cavern. There are little fish in the water and some algae stuff, but not much. There is no one else there, and the water seems extremely clear. That’s confirmed as we get in. Wow. It’s always hard to estimate actual visibility in feet, but this was the best I have ever seen. Carol later tagged it at 300-plus feet. It was like air, with no floating debris or particles of any kind.

The exposed side of Blue Grotto is like a large bowl that is part open water and part cavern. The bottom slopes down to a massive plate called “peace rock.” It’s a slab that at some point in the cavern’s history must have broken off the ceiling and now rests at the bottom, inviting you to sit on it and peruse the stunning vista from a depth of about 40-45 feet. Looking up from there, you see the various dive platforms, the sunlight shining through the water as glorious rays, an air bell on the underside of the cavern ceiling, and the myriad of reflections from the scenery above. Carol’s taking pictures of me floating through the clear water, and then it’s time to descend into the dark depths behind Peace Rock.

I had read about Blue Grotto but couldn’t quite get a sense of what the various reports seemed to describe as a circular descent and ascent along a guideline. I somehow envisioned a cave-like tube. In reality, there is a lot of rock in the center of the wedge-like cavern that tilts down at a steep angle. The thick guideline rope takes a counterclock-wise turn around all this rock, making it feel like a real cave dive. My heart rate went up quite a bit as I followed Carol down into the dark clear water behind the rock. The powerful video lighting system illuminated our descent into all the white rock. Blue Grotto actually has a high-wattage lighting system mounted on the ceiling near the entrance, but it was off that day, so I don’t know how much it lights up the darker, deeper parts of the grotto. I had my own dive light with me, of course, and so I soon relaxed and took in the majestic scenery, always making sure I stayed by the line.

The descent from 40 feet to the bottom of the guide line, which is at about 83 feet, took only four minutes or so. Carol explored a bit, touching the sandy bottom and thus logging a hundred foot dive. I had not seen the blue light of the cavern entrance during the descent, though I am told that if you’re looking for it, it’s there, thus making Blue Grotto accessible to Open Water divers as opposed to requiring cavern or cave certification. We then did a slow eight to ten minute ascent with the very blue Grotto entrance coming into view first as a small slit, then growing and shining ever brighter. It is a stunning sight and it’s instantly clear why it’s called the Blue Grotto. After we got back to Peace Rock I regretted not having taken more time, just as in Honduras I had regretted having gone through Mary’s Place and Calvin’s Crack much too quickly on my first time. I plan on being back for sure, but it’s hard to imagine conditions ever being this perfect again and the water this clear.

One of Blue Grotto’s attractions is an air bell mounted on the underside of the cavern ceiling at about 22 feet (depth depends on water level, of course). The bell actually feels a little weird. There is nothing to hold onto, you can’t really see out very well, and the acoustics are such that you can barely understand each other. It’s an interesting curiosity, but not the vista point I had expected it to be.

We surfaced after 45 minutes, having enough air left (after I switched tanks with Carol who still uses less than I) for a second half-hour fun and photography dive.

From what I am told, the number of people diving at Blue Grotto pretty much determines visibility. There are times when the place is full of certification divers, and since the bottom is silty, visibility can go down the drain very quickly. This probably won’t affect the water deeper down, but to get the full effect of this awesome place, come early, and during the week.

Anyone wondering whether to choose Blue Grotto or Devil’s Den, the two venues being so close to each other, do both. They are totally different, each spectacular in its own right. And it’s easy to dive both in one day.

Williston, Devil’s Den

Devil’s Den was the first dive when I took my advanced scuba class and I will never forget it. It’ll probably always be one of my very favorite dive sites. The prehistoric setting with the groves, the sinkhole with just a small circle on top that lets in light, the stairs down into the cavern through sheer rock, and just the whole atmosphere of the place are simply priceless. And the diving is wonderful, too.

Devil’s Den is not a large site, nor is it very deep. You may see 50 feet or a bit more if the water level is high. Management had rebuilt the wooden stairs descending into the sinkhole and terminating on the platform built atop the central debris cone. The water was clear as always, though without the absolute clarity I had seen prior as several teams of divers had used the facility before us.

When you look at the water in Devil’s Devil’s Den, it looks like it is about four feet deep, an interesting optical illusion. We descended into the 72 degree water which seemed fairly dark at first so that we turned on our dive lights to explore the rocks and formations. The cool thing about Devil’s Den is that even though the site is limited, you can dive behind and under rocks and it all looks like you’re exploring cave.

This time we went deeper and ventured into nooks and crannies more than before. We saw the several areas that are blocked off from further exploration. Beyond the grates, the cavern continues for what looked to me like a good distance, down as well as out. I probed with my light and wondered how far the system had been explored. I afterwards asked Rowena, Devil’s Den’s manager, and she claimed it was only a few feet before it petered out. I also asked Bill and Diane Oestreich of Bird’s Underwater, who are very advanced cave divers. They, too, said there wasn’t much, and that it had taken Bill five minutes to get in and 15 minutes to get back out when he ventured farther years ago. Maybe it was an illusion, but to me it looked as if there was much more to it.

We spent a full 45 minutes exploring during one full rotation of the den. As we came back up towards the debris cone, sun rays shone down into the water, making for a fairy tale magical atmosphere. And that was at almost 5PM. I took a bunch of pictures.

Later, after I got out of my gear and stowed it away in the back of our Pontiac Vibe rental (a small SUV that made for a perfect dive vehicle), I walked around the aquatic park facilities that someone had built as part of Devil's Den several years ago. It seems to be just sitting there, unmaintained, which is unfortunate as the whole setting would make for a wonderful, and wonderfully romantic, getaway.

So there. I look forward to my upcoming trips to Turks and Caicos in the Caribbean and to Cozumel later this year, but diving the springs and rivers of Florida will always be among my favorites. And it's a terrific bargain for anyone willing to do their own thing.

Posted by conradb212 at 10:01 PM | Comments (0)

June 11, 2009

A greener lake

With Folsom Lake just a few minutes away from home, I really wanted to go back there diving. And I wanted to do that as long as the lake was still full, but the weather just wasn't cooperating. This is unusual for the Sacramento area where the weather forecast usually turns to "sunny and hot" in May and stays that way until October or so. I kept checking the water level of the lake at the California Department of Water Resources website and my dive gear was packed, but I didn't get to go back to the lake until June 8, a sunny Monday morning.

The lake level was at 461 feet or just about the same as on our last dive in the lake, which means 930,000 acre-feet, close to the capacity of 975,000 acre-feet. We paid our eight dollars for a day pass and parked at Brown's Ravine with no one else there but the park cleanup crew and a couple of fishermen. The dive plan was to follow the perimeter of the submerged parking lot, then go down the boat ramp at the lot's far side until we found its bottom. We had originally planned on making and deploying some kinds of markers that would be found once the water went down again, showing how deep underwater the marker locations had been. However, we couldn't think of a good way of doing that.

The water looked quite clear from the surface, amazingly so given that there'd probably been thousands of people swimming and boating over the prior weekends. However, as soon as we waded in we saw that the color of the water had changed. It now had a distinctly greenish cast compared to the blueish tint back in mid May. It still felt clean, though, without debris or algae floating around. Water temperature at the surface was 69 degrees.

As soon as we went under I saw that the visibility was poor, probably no more than five to seven feet. There was also considerably more silt and the yellow double line on the submerged road was barely visible anymore. We had resolved to stay close together so we would not get separated, something that can happen in an instant in murky water. Visibility was so poor that at times it was hard to even follow the perimeter of the road, and I wasn't quite sure I wanted to descend down the ramp once we found it as it'd probably be like pea soup there.

One thing we noticed was that the water had warmed up quite a bit. It was 70 degrees at the surface and still 68 degree down at 25 to 30 feet, whereas it had dropped to 57 degrees at that depth just three weeks ago, with a steep drop from 70 to 57 between 15 and 20 feet. Now the temperature didn't start dropping until we got to 30 feet.

Visibility at the top of the ramp was bad, but no worse than during the 20 minutes it took to get there, and so we decided to go down. It feels a bit weird diving down a deeply submerged ramp where you can barely see anything and it gets darker and darker. The temperature also rapidly dropped into the 50s, though it didn't feel very cold with the 7mm wetsuit, hood and gloves, and having started out in fairly warm water.

We found the bottom of the boat ramp at 83 feet -- which translates to an elevation of 378 feet -- where it ended in the silt. The temperature at 83 feet was 50 degrees. I took a couple of pictures while Carol explored a few feet beyond the end of the ramp. Anything farther than that and it'd have been too easy to lose the ramp and then simply be at the murky bottom of the lake, without anything to orient yourself by.

The much lower visibility meant we saw fewer fish though they were clearly there. We did see what seemed like millions of tiny fry. First I'd thought it was just floating debris, but it was schools of little fish, everywhere.

I was surprised at how much more silt had accumulated on the bottom within just three weeks, and so we were careful not to touch bottom with our fins and stir things up. This meant staying close enough to the bottom to see where we were going, but not so close that we touched and caused silt-outs.

We made our way back up the ramp, following the steel cable in its center, and then onto the parking lot where we used the compass to cut across the lot and back to our starting point. On our prior dive the water had been clear enough to explore a bit, but this time it was just swimming in a greenish world that disappeared a few feet away from us in all directions, and all we could do was follow one another.

It was a fun dive nevertheless, and I was happy that we found the bottom of the ramp. But it was amazing to see how quickly the water had gone from fairly clear to quite green. The much higher water temperature in the top 20-25 feet probably facilitated algae growth.

The moral of the story is that if you want to dive Folsom Lake, do it as early in the year as possible, when the new water from the Sierras is still cold and fresh.

Posted by conradb212 at 02:01 PM | Comments (0)

May 29, 2009

An earthquake hits Roatan

At 3:24 in the morning, a strong earthquake, measuring 7.3 on the Richter scale, hit Roatan. According to the USGS, the epicenter was at 16.730°N, 86.209°W, less than 20 miles north off the eastern tip of Roatan. The earthquake had a shallow depth of just 10 kilometer, with shallow earthquakes usually creating greater damage. This earthquake apparently happened as the result of movement on the Swan Islands fault, which is a segment of the boundary between the North America and Caribbean plates. The plates there move about an inch a year and cause frequent earthquakes. The last major one caused by friction between the North America and Caribbean plates happened in February of 1976 in Guatemala. That one measured 7.5 on the Richter scale and resulted in almost 25,000 deaths.

Despite the magnitude and proximity, this earthquake appears to have done far less damage. As of May 29, the USGS reported six fatalities, 40 injuries, and 130 buildings damaged or destroyed in northern Honduras, with the earthquake also felt in the entire region.

I read about the earthquake a few hours after it had occurred and worried about how it had affected Roatan itself. The Cocoview resort has a website with two webcams as well as a very active bulletin board. I was relieved when I saw both cameras online, showing no apparent damage to the dock area with the boats nor to the structures on the water in front of the resort.

Apparently, Cocoview had neither lost power nor internet access for any length of time as reports began coming in on the CoCo Chat bulletin board. "Doc" Radaswki reported that everyone on the staff and their families were okay, and that the resort itself was okay as well, except for broken water pipes and major clutter from things falling down. He reported that the home of Jorge, who had been our boat captain the first time we visited Roatan, was badly damaged.

There were also reports from underwater and those sound quite intense. It was reported that the wreck of the Prince Albert had a big buckle and crack in one area, and another new crack running all the way down the ship from top to where it rests in the sand. It was also reported that huge pieces of coral had broken off walls and toppled.

A second report by the same source (user name Habib at CoCo Chat) said that a large number of sponges had simply been sheared off at the base, that there was much damage to Neuman's Wall near the Prince Albert, with pieces broken off the wall and falling to the bottom, exposing edges of long dead coral. It was mentioned again that the Prince Albert had developed large holes, with rust clouds still spewing out. Habib also reported "weird noise we are all hearing underwater...like distant sonic booms reminding me of rolling thunder...you can feel the concusions in the water..."

The underwater reports sound drastic, above water it seems that the area got away with far less damage than could have happened with such a strong earthquake so close. The 6.7 quake that hit Los Angeles in 1994 caused $20 billion in damage.

Doc Radawski reported a couple of days later that two popular dive sites -- Mary's Place and Calvin's Crack -- appear to have survived intact, with sponges sheared off and some new cracks visible on top of the reef, but no visible structural damage or changes.

Dr. Rob Davis of the Whale Shark & Oceanic Research Center on Utila also checked the south east and south west dive sites and found only "minor damage here and there." He reported that the "Labyrinth had a new crack, but overall nothing too dramatic."

Two other divers reported that the damage they saw was depressing, but that for those who don't know every nook and cranny of the sites, there is still a lot of beautiful reef left. They, too, reported that the big barrel sponges do seem to have suffered the worst damage, and that a chunk of Newman's wall closest to the wreck of the Prince Albert came down. They had also gone to the Anka's Place dive site and when they went over the edge of the wall, there was just two hundred feet or so of gray concrete-looking rubble instead of the coral wall and overhang. They also visited Calvin's Crack, and found that other than a couple of big sponges that had come off, the site looked much the same.

Posted by conradb212 at 03:39 PM | Comments (0)

May 20, 2009

Diving the Folsom Lake parking lot

For the first time in three years I got to dive again in Folsom Lake where I'd done my certification dives three years ago.

Folsom Lake is, strictly speaking, not a lake but a reservoir, with the water held back by Folsom Dam. The dam was built in the 1950s to provide flood control, electricity, and water for irrigation and drinking. When full, the lake covers an areas of about 18 square miles, not huge, but large enough to have marinas with many hundreds of boats. Folsom Lake, however, is rarely full. For one thing, its flood control duties mean that it must always hold some capacity in reserve. For another, it can get pretty dry in California, and so the amount of snow falling onto the Sierra Nevadas to the east of the lake will determine how full the lake will be in any given year.

The volume of reservoirs is commonly given in acre-feet, an acre being roughly 44,000 square feet (43,560, to be exact), an area just a bit smaller than a football field. An acre-foot is the volume that covers an acre with one foot of water, or 43,560 cubic feet. Folsom Lake's capacity is given as 975,000 acre-feet, which is about 318 billion gallons, or for those who think in terms of oil, about 7.5 billion barrels. As far as reservoirs go, Folsom Lake is not a giant one, being dwarfed by Shasta and Oroville that have capacities of 4.5 and 3.5 million acre-feet, respectively. Because of its relatively small size and reliance on snowfall in the Sierras, the waterlevel of Folsom Lake tends to go up and down dramatically. On May 20, 2009, with the lake almost full at 932,000 acre-feet, the water level elevation was 462 feet, but elevation can vary from a maximum of 480 feet to a minimum of about 350 feet, a difference of 130 feet.

I'd gone up to Folsom Lake during times of drought when the waterlevel had fallen to just 22% of capacity with large areas of formerly submerged land suddenly dry. The lake level had gone down so much by the end of 2008 that visitors were asked to stay away from what could be archaeologically valuable sites, such as the remnants of building foundations from farms and other structures that once stood where Folsom Lake is now.

Since the Folsom Dam was designed not only for flood control but also as a recreation area, its designers made sure that the lake would still be accessible for boats when the water level was low. For that purpose they built a secondary parking lot and boat ramp at the far end of the Brown's Ravine marina area. That parking lot is underwater when the lake level is high. When we did the certification dives, instructor Chuck had casually mentioned "the parking lot" but I had thought it was some sort of natural underwater formation, not a real parking lot. But when we went in, we were actually diving and hovering over the parking lot.

Below is an aerial view of the submerged parking lot. You can clearly see the outlines of the lot underwater at 10 o'clock off the dry land. On our dive, the water level was quite a bit higher yet.

This time, the water level was higher yet, with the access road to the parking lot itself flooded halfway up. A lot of trees were almost entirely underwater, so water this high is apparently not something the trees expect. Our plan was to enter the lake at the access road to the parking lot, then follow the perimeter of the parking lot counter clockwise until we reached the boat ramp and then go down the boat ramp if conditions were conducive.

We had no idea what the water temperature was going to be, or what visibility to expect. A web search yielded widely varying temperatures. A triathlon event that included swimming in the lake suggested water temperatures in the high 60s towards the end of May. However, for environmental reasons (fisheries, etc.), the operators of Folsom Dam are trying to release water at a steady 57 degrees. As for visibility, I had thought it might be quite good. After all, 70% of all the water in Folsom Lake was brand-new water directly from the snow-packed Sierras. So I had visions of hovering over the parking lot and being able to see it from one end to the other.

Reality is always a bit different. We had suited up in 7mm wetsuits, gloves and hoods, and that turned out to be a good choice. The water temperature on the surface and down to about 15 feet was a balmy 71 degrees. Though the water was very clean, visibility was only fair, perhaps 10-20 feet. We followed the yellow double line in the center of the road, then the right edge of the road until we reached the parking lot. Between 15 and 20 feet was a fairly steep thermocline with the water temperature dropping from 71 to 57 degrees. It still didn't feel cold, though. 23 minutes into the dive we reached the top of the boat ramp which was now 25 feet underwater. We went down the ramp along its rightside edge. It was getting colder now and there was much less light. At 75 feet we still had not reached the bottom of the ramp, but decided to turn around as the water was now 49 degrees. Amazingly, it felt nowhere near as cold as in San Diego at the Yukon where 50 degrees had felt debilitatingly cold.

Below is a picture of the lot when it is not flooded. The yellow "No Parking" block marks the top of the boat ramp that was about 25 feet underwater on our dive.

Going back up the ramp took another ten minutes and then we followed the perimeter of the parking lot on the other side of the ramp. The whole time we'd seen plenty of fish, mostly bass, and numerous schools of tiny fish. The bass did not seem afraid in the least and easily came within reaching distance. We also found a pair of fully functional reading glasses and what looked like a small, cut diamond (it wasn't real). I am not sure how Carol managed to find it, but she did. A good hour into the dive we left the perimeter of the parking lot and promptly got lost on it. Since we'd been in just 15 feet of water for a while, a quick ascent to the surface showed which direction to go. At the end it had been a 70 minute dive, and a thoroughly enjoyable one.

What surprised me was just how much silt and sediment had formed on the road and on the parking lot in just a few weeks. It wasn't enough for a serious silt-out, but swimming close to the bottom whirled up quite a bit.

A lot of people sneer at Folsom Lake for diving, even those who got certified there. For the most part, they are right. There isn't much to see underwater and during certification it's mostly descending to 30 feet or so and demonstrating skills. But diving the parking lot and the ramp was a lot of fun. It just felt so weird to dive over where we had parked just a couple of months ago. And during the drought last Fall, we even had taken the car down the ramp and parked on the lake bottom, probably a good deal lower than the 75 feet we had reached on the ramp.

With the conditions we encountered, not only is Folsom Lake an enjoyable dive, but it'd also make a terrific place for underwater navigation on the parking lot, and for deep dive training by simply following the ramp down (it probably ends well below 100 feet when the lake is this high). And the price of admission is a grand total of eight dollars for a day pass to the area.

The image below shows the computer log of the dive. Going down and then back up the boat ramp made for one of the more interesting looking dive profiles.

Posted by conradb212 at 04:59 AM | Comments (0)

May 02, 2009

Nasty letter from PADI

Today, much to my surprise, I received a nasty letter from PADI's legal department. It went:

"Dear Mr. Blickenstorfer:

I am with PADI's Legal Department. PADI is the distributor of DSAT’s Recreational Dive Planner. Please be aware that you do not have the rights nor permission to use DSAT's various dive tables on your site http://www.scubadiverinfo.com/2_divetables.html. To be able to use DSAT’s copyrighted materials, a license agreement would need to be in place. At this time, we have no interest in pursuing a license agreement.

We must request that you please take these portions of your site down immediately. Also, we would appreciate a written confirmation from you that you understand and will comply with this request. Thank you in advance for your anticipated prompt cooperation."

The missive was directed at my having a picture of the PADI dive table on our scubadiverinfo.com site. PADI dive tables are quite complex and convoluted, and so I took the time explaining them with examples. Everyone said that was a great idea. Everyone except PADI, that is. Don't these folks realize PADI, and diving, needs all the help it can get?

And not only are those puffy legal eagles threatening me, but then they condescendingly declare that "At this time, we have no interest in pursuing a license agreement."

Get real, guys!

Posted by conradb212 at 12:27 AM | Comments (0)

March 30, 2009

The importance of picking the right dive suit

When I first started diving, I didn't think much about water temperature. The pool where I did my training dives was comfortably warm, and I was far too occupied with figuring out how to breathe and move underwater to worry about being hot or cold. When we selected our rental gear at the dive shop for the certification dives in Folsom Lake, I picked whatever fit as opposed to checking the anticipated temperature of the lake and then getting the appropriate gear. And when I worked on our scuba website and wrote a section on exposure suits, the insulation guideline table from Carol's NAUI course materials meant little to me.

That table said to wear a dive skin in water 85 degrees and above, a thin wet suit for 75 to 85 degree water, a 5-7mm wetsuit for 55 to 75 degree water, and a dry suit for temperatures between 35 and 55. So when it came time for me to get my own wetsuit, I figured 7mm was best as it provided the widest range of protection.

The Telos 7mm suit I picked as my general purpose dive gear certainly did provide good protection, but I soon realized that there were drawbacks. The 7mm material is thick and bulky, making it difficult to pack the suit on trips. The suit was very difficult to put on and I was usually exhausted before I even got in the water, just from getting into the darn thing. And even a bit of sun or exertion on dry land led to overheating.

Still, I wore the 7mm suit on all my early dives, including the rivers and springs of Florida (71 to 73 degrees) and Lake Tahoe which was usually 66 or so on the surface and then ranged from a chilly 48 degrees at 110 feet to the mid to high 50s on most dives. Once I was in the water I felt just fine in Florida, and really wasn't too cold in Tahoe. Getting into and out of the suit, however, was a constant pain, and often what I remembered most. I thought working up a major sweat and being exhausted from putting on the wetsuit was the norm. I did buy a second 7mm suit, one that fit me better and was more stretchy. That made a substantial difference.

I bought a 3mm wetsuit for my August trip to Honduras where the water was usually 84 to 86 at the bottom. That was perfect and there probably wasn't even a need for a suit as the weather was hot and sunny. Putting on the 3mm suit was infinitely easier than the thicker suits. The 3mm suit also dried much quicker and took up much less space in my luggage. After those wonderful dives in tropical waters I thought I had it all figured out. 3mm worked in warm water, and as soon as it got a bit colder, or even quite cold, 7mm would do the trick.

Then I found out it wasn't that easy. When we returned to Honduras in December, the water was still 78 to 80 degrees at the bottom, and usually 80 to 82 at the surface. I thought that was plenty warm enough for wearing my 3mm suit, but I was usually cold. I also found that overcast skies and wind can make a huge difference. It's one thing to emerge from the water and into the warm sun, and quite another to come up to wind and rain. Wind, especially, can be brutal on an open dive boat, and somehow the difference between a sunny and a gray, overcast day is huge, too. I was so cold that I bought a diveskin to wear underneath the 3mm suit, but found that it hardly made a difference. I also bought a Shammyz jacket to keep warm on the boat.

The wreck diving trip to San Diego then showed me that even a 7mm suit with thick boots, thick gloves and a hood was not enough to keep me warm in 50 degree water, at least not when I was staying down in that cold water for 30 minutes at a time. It felt brutally cold, to the extent where I could not enjoy the dives and had to skip some. I felt that the gray, dreary sky contributed to feeling cold once I was back up. I tried diving with the skin under the 7mm suit, but it made little difference.

What I learned is that there's nothing like personal experience when it comes to picking the right suit to wear on your dives. There may be guidelines, but you need to experience how it feels to you and what your personal comfort level is. I really thought that a couple of suits would cover the whole range of water temperatures you're likely to encounter on typical dives, but, at least for me, that's not so. Knowing what I know now, I'd have bought a 5mm suit for my December trip to Honduras, and I am now contemplating dry suit certification so I'll be able to enjoy my next cold water dives.

Why not just tough it out? For some that my be a solution, but I don't think it's worth it. Dive vacations and dive trips are expensive, and not being able to enjoy dives, or even having to skip dives, because of being cold makes no sense at all. As far as I am concerned, it can even be dangerous if you find yourself shivering underwater instead of paying attention.

I should also mention that the type of wetsuit you wear makes a BIG difference on your buoyancy. That's another thing I only learned through experience. I thought there couldn't possibly be much difference between a 3mm and a 7mm suit, but there is, and you have to compensate by adding or subtracting weight from your weight belt or your BC's weight pockets. Even gloves and a hood can make a difference.

Posted by conradb212 at 03:16 PM | Comments (0)

March 24, 2009

Wreck diving off San Diego, California

Diving the Yukon

No, not the Yukon up north but the HMCS Yukon, a Canadian McKenzie Class destroyer that now sits in 105 feet of frigid water a couple of miles off the coast of San Diego. As far as wrecks go, the Yukon is a big and imposing one. It’s 366 feet long, displaces almost 3,000 tons, and has some menacing looking guns. The ship was launched in 1961 and sunk in July of 2000 to form an artificial reef. Unlike ships that sink all by themselves, the Yukon was helped along, after having been thoroughly prepped for scuba diving adventures by cutting a large number of holes into its sides and decks. The actual sinking of the Yukon was supposed to be an orderly event witnessed by thousands of boats. Maps had been drawn, cutouts were all neatly marked, and there were even laminated “You Are Here” orientation maps in many strategic points inside the vessel. (see article "Map the Yukon" in Geospatial Solutions)

The Yukon, however, had other plans. Rougher than anticipated seas made the ship take on water through the cut-outs in its side, and so she simply sank, ahead of time. She also did not neatly settle on the sandy bottom, but rolled over and came to rest sideways. Some of the planned cutouts remained unmade as the shape charges never went off, and the nice, neat map, while still technically accurate (except for the cutouts), isn’t of much use with the ship now laying on its side. Those who want to see how the Yukon rests at a depth of 105 feet should get Franko’s HMCS Yukon Deck Plan. It shows an exploded view of all six decks as well as floor plans and all the current cutouts.

I had been invited to dive the Yukon early on in my scuba career, but at that time I had not been ready yet. Now I felt I was, and so I had signed up for three days of wreck diving with our friends at Fisheye Scuba. We drove the 500 miles or so from Folsom to San Diego’s Mission Bay area and stayed at the Dana Hotel that was right across the street from our dive charter, Waterhorse. The Dana Hotel is also very close to SeaWorld San Diego, but, in all fairness, why go to an expensive seaworld theme park when a mile away you can see and experience the real thing?

About 16 people had signed up for the trip, some doing their PADI wreck diving certification dives and others, like us, just doing the diving itself. I had no idea what to expect. This was going to be my first time in the waters of the Pacific. Kate of Fisheye Scuba had said the water temperature was going to be in the high 50s on the surface and 52 or so at the bottom. Half the divers were going to wear drysuits and the others wetsuits. Not having a drysuit, I brought along my 7mm Scubapro Form wetsuit. And hood, and gloves. And not one but two pairs of Shammyz to keep warm, one of them with the special windbreaker that zippers on the outside.

Set the alarm for 6am and made it to the dock by 7:30am where there were already a number of folks unloading trucks, donning gear, signing papers and using a big dolly to get tanks and gear to the dive boat. Half an hour or so we were all on the boat, which was a cozy affair with a head, a nice cabin where the captain had set up snacks, fruit and beverages, and even a hot shower. The boat had its own compressor so they didn't even have to take the tanks off the boat to fill them. Carol had brought her two Nitrox steel-80 tanks (US$12 per fill as they had to take those off the boat); I used the rental aluminum 80s that came with the trip.

The weather was typical San Diego, that is all foggy so that it looked like it was a gray, overcast day. It’s just fog, of course, but it feels coldish and dreary anyway. The fog usually burns off around 11am or so, but not always, and sometimes it goes away and then comes back. Kate gathered her wreck class group for a briefing, and then the captain did a dive briefing of his own. The first dive was the big one, the Yukon. She’s a big one, we learned, just look at the bow and stern buoys (they were far apart for sure). Viz isn’t very good, like 20 feet or so. Look out for the surge as it can suck you right into an opening and spit you back out. Other than that, go down the line, do the dive, and come back up. It’s actually refreshing that it’s all so straightforward in something so potentially dangerous.

After having checked all my stuff and gear at least five times, including the Canon G10 in its underwater housing, the Scubapro dive knife I had strapped onto my right arm, and the little dive light, I did a giant stride into the darkish sea. You always heat up quite a bit in a 7mm wetsuit, and so the 56 degree water actually felt quite refreshing. Carol and I had vowed to stay close together and so I waited for her before I descended. Turns out she didn’t have enough weight and had to add another two pounds. I had guessed 24 pounds for me, and that ended up being just right.

Going down, the water was all green. I had a bit of a sinus pressure ache in my forehead at around 15 feet. So I stopped rather than force it and end up with a big nosebleed as I had in Honduras. The ache subsided and I resumed the descent. It quickly got colder and darker, and two minutes later giant shapes came into view, the Yukon. If you are not a diver you may think it must be quite interesting to simply float and look down onto a sunken ship. It is very interesting, but ship wrecks hardly ever sit in crystal clear water so you can really see them. Instead, they may be so broken that you hardly recognize them. It’s amazing what the sea can do to a ship in just a few years. Or it is so dark and murky that you can only see what’s practically in front of your nose. Now imagine a 366 foot vessel lying on its side, and you’re looking at it essentially in the dark and with a visibility of no more than 15 feet or so.

What that means is that things come into view and then disappear again. You don’t quite know what they are or where you are. I had thought the map would help me orient myself, but it was much too dark and murky for that. I was so enthralled with the adventure of it all that I actually completely forgot that the ship was sideways. All I could concentrate on was the encroaching cold, checking my gauges to make sure I didn’t get too deep or run out of bottom time, and, most importantly, not to lose Carol. We both had cameras and I was determined to at least take a few shots.

I was stunned at how much aquatic life had already taken hold on the ship. Anyone expecting a gleaming high-tech destroyer to still look pretty much the same after nine years underwater, not so. There’s a thick crust of coral, anemones and other sealife, with thousands of large and totally white anemones giving the ship a surreal look. Some kelp was floating around, too, showing just how strong the surge was. I tried to take pictures, but between the unfamiliar layout of the button controls of a new camera and the eerie surroundings, I didn’t get much. When the flash did go off, I saw that the coral surrounding the anemones was bright red.

Every dive is different. Even though the surroundings were quite intimidating, I felt calm and free of anxiety. I seemed to spend equal time taking in whatever sight I could of the massive wreck, making sure I did not lose my buddy, trying to take pictures, and checking depth and air. I did not come close to penetrating the wreck, or even come close to one of the openings. I really wanted to see the big guns but there was no time to do any exploring. While the wreck laid in semi-darkness where the lights came in handy, I could see light above and quite a few fish, whole schools. There wasn’t, though, anywhere near the variety I saw in Honduras. I looked at the dark shapes of encrusted metal and felt that anyone who got lost in there would hardly have a chance to come out alive or be found and rescued in time.

Time went very quickly. It was a bit hard to clearly see the data on my Uwatec Smart-Z wrist-mounted dive computer in the near darkness and so I made extra-sure to stay on top of remaining air. After 25 minutes at the wreck, at depths between 65 and 82 feet and at a constant temperature of 51 degrees, I was down to 850 psi and 6 minutes of nitrogen time. Though we had not moved around much, I had no idea where the descent line was and motioned to Carol that it was time for me to go up. Carol did know (it was only a few feet away) and we went up, doing a four minute safety stop at 15 feet. Using less air and being on Nitrox, she still had a good third left, and nitrogen time had never been an issue.

Back up on the boat I felt both elated and quite cold. Even a bowl of steaming hot minestrone soup didn’t eliminate all the shivering and so, after two test divers reported poor visibility at the second dive site (the cutter Ruby E), I decided to call it a day. I had dived the Yukon, and that felt really good.

No two wrecks are the same, and every wreck dive is different. Temperature and visibility can make a huge difference. A wreck in good light and clear water is totally different from a wreck in the semi-dark at almost no visibility. I am glad I did this dive. I enjoyed myself and I did not feel anxious. I did well. But I realized once again that this is not a harmless sport. The margin for error is very little.

Diving the Ruby E

After the very cold, murky dive to the Yukon I wondered what Day Two of our wreck diving trip would bring. I’d been asking myself why the dive boats go out early in the morning when just about every day in San Diego seems gray and foggy until about the time the dive boats return. I’ve heard a number of explanations, from the sea being calmer in the morning, to dive boat captains wanting to go home early, to the tide and such. I still don’t know what the actual reason is. It’s definitely no fun to get up early for a few hours of dreary fog when one knows the weather will most likely clear up around 11AM or so.

Anyway, I really didn’t feel too hot as we made our way across the street to the dock. Everything was damp and clammy and I racked my brain trying to figure out the best way to stay reasonably warm and dry through the process. At 8:15AM we took off onto the grayish sea under a grayish sky. First stop was a lobster trap rescue operation. Seems one of those crude, yet effective lobster trap cages made of chicken wire and rebar had gotten stuck. Ryan of Fisheye Scuba dove into the frigid waters. After a few minutes he re-emerged, mission accomplished. The captain of the tiny fishing boat was happy.

On we went to our first destination, which was the wreck of the 165-foot Coast Guard Cutter Ruby E originally designed to enforce prohibition and launched in 1934. The vessel then had a checkered history (including submarine control, fishing, salvage and even a bit of drug smuggling, and she ran under various names. The Ruby E is a much smaller ship than the massive Yukon and had been sitting on the bottom since her sinking in 1989, 11 years longer than the Yukon.

We geared up, with Carol donning the Liquid Image camera mask. The camera mask was invented by a camera located in the Sacramento area and combines a 5-megapixel CMOS camera that can also do video with a regular dive mask. This sounds somewhat gimmicky, and looks it, too, but the thing seemed well designed and we’d actually had had dinner with Liquid Image executives a few days prior to the trip. They’d explained the device, how it came about, and what it could do. We had offered to take it along for an underwater test. And while this version of the camera mask only had a 33-foot depth rating, we planned to take it down to the Ruby E, which sits in about 85 feet of water.

The water was green as we went down the descent line and it got dark quickly. By the time we reached the sandy bottom we could barely see the bow of the cutter. It was cold, barely 50 degrees, the visibility was poor (perhaps 15 feet), and there was a strong surge back and forth. Without being able to see much, exploring a wreck becomes a matter of slowly examining what appears in front of your eyes. The Ruby E was reasonably intact, but all surfaces were totally overgrown with a dense cover of small strawberry anemones and similar critters. There were none of the giant white anemones here as we'd found on the Yukon. We saw a good number of starfish that come in a wide variety of shapes, sizes and colors. Carol, aware that the camera mask was recording, kept moving so that her exhaust bubbles did not obscure the recording and also made an effort to keep her head still, which with the data mask meant the same as holding the camera steady. The mask apparently worked as it wasn’t fogged up and she did not seem to experience any problems.

I tried to get some good shots with my Canon G10, but it was mostly a futile effort. Between the surge and the cold, things just weren’t very pleasant. If a bit of cold and dark does not seem like a big deal, consider that this is a cold one cannot escape from. Down there, you cannot duck into a doorway to get reprieve from an icy blast or wind. You also cannot button your coat or pull up the zipper or a hood. What you’re wearing is all you got, and it cannot be changed. The dark and surge makes it worse. Add to that an unfamiliar place that remains largely hidden from sight, and things can get somewhat stressful in a hurry. I never felt truly anxious, but also did not enjoy myself. It was just too cold. Eventually it got so that I began to shiver. It was time to get back up anyway and, as usual, Carol almost instantly found the descent line (how does she do that?). At the 15-foot stop the water was back to 57 and, comparatively, felt like bath water. I was glad.

Back on the boat I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to do a second dive. Even sitting inside the cabin I was shivering, and even hot soup and a big cup of hot chocolate did little to warm me up. I felt annoyed by that as I am not usually that susceptible to cold. I really did not want to miss another dive, and so I willed myself to stop shivering and get ready to brace the cold water again.

In the meantime, Kate’s wreck diving students compared notes and had a critique, though I am not sure how much people actually heard over the noise of the engines. I don’t think much wreck penetration was done, but they got to practice site surveys, handling their reels, and other wreck diving techniques.

Diving kelp

The second dive was in a kelp field. I had read a lot about the kelp forest off the coast of California and didn’t quite know what to make of it. It sounded quite intimidating and invoked unpleasant memories of fighting off sea weed and assorted algae when I was a child. Whatever I’d read of the underwater kelp forests was invariably positive, though I’d also come across references of people getting caught in kelp and having to use knifes or requiring assistance to extricate themselves. Kelp, apparently, was also where a lot of fish and other critters hung out, and there were many accounts of divers suddenly finding themselves with a big fish or a sea otter or some other creature.

When we arrived at our destination, it really didn’t look very pleasant. A lot of what I used to consider "sea weed" was bobbing on the surface, making the water look murky and somehow not clear or clean. In his briefing, the captain described a ledge and rocky area underneath us and said we might expect to see some larger animals. He said stay below the surface to keep from getting entangled in the kelp once we came back up, and, should we get stuck, to simply drop down rather than fight the kelp. I didn’t quite know what to make of that, but in I went.

The water wasn’t much clearer here, but at least we didn’t descend into darkish depths. Instead, as soon as I dropped below the surface I saw the kelp forest, which turned out to be a magical world of gently swaying leafy plants vertically in the water. Far from being mere “sea weed,” kelp is intricate, beautiful, and unlike anything that grows on dry land. It isn’t just a stalk and leaves ether; instead, the plant makes a multitude of different tendrils, spirally growths, leaf-like structures held up by battalions of bulb-like floaters, and it all sways together in a gentle concert of fluid motion. It is captivating and Carol took numerous pictures.

We quickly reached bottom that looked much like the coral reefs of the Caribbean, only without the variety of fish and colors, or the clarity of the water. Instead, there was strong surge back and forth. Examining the bottom we found a lot of urchins and many starfish, a Garibaldi or two, and some other critters. I had read a book on urchin fishing in California, which had been a lucrative trade and industry in the 1980s and 90s when the Japanese bought up whatever enterprising professional divers could bring up. I somehow thought the urchins were just sitting on the ocean floor, but the vast majority is actually burrowed into the surface in roundish cubbies. I don’t know if they ever come out or simply stay there. Some are quite large, much bigger than I thought they get. Some seemed the size of basketballs.

We swam between rock outcroppings that rose to within 25 feet of the surface, then dropped down vertically to lower ground in the mid to high 40s. The water was colder and less clear on this side, but it was still fascinating to swim between the kelp plants. They were not dense enough to get lost in them or having to fight one’s way through by any means. There was plenty of room. I was getting cold again and began my ascent after 35 minutes or so. I’d found the boat’s anchor line and so had a clear shot straight up. Carol followed, taking many beautiful close-up and macro pictures of the kelp plants and some of the amazingly colorful critters that live on and between it. Some look downright psychedelic and when you look at the pictures later, it's hard to believe that something that beautiful is in the cold and dark water.

Me, I was glad I’d overcome the cold and made the dive.

Another dive to the Yukon

Our last day started like the first two, with a gray sky and a chill in the air. In addition to getting ready for diving, we also had to pack up our stuff, put it in the car, and check out. Logistics can get a bit overwhelming at times.

This time I decided to wear my Akona dive skin underneath the 7mm wetsuit and see if that helped me fend off the penetrating cold. The wetsuit certainly goes on easier when you wear a dive skin, but when you have to go to the bathroom, it’s yet another item to somehow get out of the way.

The first dive was a second descent to the Yukon. That was certainly alright with me, but I wondered whether a repeat dive was due to the wreck diving class or whether there were no other suitable wrecks. This was, after all, “wreck alley.” On this dive we were going to be testing the Liquid Image Camera Mask again, recording and documenting the entire dive. The water was 57 on the surface, but quickly got colder as we descended down the line into semi-darkness. This time our mooring line got us to the center of the Yukon. The world was all green down there and once again, it was difficult to make out anything but darkish shapes at the very edge of the 15-foot or so visibility range we now found ourselves in. They were parts of the ship, but it was mostly impossible to figure out which parts.

The top of the ship had a lush growth of kelp or weeds on it, and they were moving with the surge that washed over the ship. I descended down what must have been the deck surface in front of the bridge and found the water to be both calmer and darker. I was at 91 feet in 51-degree water; trying to get my bearings, trying not to get lost, staying calm, and figuring out where I was. Since it was so dark and murky, everyone stayed reasonably close together and so I was watching dive lights of my fellow divers as they shone into some of the cutouts, tied off lines, handled reels, and slowly entered the wreck.

Though I was very careful I temporarily lost sight of Carol, white fins and all, and felt a sense of frustration over that as I wanted to experience and explore for the precious minutes down on the wreck rather than spend the time searching for my dive buddy. At this depth and under these conditions I really didn’t want to dive solo, and I also didn’t just want to join another group. Fortunately, Carol found me after a few minutes.

My total time down by the Yukon was 22 minutes, from the time I arrived at the bottom of the descent line to the time Carol and I began our ascent. It didn’t feel that long, but it also wasn’t long enough to do, or even start, anything meaningful. So the dive was mostly looking at this and that, and simply holding it together at this murky depth. I took some pictures of the white anemone, marveled at just how colorful the growth was. The ever-present strawberry anemone, whose scientific name is corynactis californica, covered large areas of the wreck, bursting in bright red whenever touched by a flashlight or dive light. These are really neither anemones nor coral, but somewhere in between. Individual strawberry anemone don’t grow larger than an inch, but they can cover something as large as the wreck of a destroyer.

Again, I cannot overemphasize the difference between 90 feet in warm, clear, bright Caribbean waters and 90 feet at 50 degrees, poor visibility and near dark. It’s a bit like the difference between cruising along in sunny daylight, enjoying yourself, and driving at night and in the rain or snow and having to really concentrate on what you’re doing.

The ascent means a progressively lighter shade of green, and also noticeably warmer water. Warmer, of course, is relative as it is only the difference between 51 and 57 degrees. I swam to the dive boat, took off my fins, climbed up onto the deck and plopped down, exhausted, but happy. It’d been a good dive, and it felt like a monumental thing.

Carol thought the camera mask had given up its ghost as it looked like the lens had condensation or water inside. Later I found that the mask had recorded the entire 40-minute dive in one giant 2GB file.

After the dive I was unable to warm up and couldn’t stop shivering no matter what I tried. So I decided to skip the second dive, another kelp dive, and watch the goings-on on the dive, the San Diego coast, and the bubbles of my fellow divers. The bubbles hardly moved. When you’re down there you think you’re moving around quite a bit, but the bubbles tell otherwise, at least when there is no current to carry you away.

Posted by conradb212 at 10:05 PM | Comments (0)

Getting started with dry suits

After shivering through four 50-degree water dives in my 7mm wetsuit, I seriously began contemplating a dry suit. On the dive boat I’d been watching the divers in our group who wore dry suits smiling and being comfortable whereas the wetsuit contingent was grimacing and trying to warm up with steaming cups of hot chocolate or bowls of minestrone soup. I’d missed two dives because I simply had been too cold. Dry suits are expensive, but so is missing dives on expensive dive trips. My missed trips probably would have made a nice down-payment on a dry suit.

What are dry suits? They are the kinds of protection divers wear in cold water, 50 degrees and below (and as far as I am concerned, make that 60 and below). As the name implies, a dry suit stays dry inside and allows no water in, and that is its primary purpose. The staying warm part comes from wearing undergarments that trap an insulating layer of air. Dry suits are made of high tech components and materials, essentially technology that emanated from the space program, with some bicycle tire technology thrown in. Using a dry suit is significantly more complicated than a wet suit, and there are things that can go wrong. This is why there are special classes for dry suit diving and certification. And expect to pay quite a bit more for a dry suit than a wet suit.

Unlike wet suits that come in various configurations, almost all dry suits are full body suits, including integrated boots. They are totally sealed, and have special waterproof zippers. The seals around your wrists and neck are made of latex or neoprene, with large contact areas to provide the best possible seal. Latex seals are thinner and seal better, but they are easier to rip and some people are allergic to latex. Neoprene seals wear better, but are thicker and need to be stretched to fit. Seals are usually the first thing to break on a dry suit. They can be replaced, and some dry suits even have seals that can be zipped on and thus replaced.

As stated, the insulation provided by a dry suit comes from the air inside the dry suit. Air is a much better insulator than water, but unlike the water layer inside a wetsuit, the air inside a dry suit compresses and expands, which means the dry suit needs an air valve that allows for inflation from a low-pressure supply from the air tank. The valve is usually located on the chest. That way, the divers can add more air as they descend. There is also an exhaust valve, or “dump” valve to purge expanding air during ascent. Controlling the air inside a dry suit requires training and experience. You don’t want for all that buoyant air inside your dry suit to end up in your legs and you ascending feet first.

Dry suits can be made of a variety of different materials. Generally, they are foam neoprene, compressed and crushed foam , or membrane coated materials. Foam neoprene is the same kind of material that’s used in wet suits, which means dry suits made of it provide a bit of insulation in addition to that provided by the air layer, but their buoyancy varies with depth. Compressed and crushed neoprene dry suits use special kinds of neoprene material that has been specially prepared to strengthen the material, bonding and stitching. Membrane, or “shell,” dry suits use a waterproof coating over the fabric. The coating is usually urethane or a laminate of rubber and some tough synthetic material. They are lighter and more flexible than neoprene suits, but provide almost no insulation by themselves and have no positive buoyancy. The materials used do not stretch and are generally more loose-fitting, which makes it easier for air to move around and potentially get trapped where it shouldn't be.

It so happened that Carol had a dry suit whose arms and legs had always been too long for her, and so she suggested I try that on. I put on the thick, full-body thermal underwear first. The membrane suit itself had its waterproof zipper across the chest. I stepped into it and got my feet into the integrated boots. I then made my left hand as small as possible and squeezed it through its seal, using the fingers of my right hand to carefully stretch the seal. Same for the right hand. Then I gently used the fingers of both of my hands to grab and evenly stretch out the head seal so I could get my head through the latex seal. Carol then carefully closed the waterproof chest seal. I was now wearing a dry suit.

I had always wondered how the watertight seals worked and whether they’d feel uncomfortable and constricting around the neck. The initial answer was, “some,” but actually almost less than the neck cutout of a thick 7mm wetsuit.

I was now sealed inside the dry suit, together with a good bunch of air. Carol showed me how to hug myself with one arm, use the hand of the other to reach inside the neck seal and provide a path for air to escape, then kneel down to push out most of the air. Remove the hand so that the airtight seal re-forms, get up, and tighten the sash around your waste.

I looked in the mirror and what I saw was very different from the sleek, form-fitting look of a neoprene wetsuit. Instead, the dry suit wrinkles and crinkles and doesn’t look very elegant at all. This one had another interesting touch in that it was half black and half hot, screaming pink.

So now it was time to see how the suit worked in the water, and for that I used the pool. I got in up to my thighs and instantly felt the weight of the water compact the suit around my feet and legs. There were very small bubbles emanating from the left knee and some from the right, which Carol felt was probably air trapped underneath an outer double layer of material. I then stepped fully into the shallow end and, for the first time, experienced the weird “grab” of a dry suit as you enter water. The suit tightens around you in a weird way. Imagine one of those vacuum freezer bags where you use a machine to suck the air out of the bag so it fits tightly around the meat to be frozen. It’s an interesting and not unpleasant feeling.

I donned my fins, a dry suit hood, gloves and my mask and snorkel and began snorkeling around the pool, which was at about 58 degrees. I felt warm and, of course, dry. Water still got into my gloves, of course, but the dry suit hood almost made it feel like my head was fully protected as well. Despite having let out more air through the neck seal, I was hugely positively buoyant and couldn’t even get down to the bottom of the pool to retrieve the thermometer that had rolled down to the deepest point.

I played around for perhaps half an hour, getting used to the feeling, then got out. I still felt warm and cozy, though by now my feet were a bit cold and I wondered if my butt had gotten wet. I opened the suit and we began testing everything for dryness. All dry, including butt, but my left sock was definitely wet, and the right one a bit as well. The bottom of the thermal underwear, however, was dry, right down to the ankles. So there’s a bit of leakage in the boot region somewhere.

That was that for the day. I’d finally had my first taste of how a dry suit feels. Next we’ll hook up an inflator hose to the chest valve and try the suit with the BC and a tank.

Posted by conradb212 at 05:29 AM | Comments (0)

February 23, 2009

Getting the real scoop on new dive locations

It's interesting how almost three years after I got my Open Water Scuba certification I still find things they simply don't tell you in class, like what diving in certain places is really like. For example, Cozumel, a smallish island off the east coast of Mexico, is a very popular place to go diving and it's high on the list of places I want to go this year. So naturally I want to find out as much as I can about diving in Cozumel.

If I try Google I find endless commercial links. As of this writing, February 2009, while Google is certainly a phenomenal search engine, it has also become so commercial that it's hard to sift for the nuggets of real information in a giant flood of commercial links. Google is starting to look more and more like the old Yellow Pages. Sure, I can probably link to every dive operator's website from Google, and also to all the travel agencies and hotels. But that's not the information I am looking for.

I want to know what it's like to dive in Cozumel. Like, where on the island do people dive? Are the dive spots all in one place and if you don't live close your boat rides will be much longer? And when you book a Cozumel dive package, does the hotel also have its own dive operation, or are they contracting it out to third parties? And if so, to whom? If there are resorts with their own dive operations, is it better to go to one of them? What's it like to deal with a third party operation? Does that mean they pick you up at the hotel? Or do you have to walk/drive to some pickup point? If you deal with a third party, is there a pecking order? Are there outfits to stay away from? What if you want Nitrox? Will my hotel's operator have it? If not, what do I do?

As far as hotels go, as expected, there seem to be significant differences in pricing. In part, that's because some include all meals whereas others do not, and some are big, luxurious places with lots of facilities whereas others are not. So if all I want to do is go diving every day, does it still make sense to stay at a fancy resort that advertises all sorts of luxury amenities included in the price when in all likelihood I won't ever use them? Would it be better to stay at a place that specializes on divers, or one where you simply get a decent room and good access to the pier?

Is the location of the hotel important? Some advertise they are close to downtown, or just a short cab ride away. Does that really matter? Would it actually be better to be farther away from a town or village? Or does being far away mean you're stranded with nothing to do and nowhere to go?

What's the weather like for diving and how warm can I expect the water to be? That's pretty important when figuring out what wetsuit and clothing to bring along. And will there be bugs/pests that are worse in some seasons than in others? Which ones?

Then there's the diving itself. Apparently, a lot of diving in Cozumel is drift diving, which means the current is strong enough so you can't just go on a dive and then return to the dive boat. Instead, you go down, let the current carry you along and then resurface at some other point. The dive boat follows your bubbles and will pick you up when you surface. This presumably means that groups need to stay together and go up together. Which I suppose also means that whoever runs low on air first will dictate how long a dive will be, as opposed to non-drift places where you can always stay down longer if you still have enough air. I've heard people complain about very short dives on Cozumel, like mostly in the 30 minute range. I don't know if this is true, how dive masters in Cozumel handle dives and divers, and just exactly how this surfacing together works.

I read that there are "large" boats and "fast" boats. Apparently, "large" one are just that. They can carry a couple dozen divers or more and have some amenities. "Fast" boats appear to be much smaller, with just enough room for six divers or so. So who decides what boat to take, who gets on a boat, who will dive together, and where the boats will go? If I go with a group, will the group be split up and never dive together?

Not knowing any of this drives me nuts. I like to know what to expect so I can make an informed decision. I know I can just sign up for one of the trips at a local dive shop and they arrange everything for me and all I have to do is show up. That's probably how most people do it. But why is it that it's so damn hard to get the real scoop on a place, the real information? I often use Wikipedia as a last resort for commercial-free factual information. There's a brief Wiki entry on Cozumel, but apart from saying "scuba diving is still one of Cozumel's primary attractions" there isn't much useful information there either.

It's really interesting that at a time where we have access to instant, endless information, it still all comes down to trial and error. Unless I go to Cozumel to find the answer to all my questions firsthand and on location, I just won't know. And maybe that's not such a bad thing.

Posted by conradb212 at 03:21 PM | Comments (0)

December 21, 2008

Return to Paradise

Flying back to Roatan felt like going back to paradise, but this time I knew what was coming, I knew the routine and knew what to expect. Another great week of exploring underwater at what must be one of the best dive resorts in the world.

It was colder this time and occasionally there were rain clouds, gusts of wind, and the puddles of the rainy season. If that sounds like a bad thing, it wasn't. It was a wonderful week of diving at CoCo View resort that I wouldn’t want to miss for anything. The newness of the first trip there was replaced by the sheer joy of being back to a magical place and looking forward to all the things I knew I'd experience and enjoy. And discovering new things I'd missed the first time around. In a way it was like the difference between a first date and a great relationship. My initial romance with Roatan now seems destined to becoming a long-term relationship.

This time we stayed with our friends Bob and Diane from Tennessee. They’d been to CoCo View numerous times, qualifying them as “CoCo Nuts,” and they had rented one of the beach houses at Playa Miguel, the peninsula between the man-made canal and the beach. It was a nice place with generously sized showers, good water pressure and plenty of hot water (which is a very good thing on a dive trip). There were trail bikes to get back and forth between the resort and the beach houses and it all worked very well.

It was great to see familiar faces in the office, dive shop, dock and boats. I had looked forward to having Eddie and Jorge again, our boat crew from the summer, but this time we were assigned to the CoCo View II boat with divemaster Jessie and captain Ruben. They turned out to be great guys as well. Jessie is an easy-going, experienced divemaster who had also worked on an Aggressor liveaboard and is a master at finding and pointing out critters. And Ruben sure knows how steer the big boat through rough water.

I had wondered what the water temperature was going to be like in December. In August we’d had a balmy, tropical 86 degrees. In December it was more like 78 to 80 degrees, still warm but a definite difference, especially with the wind blowing when you got out of the water. The resort was full, too, with eating sections in the Clubhouse extending into the play and upstairs areas. The dive boats were full, too, with ours having 19 people assigned. A full house also meant that the lists for extracurricular and optional activities were quickly filling up. The shark and dolphin dives were all booked by Monday morning and so that decision was made for me. No sharks. Next time.

As returning guests we attended the orientation Sunday morning but skipped the orientation dive where those new to the resort were being shown the ropes. Instead, we went right to our first boat dive. In August I’d been a nervous wreck before that first ocean dive. This time I was completely calm and couldn't wait to get into the water. The first dive site on Sunday was Valley of the Kings, where the drop-off on top of the coral reef is around 30-35 feet and then there’s this gorgeous sloping, valley-like cut in the reef instead of just going over the edge of the wall. We'd done that site before, but last time I had stayed shallow as I'd been experiencing those nose bleeds and didn’t want to push it. This time I found myself completely comfortable and actually went down to 92 feet. Some sites lend themselves to deeper dives better than others. Visibility plays a factor, but also the terrain. Here, the viz was very good and the sloping valley made going a bit deeper easy and unintimidating.

I also decided to use air instead of Nitrox. I think I was actually the only one on our boat who used air. I’d felt fine on Nitrox in August, but Nitrox cost eight dollars extra per tank while air was included. If you used Nitrox all week it cost US$125. I figured I’d do an average of three dives a day for a total of 18 dives, so I’d have paid about seven dollars extra per tank, still expensive. For those doing four dives or more a day it made perfect sense. Anyway, I did not want to feel like I needed Nitrox to dive or enjoy diving.

Was using air instead of Nitrox any different? Not in the way I felt. In fact, I felt exactly the same. I was warned that I’d feel tired and exhausted after a few days diving on air, but that did not happen. There is one difference, though. With air you do have to watch your dive computer more frequently so as to not break the limits of no-decompression diving. Every time I went deep (80-100 feet), the remaining nitrogen time quickly dropped. It also dropped if I descended again by just a few feet after I’d gradually come up to shallower depths.

My second dive this time was a drop-off at Newman’s Wall. We went down to about 75 feet and began ascending when my computer showed eight minutes of remaining nitrogen time at that depth. Once we reached 30 feet about 35 minutes into the dive, nitrogen time was back up to 99 minutes, or unlimited. However, we then returned to the resort via the Prince Albert wreck and that got me back down to about 50 feet. Nitrogen time quickly dropped to just one minute and then I ran out and into my first-ever deco stop situation. The computer only wanted a minute at ten feet and the deco warning quickly disappeared as I slowly ascended, but it was a first for me and from then on I watched my dive computer even more carefully.

On my subsequent dives I found that my remaining nitrogen time was always considerably less than Carol’s, who was using Nitrox. I also found that diving deep (I had two dives deeper than 100 feet) was okay as far as nitrogen time goes as long as I then didn’t do another dip of more than 15 feet or so.

In all my dives, it was the recommended time limits of about 60 minutes per dive and my air consumption that determined the length of my dives, and not the fact that I used air. As far as air consumption goes, I fully expected to use a lot less this time around than back in August. Somehow that didn’t happen. Though I couldn’t have been calmer and more relaxed through most of my 16 dives, on some I actually used more. Go figure.

I got a chance to learn a bit more about how depth affects me. I am still convinced that psychology plays a big part. If you think something is going to happen or change at a certain depth, then likely it will. In his book "Deep Diving," author and deep diver Brett Gilliam mentions a study where symptoms developed pretty much based on what a group of divers was told would happen. Me, I did feel a little twinge of something every time I passed 100 feet. The air tasted different and I felt different. I also noticed that by and large, 80 feet seems to be the depth where I start feeling a little different. It’s an entirely good feeling. The air tastes slightly more metallic, I feel very calm and appreciative of diving. I found that I love to cruise at around 80 feet.

Doing the same dives again can be greatly rewarding. I was thrilled to get to go back to Calvin’s Crack and Mary’s Place, the two dives where you get to go through deep, narrow canyons. This time I took more time to look around and enjoy the wonderful scenery inside the crevices. Carol, who was filming high definition video with the Bonica underwater vidcam we tested, went through Mary’s Place first so that she’d have undisturbed visibility. I was behind her and stayed a good distance back. Yet, even though divemaster Jessie had asked people to keep their distance and was waving in two at a time, when I turned around I still had a diver practically on top of me and three more backed up right behind me. What’s the rush?

On Wednesday we did a day trip to the other side of the island by boat. I wasn’t feeling great as the relentless wind and perhaps some infection had conspired to make my head feel stopped up and I felt pretty miserable. We almost didn’t go, but I wasn't going to skip precious dives unless it was absolutely necessary. I felt better on the boat and we ended up having three terrific dives. Two of them were drift dives where the boat dropped us off and then picked us up a ways down-current. I saw sea turtles for the first time and a whole different underwater scenery than on the southside of Roatan. Instead of flat reefs and then walls, the northside has lots of fairly flat sandy areas and then spectacular sloping reefs.

Captain Ruben docked the boat at Half Moon Bay and we had a picnic on the boat. Then there was an hour or so of free time to explore West End. This was quite an experience. The main drag was unpaved and essentially one pothole next to the other. There were colorful little shops and boutiques and even PADI “5-star” diveshops, all in modest clapboard huts. It was probably more primitive than what I remember from vacations in Spain and France in the late 1950s. We bought a couple of little knicknacks though Carol was taken aback when Christmas ornaments she liked carried the dreaded “Made in China” sticker. She told the crest-fallen salesgirl we wanted things made on the island and hadn’t come all this way to buy stuff made in China.

The boat ride back was rough. The beer coolers were open now and there was Rum and Tequila, and so the drinking contingent of our boat, which was most, had a grand time and seemed wholly unaffected by the boat’s tossing and pitching. And a pit stop halfway home served to relieve accumulated pressures. We were unaffected, too, but there were times when I wasn’t sure how much more the boat could take. I was happy to find that apparently I don’t succumb to seasick easily, though I won’t be taking that for granted.

On the last day of diving we got to see the wreck of Mr. Bud, a fishing and cargo ship resting on a sand bank at the edge of a wall at 50 to 65 feet of water. Visibility was excellent and I actually got to take in the whole wreck from a distance as opposed to seeing just seeing the bits and pieces within viewing range. The wreck also had been underwater for just a few years, so things were not quite as rosted and encrusted as on the Prince Albert. I had my divelight with me and actually penetrated the hull of the wreck. It had all been prepped for divers, but it was a first for me, and exciting.

Every trip I’ve made in my life has been different. I’ll remember this one as my second ocean dive trip with many wonderful dives, but also for the observations I made and things I learned about diving and dive trips.

Allergies and colds

I’d been taught that diving while suffering from allergies or having a cold is inadvisable, or even dangerous. This has to do with the clogging up of sinus cavities that may make it difficult or impossible to equalize pressure in your ears or result in blockages elsewhere. This time I found myself with fairly severe allergies, probably due to the wind that stirred up all sorts of allergens I was not used to. This began on Tuesday and I really did not want to miss diving the rest of the week. So I decided to give it a try.

Amazingly, I encountered very little problem. Equalizing was a bit more difficult (and a bit noisier), but it did not pose any real difficulties. A couple of times I encountered sinus pressure and pain in my forehead right above my eyes. Whenever that happened I simply stopped descent and ascended a couple of feet. This almost always made the pain/pressure disappear and I resumed descent. I was able to do another seven or eight dives, including one below 100 feet without any pain or other issues. If anything, diving felt like a relief from feeling somewhat miserable on the surface.

This does not mean that I recommend diving while suffering from allergies or having a cold. It just means that in my case, it did not mean the end of diving for the week. If anyone finds him/herself in the same situation, I’d recommend finding out what can be done rather than just giving up.

Insects

Insect bites can be a major pain on dive vacations. Roatan’s infamous “no-see-ums” were out in force and three days into our stay we were covered in nasty red bites. This seemed to happen no matter what we did, and no matter how we tried to protect ourselves. While we hacked and coughed from the fumes every time we sprayed arms, calves, neck and every other exposed part of the body, the no-see-ums appeared unaffected and everyone was covered by bites. Nasty red dots that then spread and began itching so much that scratching till things were raw seemed a preferable alternative. No fun.

Interestingly, the divemasters and dockside staff seemed immune and had no bites. I asked our divemaster, Jessie, and he grinningly said his skin was too dark and tough for the bugs. I shopped for a second opinion and found that the locals attribute their relative immunity to their diet that includes fragrant oils and a lot of vinegar. The vinegar supposedly changes the acidity of the body and skin, and keeps the pesky little buggers away.

At times I felt irrational frustration and anger against the bugs. Our beach house was beautifully located and a gorgeous beach beckoned, as did walks along the beach and through the luscious groves. But there was a price to pay in terms of insect bites, and that price simply was too steep. So we stayed mostly indoors.

Clothing

Somehow it seems impossible to ever pack the right clothes. When I lived in upstate New York I used to assume it was cold everywhere else, too, and overpack. Now that I live in sunny California I generally don’t pack things that are warm enough in colder parts of the country. Fortunately, the wardrobe requirements for the kinds of traveling I usually do are modest, and if push comes to shove, there’s usually a Target or Wal-Mart closeby to buy things.

For this trip the weather report had predicted temperatures in the low 80s during the day and low 70s at night, and so I only brought one pair of blue jeans and one long-sleeved shirt. That was not enough. There wasn’t much rain during the week, but it was windy, which means wind chill factor. Sitting on a dive boat in a wetsuit with the wind blowing is a miserable experience. As a result, the local dive shop quickly sold out of Chammyz, the cozy, warm dive and actionwear. They had 20 of them or so the beginning of the week, and they were all gone by Friday.

Dive skins

Almost every serious diver I ever met has been singing the praises of dive skins. Dive skins are ultra-light full-body garments that look like wetsuits but are much lighter. Depending on whom you talk to, they either look like those snazzy high-tech suits worn by Olympic swimmers, or like ballet tights (I think it’s the former).

Dive skins are usually worn in really warm water (85 degrees on up) or under a wetsuit. You don’t really need a full-body suit in such 85+ degree water, but some divers (including myself) like to have their skin covered so that things don’t sting or bite as easily.

On this trip, I bought a dive skin because I simply felt too cold with just the 3/2 mm wetsuit. So now I know what a dive skin does, and does not, do. First, a wetsuit goes on a hundred times easier if you wear a dive skin. No more struggling; the wetsuit simply glides on. However, do NOT expect to be warmer underwater. I wore the dive skin under my 3/2 mm wetsuit on several dives in 78-80 degree water (which, amazingly, feels pretty cold after a while) and actually felt colder with the dive skin than without. I think that’s because of the way wetsuits work. A wetsuit is designed to let in a thin layer of water that is then warmed up by the body. The wetsuit does not easily let the warmed-up water layer escape, and so it acts as insulation and keeps you warm. If you wear a dive skin under the wetsuit, the dive skin sort of disrupts that insulating layer of water and you feel colder. I know, it doesn’t sound logical that wearing more should make you feel colder, but in this case it does. I am not sorry I bought the dive skin though. It looks and feels great, and it serves a number of purposes. It also stows away into a tiny packager that fits almost anywhere. How much did it cost? I paid US$95 for an Akona XL dive skin at the Dockside dive shop at CoCo View.

Taking pictures underwater

I’ve been taking pictures for what seems like forever, and underwater pictures for a good while. Yet, every time I go diving with a camera I am reminded that taking pictures underwater is absolutely and totally different from taking pictures on land.

On land, cameras have it easy. All they have to do is measure the light, determine aperture and shutter speed, focus, and then take the picture. If there isn’t enough light they use the flash to help out. So what’s different in the water?

Well, there is much less light for starters. And whatever light there is acts differently from the surface. Certain colors disappear at fairly shallow depths. Red is gone at 15 feet or so. Orange and yellow soon follow. Which means that everything looks greenish-blue, which looks pleasant enough when you swim through it, but much less so in a picture. Add visibility that is MUCH less than on the surface and hunting for light becomes a huge challenge even for the best cameras. To provide perspective, on land you can often literally see for many miles. Underwater, divers are thrilled when they have 100 feet or so. Even “gin-clear” water rarely has more visibility than 150 feet. And I’ve been on many a dive where visibility was just four or five feet, which is much less than even the densest fog.

As if inadequate light and limited visibility weren’t enough of a problem, there’s so much stuff moving in the water that most auto-focus systems are simply overwhelmed. When just about everything is moving, what should the camera focus on? Fixed focus or automatic spot focus are almost a must for decent pictures, and even then they are far from guaranteed as focusing systems need enough light to do their job.

Add to that the fact that not only is the whole scenery moving constantly, but so are you. Even the most advanced divers seldom remain completely motionless; there are always little corrections, or the surge moves you back and forth. This makes an active, optical anti-shake system pretty much mandatory. Digital anti-shake really doesn’t work as it’s based on increasing sensitivity and shutter speed, an approach that doesn’t work well underwater. Why not hold on to something or sit down? Easier said than done. Many resorts and marine parks prohibit the wearing of gloves to discourage touching coral and plant life, plus the water will rock and sway you anyway even if you were to hold on to something. Sitting or laying down is also not a good idea as it either disturbs plants and critters or stirs up silt and sand, or both.

With so little light most of the time, you need a good flash, right? Yes and no. A flash can do wonders for macro photography, but it is worse than useless in just about any other situation. That’s because a built-in flash will illuminate every tiny piece of flotsam and jetsam producing what underwater photographers call “scatter.” In anything but the clearest water, flash-generated scatter makes most pictures unusable. Now, as far as I am concerned cameras should know that but most don’t. If the camera is set on auto-flash, it’ll use the flash with almost every picture underwater, rendering them useless. So you find yourself in the unenviable position of not having enough light, but also not being able to use the flash.

Many cameras for which underwater housings are available have underwater settings. Problem is, it’s not always clear what they do. The otherwise excellent Olympus Stylus 1030SW I used has “underwater wide 1” and “underwater wide 2” settings, but virtually no explanation as to the settings used. Select “underwater macro” and the camera goes into full 3.6x tele mode for no apparent reason, so by using the special macro setting I actually had to move farther away from a subject than in regular automatic mode. What this means is that you really need to know your camera and all of its controls. And those controls can be different when you use the underwater housing.

And then there are those little obvious things that can trip us. Like forgetting the power supply, memory card adapter, or memory cards themselves. Some items you can buy at your destination, but it’s, for example, hard to find an xD-Picture card adapter for micro-SD cards or some such. In the olden days all you needed was film. Today it’s a whole slew of things that can put your camera out of commission.

Mask defog

There are few things more infuriating that a fogged-up mask when you’re underwater. Everyone has their own special way of making sure the mask doesn’t fog up, ranging from expensive, exotic defoggers to home-grown mixtures to good old-fashioned spit. I remember at least one dive where absolutely nothing worked and my mask was fogged up the whole dive. This time, the opposite was true. My mask didn’t fog once, and it didn’t leak at all either. I’ve come to really love and appreciate my Scubapro Frameless mask and attribute the absence of leaking to its superior design and materials, but why this trip I didn't have any fogging problems at all I do not know (Carol thinks it's because I used the defog stuff she likes). Even if I had, by the way, by now I figured out how to let a little bit of water into the mask and then swirl it around to clear the mask from fogging.

So there, my second trip to Roatan, another great week of diving.

The flight back was uneventful. I’d dreaded another long, hot, crowded flight from Houston to Sacramento in a leg- and elbowroom-challenged Continental jet, but things went fairly smoothly. I ended up sitting next to a guy who turned out to be a scuba instructor and tech diver from Reno. He and his girlfriend had been diving in Belize. He’d read many of the same scuba enthusiast books as I had, so there was lots to talk about, though he was light-years more experienced than I. I must have come across as reasonably knowledgeable as early on in the conversation he inquired whether I was perchance Bruce Wienke, the decompression guru. Anyway, I was surprised how quickly a 4-1/2 hour flight goes by with good conversation.

Posted by conradb212 at 08:33 PM | Comments (0)

December 05, 2008

Milestones

Sometimes it seems that life is a never-ending series of goals. We plan on doing or achieving something, and then work towards that goal. Once we reach a milestone we've set for ourselves it's on to the next one. And so on. It's no different with diving. First it was actually signing up for scuba lessons, then buying my first set of basic scuba gear (mask, snorkel, fins), then that first breath underwater from a bottle of compressed air, then getting certified in Folsom Lake. Then planning for the first "real" dive, the first night dive, the first Nitrox dive, and the first dive in the ocean.

The one problem with achieving goals is that they can leave you feeling empty. You're there, you've done it, now what? I felt that way after I had successfully defended my thesis many years ago and years of study were over. They say that the journey is the reward and that is undoubtedly true, but it's still the milestones that we remember.

Over the relatively brief time since I became interested in scuba diving I've experienced a lot of interesting things and seen many new places. Yet, for some reason the big milestone is seeing sharks. It's been my goal almost since I started. Maybe it's because people almost invariably ask, "Have you seen sharks?" when you tell them you're a diver. Maybe it's more of a primal thing, one ultimate predator meeting the other.

I had the chance to go on the shark trip in Honduras, but somehow I didn't. I had all sorts of excuses. It cost a good bunch of money. It meant missing some of the regular dives. It was a land trip and then a 30-minute boat ride into the open ocean. It was a 70 foot drop off instead of the 30-50 foot drops I prefer. But lots of other people went, so maybe I was just scared.

I am going on another trip there now, and maybe this time I'll see the sharks. It's a milestone in my diving career. If I do it, how will I feel?

Posted by conradb212 at 04:10 PM | Comments (0)

August 29, 2008

Mary's Place

Some dives are adrenalin-pumpers whereas others are relaxing. At the end of the Roatan trip I was at a place where I was able to relax. I knew that my equipment worked fine and my body, too, and that I would not suddenly freak underwater. I also found myself increasingly able to release all tension and hover, simply let go and enjoy the total lack of gravity. I became much better with buoyancy and had to add and drop air to my BC less and less often. I worked on the bad habit of using my left arm and hand to help manoeuver instead of using fins. With one's breathing under control and a total sense of relaxation, diving assumes a dreamlike quality that is quite addictive. Floating weightlessly becomes natural and seems the norm. I concentrated on finning and gliding with slow, fluid and deliberate movements. That not only conserves air and energy, but also keeps you from harming sea fans, sponges, and other plants.

Between the much better buoancy in seawater and my increasing diving experience, I managed to stay clear of plant life and didn't kick up silt or sand. I only layed on the bottom a couple of times, on purpose, and virtually never used my hands to push off. CoCo View does not allow the wearing of gloves, and so the temptation to touch was greatly diminished. I don't think I touched anything on purpose more than once or twice. Some plants and critters sting or burn, and so it's better to stay clear anyway.

Mary's Place is one of Roatan's most famous dive sites. It is a horseshoe-shaped fragment that broke off from the main reef, perhaps during an earthquake long ago. When that happened, a number of deep cracks and crevices formed and you can now dive through those. The cracks are narrow enough to mandate swimming through them single file and make for wonderfully dramatic scenery. At a moderate pace it takes maybe six to ten minutes to swim through the main crevice of the formation. Attendance at a special buoyancy control seminar is usually required before diving Mary's Place and the site is listed as suitable for intermediate level divers on up.

The initial drop-off was at just 25 feet or so on top of the reef plateau. We then dropped over the wall and descended to about 75 feet. I was a bit nervous as I always am with new adventures as we came upon the entrance of the main crack along the wall. It was adorned by beautiful black coral whose branches actually look orange. On divemaster Eddie's go-ahead we went in one by one. I was videotaping the entire swim-through on the SeaLife DC800 camera. Carol was right behind me with the big Olympus digital SLR. The flat, sandy bottom of the cracks was at perhaps 90 feet or so, though I never went deeper than 75 or 80. I enjoyed this dive very much. Mary's Place lived up to expectation, and then some.

The magical traverse between the otherwordly cliffs was over all too soon. At the end there are two exits, one going straight ahead and expelling the diver into the wide, blue ocean with the wall dropping away to the left and right. Divemaster Eddie suggested we take the last left turn that ascended to another exit, one that was wonderfully picturesque and led back to another exit at maybe 60 feet. When I got to the junction I wasn't quite sure which way to turn as the left turn is just feet before the main crack opens into the ocean. It is fairly narrow and goes uphill. I took that one, working my way up to the exit where we all lingered and took in the sights.

What I didn't know at the time was that Mary's Place, on Valentine's Day of 1990, was the site of an open water deep diving record. Bret Gilliam chose Mary's Place because of the near vertical wall with "abyssal drop-off depths." On a single 100 cubic-foot tank of compressed air, Gilliam reached a depth of 452 feet, performed a few math and word problems on a slate to test his alertness at that depth, and began his ascent after six minutes and 20 seconds. He did hist first deco stop at 50 feet, and an hour and 16 minute slater he surfaces none the worse for wear, having answered all the test problems on his slate correctly.

This was, incidentally, my 50th dive and I couldn't have wished for a nicer experience. Or for a better conclusion to a truly memorable week of diving at CoCo View resort on Roatan.

Posted by conradb212 at 12:53 AM | Comments (0)

August 27, 2008

Waves, surge, sharks and night dives

Lakes are rarely rough and so my diving before Roatan had been in calm water, all of it. I really did not know what to expect from the sea. I remember long vacations on the beaches of Italy and Western France and how the surf pounded the beach, sometimes so strongly that a flag was up indicating that there would be no swimming that day. The beaches on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, of New England and the West Coast of the United States can all be rough and forbidding. On the other hand, I've seen gentle beaches with crystal-clear water and white sand on Spain's Costa Del Sol in the late 1970s, and I still wish I could have been diving there.

Diving in the sea is different. I learned that it can be as calm underwater as in a lake or spring. And even if there are some waves on the surface, once you go under it's all still. But that's not always the case. On some of the dives the water was pretty rough down there. What is waves on the surface is surge at the bottom. You get buffeted around in a rhythm and it becomes more difficult to move and control where you're going. That can be a problem when you want to get close to something so you can take pictures but also want to make sure you don't bump into it and harm the plants. Several times I found myself entirely too close to a wall with its rich cover of sponges and all sorts of outlandish growth, and was unable to get away from it without the vigorous use of fins that might have harmed the plants. Sometimes surge is obvious as in when you see the plantlife swaying back and forth. Other times you don't see it, but feel that you're just not going where you think your movements should get you.

In addition, there's current. Here again, things can be deceptive. Sometimes it's very noticeable and you just fly away, other times you just marvel how effortlessly and quickly you can swim just to find that it isn't nearly as easy to go the other way. That can be a problem as you don't want to get separated from your buddy or buddies, and certainly not from the dive boat.

As for sharks, I didn't see any nor did I do the shark dive on my trip to Roatan. I felt I just wasn't quite ready as I was still acclimatizing myself to diving in the sea and learning something new with every dive. With the exception of a couple of barracudas and some groupers, all from a distance, I hadn't really seen any big fish, so starting out with a bunch of sharks in a feeding frenzy seemed a bit much. Some guests did go, though, and as I expected, they felt it was an incredible experience.

Brian, a very experienced diver from Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and his girlfriend Joanne, also an experienced diver, did go on the shark dive organized by a couple of Italian divemasters who run Waihuka Diving Adventures. The dive site they boat their daring customers to is called "Cara a Cara" -- Spanish for Face-to-Face. Brian said they went down along a line to about 70 feet where they stood and sat against a cliff. Shark feed operations use chum buckets full of stuff that sharks like and the local sharks know the routine. According to Brian, once the dinner bell is rung, the sharks, Caribbean Reef Sharks, appear in a hurry and do get into the feeding frenzy you see in TV documentaries. However, they have no interest whatsoever in the divers, just the food in the chum bucket. Divers are allowed to circle around the whole scene. Once the chum is gone, the sharks leave. The whole thing is recorded on video and participants can buy a DVD. I saw the DVD and it was stunning.

Maybe next time.

I did do one night dive. I had wanted to do more, but each day I was just too pooped after three or four dives to gear up yet again. Others went every night. For beach dives, the protocol at CoCo View is that a flashing strobe must be attached high above the bottom on the "front yard" buoy mooring chain. The first diver who goes out must take the strobe and attach it. Each subsequent diver then takes a numbered tag that must be clipped onto the chain. That way everyone knows divers are out there. Upon return, the last diver retrieves the strobe and brings it back in.

We went fairly late and everyone else, including the strobe, were already back. So we took it out again. We waded through the shallow part of the beach, then donned our fins and turned the divelights on. I brought two, my little Scubapro and a somewhat stronger backup. We quickly found an octopus and stopped to watch it. That was easier said than done for me as the lack of vision and visual references made hovering difficult. Carol attached the strobe to the mooring chain when we reached it and then we were off hunting for whatever might come out at night. There were, as I quickly noticed, a lot of curious fish, some of them quite large. It was mildly disconcerting to train my lights into the dark and then see shadows gliding in and out of my field of vision. Carol went off exploring with the Olympus Evolt 330 digital SLR and I stayed close, lighting things for her. We saw and photographed some interesting critters. The uneasiness never left me.

But it got worse. We encountered blood worms that swarm the divelights like angry flies. You'd think worms just wiggle around on the ground, but these pests buzzed around lights faster than anything I've ever encountered on land, and they got into things. Fortunately, I wore my 3mm wetsuit, but I still felt them against my hands, face and ears. I pulled my skullcap down over my ears as far as I could. Those things were an absolute pain and ruined whatever enjoyment I might have had out of that night dive. Yuk! We quickly retrieved the strobe and retreated to the beach. I'll try again to see if I can find the night dive magic many divers talk about.

Posted by conradb212 at 11:32 PM | Comments (0)

August 26, 2008

Contemplations on a day off

There's much joking going on about "Montezuma's Revenge," the type of gastro-intestinal distress that can afflict travelers who are not used to Central American foods and microbiology. No one expects to become afflicted with it, but three days into the trip I woke up feeling not so well. I had been careful with eating and drinking but apparently not careful enough. So it was diarrhea and feeling pretty awful. DAN, the Divers Alert Network, has guidelines on what and how to eat and drink in foreign countries, but I must admit I did not brush up on them before we left. I dragged myself to breakfast but did not manage to eat anything. It was obvious I was not up to diving and so I stayed in my room instead. I had seen a black beach towel laying in the water below the cabana that in the shadow looked just like a ray and so I wrote a children's story named "Ray, the ray" where the beach towel became real. I jotted down impressions about the trip. I dozed. I hoped I wouldn't be out of commission for the rest of the week. It'd be awful to have come all the way down to Honduras to experience ocean diving and then be sidelined by diarrhea.

I took some Imodium tablets I'd brought along and wondered about the practical aspects of diving when you don't feel up to par. Boat rides can be pretty rough and sitting in a rocking boat on top of feeling nauseous to begin with didn't sound too good. And I wondered what would happen if you went diving and had to throw up. I'd read about that and apparently you're supposed to vomit through the regulator without taking it out of your mouth. I hoped I wouldn't have to put that to the test. As for diarrhea, the thought of suddenly having an uncontrollable urge while diving with a wetsuit on wasn't pretty.

I thought about the amazing CoCo View resort and how it came about. I'd been to Central America in the late 1970s and visited El Salvador and Guatemala. Apparently, while I was lounging by the pool at the luxurious estate of my friends in San Salvador in 1978 and played tennis at the Salvador Sheraton, conditions on Roatan were still quite primitive. Roatan is part of the Honduran Bay Islands that also include Guanaja, Utila and a few dozen much smaller ones. The 49 square mile island was said to be discovered by Columbus on one of his later voyages, then visited by Spanish conquistador Velasquez in an episode disastrous for the indigenous Paya Indians who were enslaved and put to work. Roatan became popular with pirates who, together with the British, were a thorn in the side of the Spaniards. Spain essentially demolished the island by 1650 but English privateers returned and used Roatan as a base. Even the notorious pirate Blackbeard was there for a few weeks in 1718. In the 1700s it was a constant back and forth between England and Spain. By 1800, the English brought thousands of revolting slaves from other islands. Those were called the Garifuna and their descendants are still there today. Roatan was considered a British Crown Colony, albeit a rather minor and neglected one, and influential English families from the Cayman Islands arrived. Though the island was essentially English and Scotch, Queen Victoria, against protests from the settlers, turned Roatan over to an only vaguely interested Honduras in 1858. These days, the official language is Spanish, but many still speak English, and most municipalities have English names.

A 1996 report by a writer/diver/developer by the name of Lorenzo Dee Belveal who first came to Roatan in 1966, built Spyglass Hill Resort, and ran it until 1981 just when CoCo View got underway is interesting albeit perhaps controversial reading. A most prolific writer, Belveal described the primitive yet pristine condition of the island when he arrived, with spring-clear water and 200-foot visibility, and what he considers the subsequent overpopulation, loss of safe drinking water due to destruction of the natural aquifer and the resulting danger of water-borne disease. In 1995, Belveal's assessment was "It only took fifteen years for it to complete the circuit from "new and exciting" to "ruined and showing it," and his predictions for Roatan's future were dire.

An account penned by Dennis Foster in circa 1990 describes the island as still quite primitive with barely a runway, not much in terms of roads (read Belveal's The Road for an idea), no telephone system and no reliable central electricity. Yet, by that time CoCo View resort had already existed for a decade, established by visionaries Bill and Evelyn Evans with the help of local and immigrated authorities. The "Prince Albert," for example, was named after Albert Jackson, a local tycoon and entrepreneur who built Fantasy Island across the lagoon from CoCo View in 1989 (view the Sinking of the Prince Albert). Another influential persona, "Doc" Radawski, is a fountain of historical knowledge and now resides at CoCo View. He came to Roatan in the early 1970s and has been playing a pivotal role in the scuba diving community as well as marine archeology and ecological programs geared towards preserving Roatan's natural beauty. I greatly enjoyed his excellent lecture on the history of Roatan.

Fortunately and amazingly, in the afternoon I felt well enough to go diving. I found that I had missed some minor discord on the boat that occurred when a guest who was reviewing the resort for a publication or website requested four full boat dives a day as opposed to two dive site dives and two drop-offs. Drop-offs mean the boat won't take you back to the dock and you have to exit through the beach. At CoCo View that's a long swim in very shallow water, and no fun with extensive camera equipment. So the boat took him to some other dive site and thus was not at the dock when the drop-off divers arrived. Some had left personal belongings on the boat including, in one case, their room keys. That, admittedly, can be annoying and so there were complaints. Divemaster Eddie may have gotten an earful from management over that and was none too happy about it. So he called the group together and discussed the matter in a mature and straightforward manner. This young man will go far.

I later got to talk to Eddie whose blond-streaked hair, very much unlike mine, always looked perfectly towsled and coiffed minutes after a dive. His family came from mainland Honduras when he was three years old. They now own some real estate and a store. Eddie has been working in one capacity or another at CoCo View resort since he was in his early teens. He was a busboy, worked in the kitchen, the dive shop, etc., until he got a chance to get into diving. He started highschool, but still has to finish it. He took a course in English, and his mastery of the language is excellent. He fluently converses in English with an accent hardly thicker than mine. English, Eddie said, is necessary on the island to get a good job. That and computer knowledge. No one else in his family speaks English, and Eddie is trying to get at least his sister to learn it. He's never been to the United States but he has a dream of going to college and study something that relates to his love of diving and the sea. Marine biology perhaps. I hope he gets to realize that dream.

The dive site we visited was called Menagerhea, named or renamed after Rhea's Diving Services, the diveshop Carol managed for a number of years in Tennessee. The seas were a bit rough but I felt just fine, and even better once I was in the water. The site started out quite shallow, then we slowly descended down along a wall. Looking out into the open blue ocean we saw some pretty big fish, including barracudas and groupers. It's fascinating to gaze into the blueness and suddenly seeing a faint dark shadow that then becomes a fish. You can't quite tell how far away they are, or how big. The Menagerhea site is close to shore by the Newman Wall, and so there was quite a bit of surge.

For the drop-off dive I chose the Prince Albert, but this time with a special mission. I took along the Olympus Stylus 1030SW, a 10-megapixel camera that's waterproof to 33 feet without an underwater housing. It's the successor to the Stylus 770SW that we'd taken down to 67 feet at Manatee Springs in Florida with no ill effect. For a while I thought that camera was invulnerable until it did flood at 90 feet in Lake Tahoe when I simply forgot that I'd taken it with me on the dive. I definitely did not want to kill the 1030 as well and so could only take it to the upper parts of the wreck. Still, that meant half an hour between 30 and 40 feet, and a bunch of pretty good pictures -- not bad for a camera that looks just like any other modern little digicam. The visibility wasn't the best, but it took decent pictures.

Posted by conradb212 at 12:06 AM | Comments (0)

August 25, 2008

Prince Albert and green blood

In "Silent World," published in 1953, Captain Jacques-Yves Cousteau describes a new type of fish they had found in the French Mediterranean off Marseille. They'd gone deep and speared a good-sized liche and the fish bled. The blood, however, was emerald green and that was quite unusual. Ever the scientist, Cousteau made sure they'd get this trophy to the surface so they could examine the green-blooded fish. They did and were anxious to show their find to the team, but as they ascended the green blood turned brown, then pink. On the surface the fish was bleeding red like any other. Cousteau probably slapped his head and went, "Of course! You cannot see red deeper than 15 or 20 feet or so." When I read that I thought it was pretty strange. No more. I bleed green, too.

Whatever causes underwater nosebleeds struck me during a morning dive. The boat had taken us out to "Calvin's Crack," a gorgeous though somewhat oddly named dive site that's indeed a narrow crack in the reef (it was likely named after Calvin Bodden, friend of CoCo View founder Bill Evans). It descends all the way from a fairly shallow entrance area at maybe 30 feet of water to an opening to the ocean deep in the wall. The entrance is like a cave or cavern and you go in head-first, but it's not really an overhead environment as light remains visible through the top of the crack at all times.

It is a wonderfully eery experience floating downward between walls of sheer rock to the left and right, from 30 feet to perhaps 80 or 90, with beams of light from the surface shining down from between the cliffs, and air bubbles from divers ahead of you rising in a silvery stream. Diving the crack is like floating through a rugged, narrow canyon with just enough room for a single diver. The sandy bottom of the crack descends until it opens on the side of the wall into the blue ocean at a depth of anywhere from 60 to 100 feet. I'd been nervous again before the dive, of course, but felt just fine going into and through the crack. It was all totally new to me and so I composed myself and finned through, not taking nearly enough time to look around and take it all in.

I exited Calvin's Crack at about 85 feet, with the bottom still well below me. It was over too soon, sort of like a rollercoaster ride at the carnival. The water felt noticeably colder once I emerged from the wall and was floating in the open ocean along the nearly vertical cliffs. Later, when I uploaded my dive computer data into my notebook I saw that the water temperature had dropped all of four degrees, from 86 to 82 degrees Fahrenheit. All thermoclines should be that mild.

Over the next 25 minutes we slowly worked our way along the luscious wall and back up to shallower water. I noticed that the left side of my Scubapro Frameless mask was getting pretty murky with liquid accumulating at the bottom. There is almost always a little bit of water seeping into a mask and it's no big deal once you know how to purge. My Frameless mask is as leak-proof as I've experienced (I have tried out a dozen masks or so) and I rarely ever have to clear my mask to get the water out. I didn't like the murky greenish water and wasn't sure where it came from until it turned red as I ascended and then I knew. Nose or sinus bleed. Looks emerald green at depth. Nothing to be alarmed about, but definitely something I could do without. I cleared out the mask as much as I could before entering the dive boat through the cut-out with the ladder in the bottom, but Jorge, our boat captain, noticed right away and actually looked a bit alarmed. He gave me tissues once I was on the boat and I ended up needing quite a few of them. So that was a pretty good nosebleed.

I decided to skip the morning's "drop-off" dive and head back to the dock on the boat. That gave me a chance to roam around CoCo View resort a bit, look at the dozens of hummingbirds excitedly competing for a spot on one of the sugarwater bird feeders, and check out the well equipped PADI 5-Star dive shop (Dockside Dive Center). I asked the dive master and other authorities about the cause of the nosebleeds and what one can do about it, but no one seems to know for sure. I have no clue what causes regular nosebleeds (which I have rarely ever gotten), let alone ones caused by diving. They call seats high up in a stadium the "nosebleed section," so I suppose pressure has something to do with it. Carol said many divers, including accomplished ones, have to deal with this and that it usually goes away after a number of dives. I sure hoped it'd go away for me.

I did take the afternoon dive (Valley of the Kings), but made sure I stayed relatively shallow, never going deeper than 55 feet. The dive took us along a wall and then over an undulating reef plateau with lots to see. I think I'll never get tired of looking at the plants and sea creatures. I used to think real sponges looked like what my grand parents used in their bathroom. I had no idea they where tube-like structures in all forms, colors and sizes. Gliding through it all you never know what you'll see next. Many sea creatures have adapted themselves to a specific plant, mimicking shape, texture and color so they become nearly invisible against the backdrop of their host. Wonderful though it was, I felt a bit apprehensive after the green blood episode and so wasn't able to relax and enjoy as much as I should have. I did still have a bit of bleeding, but much less, and so I decided I was going to risk a second dive that afternoon. After surfacing and recuperating we asked the captain to take us to the wreck of the Prince Albert.

Not all wrecks are the same, and one sitting in 45 to 70 feet of water in a channel right outside of a dive resort is most definitely not in the same class as one much deeper somewhere in open water. But until I see one of them, if I ever will, as far as I am concerned, the Prince Albert is a real wreck and then some. It is a large iron vessel sitting upright. It was sunk almost 25 years ago specifically as a scuba attraction by the owners of the CoCo View resort. It has many openings to explore and has probably been proofed so it's safe for divers. Then again, it's still a wreck deep underwater and it can look very intimidating. The sheer mass of the wreck is humbling as you weightlessly glide along its coral and sponge-encrusted sides. The water whose clarity can be exceptional at the top of the wreck can dwindle to just a few feet at the sandy bottom. Plantlife has taken over and transformed the massive vessel of steel into a silent reef with dark gaping holes along the sides and on the top. It's all open for exploration without any supervision at all. I didn't have my divelight with me and so could not see what's inside. Not that I would have done so in the first place. Floating in darkness inside a rusted hull does not seem totally harmless. I must assume things are closed off enough so divers do not get lost, but it all did look forbidding and intimidating.

It is amazing how very quickly sealife takes over a sunken vessel. The seafans, sponges, and corrals of all kinds did not seem any different from those that grow on reefs and walls. I thought a wreck would be all mud and rust and sediment, but it's a living, teeming medley of plants and fish, and really quite indistinguishable from a reef. There are large, spindly plants that stick and fan out all over the place as well as the usual variety of sealife large and small. Fish and other critters are everywhere.

I thought of all the books I had read about divers exploring the Andrea Doria or the Empress of Ireland, and how those wrecks claim lives even from the very best. I don't think it's worth risking one's life for a porcellain plate from a sunken ship, but people know the level of risk they wish to take. Seeing the wreck of the Prince Albert gave me an idea of what it's all about. It was very real, very impressive, and a thrill.

Posted by conradb212 at 04:11 PM | Comments (0)

August 24, 2008

First ocean dive

I've had my first ocean dive. It was actually three, an orientation dive in the morning and then two boat dives in the afternoon.

Apparently, no matter what age I am, I get uptight whenever I do something new for the first time. I fell asleep just fine the evening before the dive, and had a good night's sleep, but during breakfast and then the orientation upstairs in the clubhouse I was absurdly nervous. Just like I used to get when I had to give a speech.

We then got geared up and entered the very shallow water at the beach in front of CoCo View's clubhouse. Our divemaster, Melgar, gave an introduction: first we'd swim down an incline, then congregate at the anchor plate of the buoy to demonstrate skills (flooding and clearing the mask; removing the regulator and blowing bubbles), then go past the wreck of the Prince Albert and on to Newman's Wall, then back to the wreck and over to the other side where CoCo View Wall is. That sounded like an awful lot of distance for just an orientation dive, and it felt like it, too, but when it was all over it had taken all of 45 minutes.

I had often wondered what it'd be like to see a shipwreck underwater. I envisioned it as spooky and threatening, sort of the ultimate symbol of human maritime defeat. A ship sinks and goes down to the bottom of the ocean. The image of the water closing over it and it falling has always felt extremely ominous to me.

But seeing the Prince Albert, a 140 foot long hulking former tanker, was not that threatening. Maybe it was the good visibility, or maybe shipwrecks are just one of those things that looks and feels all different once you actually see one underwater. We did not stay and peruse the encrusted wreck of the ship that'd been sunk as a diving attraction in 1985. There'd be plenty of time for that later.

Close to the wreck we saw a school of squid slowly circling in formation. An amazing sight that was. They have those huge eyes and you never quite know which side is the front and which the back. They seem intelligent, very deliberate, and very different from fish that tend to dart around this way and that.

The Newman wall was imposing, and I assume representative for a lot of Caribbean underwater walls. It's far steeper and rockier down there than you'd expect judging by the looks of the geography above the water. Roatan is hilly, for sure, but it does not seem to have the sheer cliffs that drop down many hundreds or thousands of feet. And every square inch underwater is occupied by something -- plants, fish, sea critters of all kinds. This is really what blew me away most. Lake Tahoe has awesome scenery and walls, but it is nearly devoid of life. Here I saw nothing but life teeming all over the place.

I still wrestled with some irrational fears, most of which I attribute to my initial uneasiness with new things. I am aware at all times, for example, of having all that water above me. If anything goes wrong there is simply no margin for error. What would happen if I had a sudden bout of ... something? Would I be able to handle it? Also, I do like to see what's around me, and I get uneasy when the visibility is bad and things go blank. When you dive you don't fall. Gravity as we know it is suspended. But the brain doesn't know that. So it can feel weird to float in nothingness, or turn around and see nothing but open water. But it is not only space; temperature fluctuations can also sneak up on you. You feel your body go cold and for an anxious few seconds wonder if something's wrong. Then you remember: thermocline. I don't mind cold water, but the sudden changes can make me uneasy. That was certainly not a problem in Roatan as the water temperature was 86 degrees and it never got below 84 even at the bottom. Not having to deal with cold water and thermoclines felt good.

Carol had told me many times that managing one's buoyancy in saltwater was much easier than in fresh water. I took her word for it, but it was hard for me to imagine that salt and whatever else is dissolved in ocean water would make that much of a difference. The specific weight between salt and sweet water is very close. However, as I quickly found out, it DOES make a HUGE difference.

In fresh water, where all of my previous dives had taken place (with the exception of that saltwater pool, but that doesn't count), buoyancy is a constant struggle. It is quite hard to consistently stay off the bottom so as not to stir up silt. In seawater, if you have your weights right, that is simply not an issue. I just floated, glided, hovered, flew, without any problem at all. It felt like magic. And it's a good thing, too, because the plantlife on the reefs is far more fragile than I imagined and I sure did not want to harm it.

Diving a reef, I found, is like slowly flying over and through a Pixar landscape. It's like being in "A Bug's Life" or "Finding Nemo," only much more intense and, of course, real. Those guys at Pixar must be divers, I am sure. The diversity and vitality of all those plants is simply amazing: all sorts of sponges and gorgonians (seafans) are everywhere. Some cover rocks, some bulge out, some stick out weightlessly. There's a myriad of different kinds of coral. Fish dart in and out between them in a never-ending fluid dance. Some are lightning quick, some deliberate. The water is a very different medium to live and move around in.

After lunch I experienced my first ocean boat dive. We were on the green boat, the CoCo III. The boats are larger than the ones I'd been on on the Manatee snorkel tours, and the cutout in the center through with you can get back into the boat by climbing up a ladder is fairly unique. Divers sit along the sides by their gear.

The first actual dive site we visited was called "Too Tall Too Small." I am not sure where it got that name. My guess is the resorts get quite creative naming those sites as there are so many. It was a marvelous wall dive, again full of teeming life of all sorts. As I was gliding through this wonder world I thought of the Beatles song "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" where they sing of "cellophane flowers of yellow and green," and "newspaper taxis waiting to take you away" and similar. Some said that song was really about acid trips (Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds), but though I have no firsthand experience I cannot imagine an acid or any other drug-induced trip to be any wilder than diving a reef.

The combination of weightlessly floating amidst this unreal, unbelievable underwater world with colors and shapes I'd never seen; hearing myself breathing air from a tank on my back; knowing that I was deep under the surface and really in quite a fragile position, it all adds up to a suspense of reality as we know it on the surface. It makes you think and question things. There's so much down there, and it's all so different from the familiar dry world above. The ocean is huge and endless but also delicate and tender. A single boat anchor carelessly dragged across the reefs can destroy what took decades or hundreds of years to build, and what is home to an intricate miraculous world that is a miracle.

Posted by conradb212 at 11:50 PM | Comments (0)

August 23, 2008

Dive trip to Honduras!

I am finally on my first real dive trip! It's taken me over two years to graduate from those initial checkout dives in Folsom Lake to my first diving experience in the ocean. That's ridiculously long, especially considering that I've been running a full dive website for more than two years, and that I've written this book about diving. But now I am on Roatan Island off Honduras, and tomorrow morning I'll have my first ever ocean dive.

We're at CoCo View Resort on the southside of Roatan. CoCo View is not a resort in the traditional luxury accommodations sense of the word. It's a community of bungalows, cabanas and buildings on a totally secluded penninsula. It's tropical to the max, with flocks of Hummingbirds darting around, palm trees and other lush tropical greenery everywhere. Some of the bungalows and cabanas are directly on the water. Yes, I can actually see the water between the cracks of the floorboards in my room.

Getting to Roatan is easy. It may be a penninsula off an island off mainland Honduras, but all it took was a three and a half hour Continental flight from Sacramento to Houston, and then another two and a half hour flight from Houston to Roatan island. And not in a tiny turboprop, but in a real Boeing 737. Flying along the central American coast line is an experience by itself. There is so much pristine, gorgeous and seemingly uninhabited beach with inlets and islands. Is it yet to be discovered? Is it protected? What's the deal?

Immigration at Roatan airport is a lengthy procedure with stern customs officers handwriting and hand-copying lots of stuff. I am sure it serves a purpose, but hey.... we're just here for a week of spending money and boosting the local economy. It's hot and incredibly humid waiting in line. Our luggage has bright pink CoCo View tags and is being picked up and moved through customs by friendly folks from the resort. We're being greeted and soon sit in a nicely air-conditioned Kia van.

The ride from the airport to CoCo View is maybe 20 minutes and what I see is, on a somewhat less extreme scale, what I remember from a late 1970s trip to El Salvador. Visible from the streets is a weird mix of wealth and poverty, American-style shopping strips and much more modest local stores, corrugated steel covered huts and driveways to mansion and resorts.

The ride ends at a large boathouse from where we're ferried to the actual resort, just a few stone's throws away across a still lagoon, and yet so far from civilization. We get a brief intro from a friendly young American woman who hands out forms and the usual disclaimers. There are two young couples from New Jersey and some guys. How many dives do I have? That'd be 36. How many night dives? Ummm... one. Dive buddy Carol senses my intimidation and volunteers that my one night dive was the mother of all night dives. I remember well. It was. But I am still sure that everyone else is vastly more experienced, and they are a bunch younger, too.

I pick up the key to the cabana on the water and it is sensational, just gorgeous. Hot and humid despite the big room air conditioner, but that's to be expected. I am blown away. Pretty much everyone who comes here is a diver and so instructions on what to do are in the room. We unpack and gather up our gear and walk on over to the dive building and dock. Four boats are there, painted yellow, red, green, blue. We've been assigned to the green boat, CoCo III. They are sturdy vessels that, as I later learn, even have an opening in the center for divers to climb in.

We store our gear in cubbies, then sign in to get weights. They are the old-fashioned solid lead weights. The two couples are here and they seem to know exactly how much weight they need. Me, I tried in the pool and sort of figured I might need 14 pounds. So that is what I get.

I am not sure I want to use Nitrox as it costs $8 a fill or $120 for the week whereas air is included. Carol uses it, and so I make my first three tanks Nitrox as well. We test for oxygen content and pressure, note the data on a sticker on the tank, then deposit our passports at the office. At the signup sheet I see that the Jersey couples have already signed up for the shark dive.

What have I gotten myself into? Will this work out? It's gorgeous here for sure, but what awaits me beneath the surface?

Posted by conradb212 at 07:46 PM | Comments (0)

August 11, 2008

Dogs, tanks, suits and Nitrox

Sometimes you go diving and it's just for fun. Other times you learn a bunch of new things as I found out this past weekend at Lake Tahoe. Instead of Meeks Bay which is usually overrun with certification classes, we went back to the D. L. Bliss State Park just a few miles away from Meeks. That's the site of the (in)famous Rubicon Wall that plunges down from 60 feet or so to a depth of 1,500 feet within just a quarter mile. Unfortunately, the trail from the Callawee Cove parking lot is a plunge all by itself, and quite a pain with scuba gear on. Still, the lure of the secluded beach and the wall were enough to make us go back.

Parking at D.L. Bliss is just six bucks a day, a real bargain when you consider the giant size of the park (it takes a mile on a narrow, winding forest road to even get to the park entrance gate) and the gorgeous vistas. It's a bit like Big Sur with lots of woods and nature. We arrived at the smallish Callawee Cove lot at 9:30AM when you can still pick your spot. As always with diving, the closer to the beach you can get the better.

This time, with the memory of lugging those giant 104-cubic foot steel tanks down (and up!) the steep trail, we brought comparatively tiny high pressure steel-80s. They don't look very manly, those tanks, but on this trip I certainly got to appreciate them. Sure, I only had 80 cubic-foot of air instead of 104, but that was enough, and the big difference in size and weight made this trip about diving and not about scaling what seems like 700 steps up a vertical cliff.

I never really realized before how important picking the right tank is. As much as I had read about tanks, when I bought my own first tanks I got my two used low-pressure steel-95s because Robert at Diver's Cove in Folsom recommended them, and my metallic-blue anodized aluminum 80 because it looked great. The steel 95s are good but I don't think I ever got a full 2,400 psi charge, and when you begin with 2,100 psi or so, there just isn't all that much air in them. The blue alu tank does look great, but it's actually even longer than the steel-95s, so it's quite a handful for just 80 cubic feet of air, and that's before the annoying buoyancy issues of aluminum tanks (I'll get into that!). So I think I'll relegate the pretty blue tank to pool duty, sell the steel 95s, and invest in high pressure steel 100s if we can find them at a reasonable price. High pressure tanks have their own issues (filling time, availability of high pressure fills, etc.) but at this point weight and length of a tank have become important to me. If you routinely have to carry tanks by the valve, having one that you can carry without it dragging the ground makes things so much easier.

But it's not only tanks where there is no substitute for practical experience. The same goes for wetsuits. While I liked the first wetsuit I ever bought, a 7mm Telos, the thing was so difficult to get into that I started all my dives already exhausted. And pulling the recalcitrant material up your arms and legs practically guarantees sore fingertips as the side of the nails dig into the soft parts. The answer there is to get a suit that really fits. My Telos, for example, was a "medium," which meant it fit my 6-foot, 155 pound frame snugly, but arms and legs were too short. No fun.

Well, Carol pointed out that some wetsuits come in "medium-long," though dive shops don't usually carry the size. My new 7mm Scubapro "Form" wetsuit does come in that size and it fits great. It's also made from a material that is super-stretchy and therefore goes on a whole lot easier. Nothing is ever perfect, though. Somehow it must have escaped Scubapro that Velcro grabs this material like crazy. When you pull the velcro off, it rips the surface layer of the wetsuit material. Scuba gear uses lots of velcro, and so it won't be long before suits made of this material look all chewed up. Anyway, I love the suit and we'll see how it holds up.

The water temperature at Tahoe was 68 degrees as it usually is in the summer. However, I knew from prior dives that it gets colder quickly as you go down and so I used my hood and gloves. I had some concerns about the gloves as we took a test camera along, the new DC800 from SeaLife. The folks at SeaLife have this amazing ability to retrofit ordinary digital camera equipment for underwater duty by tweaking the software and adding special underwater modes that go well beyond what consumer cameras with an underwater setting or two offer. A lot of their magic comes from special white balance modes that correct for the way water filters out different colors as you go deeper. They also know that divers do wear gloves on occasion, and so the buttons on their underwater housings are always spaced to accommodate gloves. It may have escaped them, however, that older divers need reading glasses to see fine print and tiny icons, and so that can be an issue.

I had used Nitrox at the quarry in Tennessee, but this was the first time at altitude. I had contemplated the impacts of altitude on diving before, taken the PADI altitude diver class (twice, really), and read up on the subject. It's hard enough to wrap your mind around the logic of altitude diving on air (it's the ratio of the pressure differences between surface and a certain depth underwater that determines nitrogen absorption, and not the absolute pressure!), and it's worse for Nitrox where you essentially have to determine equivalent air depths twice. From talking to various people and also reading bulletin board posts on the matter, it seems that very few really know how it works. It makes no difference, of course, as everyone relies on their dive computer.

It's interesting to see just how much dive tables and dive computers differ when it comes to the real world. NAUI, for example, sells tables for diving at altitude with 32 and 36% Nitrox as well as for air dives. There are two sets of tables, one for altitudes between 6,000 and 10,000 feet and one for 1,000 to 6,000 feet. My dive eventually took me to 64 feet. Rounded up to 70 feet, the NAUI sea level tables would allow for a maximum dive time (MDT) of 45 minutes. The altitude air table cuts that to 21 minutes. That's because diving 64 feet at 10,000 feet of altitude is more like diving 100 feet or so at sea level as far as nitrogen uptake goes. This is where Nitrox comes in handy. Its lesser percentage of nitrogen increases maximum dive time from 21 to 32 minutes with 32% Nitrox, and 37 minutes with 36% Nitrox. So when diving at altitude, using Nitrox increases maximum bottom times when compared to air, just as it does at sea level.

Now how does all that theory translate into what the dive computer shows during an actual dive? Well, at no time did my no-decompression time fall below 60 minutes. And once set to 36% Nitrox, my Uwatec SmartZ also correctly showed an altitude-adjusted maximum oxygen depth of 100 feet. That's about six feet more than at sea level. Most people would expect less, but as far as oxygen goes, absolute pressure matters and so you reach the recommended 1.4 atmosphere partial pressure of oxygen a few feet deeper at Tahoe altitudes.

It's definitely a good thing to plan one's altitude dives, but once you're down there, the dive computer takes over. And at least in my case, maximum allowable dive time was a lot longer than my air would have lasted. I am getting better with my air consumption, but I am still sucking it up at an alarming rate when I get tense, and diving that wall at Rubicon point is still a somewhat scary experience for me.

The beach at Callawee Cove is shallow. You can dive along the rock cliffs and never reach more than 15-18 feet or so. However, swim away from the beach at the point, and there's the wall. Part of it is just a sheer wall, stark and forbidding. Other parts are giant boulders. All in all, it goes from 60 feet or so down to a 1,500 foot abyss within just a quarter mile. Visibility was far less than when we dove the wall last year. We had at least a hundred feet then, but this time it was just 50 or so, as we had already noticed during other Tahoe dives this year. I am not sure why that is; it must be some sort of local phenomenon as I cannot imagine clarity going down by that much within a single year. Tahoe is totally clean and clear, and pollution simply cannot be a sizable problem. Maybe it was ash and dust from all the California wildfires, and that may also account for the lower water temperatures.

Anyway, I never like low visibility, and its worse when there are severe thermoclines. This time we hit two, each gripping one's entire body. At 65 feet it was already down to 50 degrees. I wasn't uncomfortably cold with the hood and gloves, but between the relatively low visibility, the cold, and the menacing face of the wall, I was breathing hard. By now I know that I do not fall when I cannot see the bottom, but it is still a weird feeling. I did not want for it to overcome me, and so when I saw the wall slowly came into view, I swallowed hard and decided to swim along the sheer and near vertical face of the wall. Last time I had gone over it from the top, following Carol. This time, Carol had gone up to the top and peeked over it, feeling "like the Lion King" as she later told me. I swam along the face, breathing hard and hoping I'd soon come to something other than the sheer face. During those two or three minutes it instantly became clear to me why "blue holes" that often have walls that recede as you go down are considered so dangerous. It's easy to freak when there is nothing below you and rock above. Also, at just 65 feet I didn't feel what I suppose was the calming (to me) influence of a bit of narcosis that I probably had felt at 110 feet. In any case, I am very glad I went back to Rubicon Wall. I love those rock faces and giant boulders, but I'd like them that much better in clearer, warmer water.

Nitrox worked well for me, but then again I'd never had a problem with just air. So for now I know that Nitrox doesn't make me feel weird or anything. There's psychology in that. You need to find out for yourself how something makes you feel.

After a two-hour surface interval on the beautiful beach of the cove we did a second dive. This one was just for fun, poking around the rocks and boulders along the shallow shore. It rarely got to be more than 15 feet deep. We took movies with the SeaLife (once in its case, you cannot switch between still pictures and movies, so you need to decide what mode to use beforehand), watched whole colonies of feisty crawdads do their thing, marveled at how warm the fine sand at the bottom was when you stick your hands in it, and just played around.

This second dive was also a lecture in what an impact different types of tanks can have, and how even the same tank can behave differently when it gets empty. On the first dive I had used the high-pressure steel-80 tank and used 16 pounds of weight in the two pockets of my Scubapro Knighthawk BC. For the second dive I switched to my electric-blue Aluminum-80 tank, this time using 18 pounds to make up for the aluminum tank's higher buoyancy. Carol, who generally barely uses any weights at all, had on her new 7mm wetsuit and was on her second dive with the same tank. She doesn't like a lot of weight and dropped two pounds for this dive. As a result of the different buoyancy she now had trouble going down with eight pounds instead of the ten she'd used on the first dive, and so we switched things around again. Having less weight came back to haunt me after I'd used up about 900 psi of air. As we were returning to the beach and I found myself increasingly unable to stay at the shallow depths as my aluminum bottle was getting more and more buoyant, until I signaled it was no use and I had to surface, and so I did. Note to self: tanks that switch from negative to positive buoyancy are a pain.

I listed dogs in the title of this entry. Where do they come in? Well, we had fun watching some Retrievers and Labs play in the water during our dives. But that wasn't why I mentioned it. Like everyone else, I had learned to look up before surfacing so as not to collide with a boat. I did that and none were in sight. But when I came up I bumped into .... a dog. It was a chocolate Lab, and he'd probably been investigating my bubbles. He was just as surprised as I was and quickly doggie-paddled off. Me, I couldn't stop laughing.

Posted by conradb212 at 04:07 PM | Comments (0)

July 24, 2008

Altitude diving class at Meeks Bay, Lake Tahoe

Almost two years ago I wrote how I got certified as an altitude diver at Lake Tahoe. I thought I had been, I really did. But it turned out that I never got my card and my old instructor vanished. So it seemed like a good idea to do the whole thing over again, and I signed up for the PADI altitude diver class with Fisheye Scuba in Folsom.

There really is no separate altitude class in the PADI system. Altitude is part of "Adventures in Diving" and the concepts and things to know are described in one big instruction manual. I bought the 375-page tome, studied, answered the quiz questions and did the knowledge review. I also attended the altitude portion of the class at Fisheye Scuba which took about an hour.

Instructor Kate Fuquay, who is also part-owner of Fisheye Scuba, wanted students to go up to Lake Tahoe the night before the class so our bodies could properly acclimate to the much higher altitude. A bit of research and calling around yielded a reasonably priced motel room, a rare commodity at Tahoe in just about any season. The motel did not have air conditioning and the room was baking hot despite open windows and night time temperatures dropping into the mid-40s. No big deal as thanks to a big fan I managed to sleep anyway.

Meeks Bay is on the other side of the lake and so it was a bit of a drive to get to the camping and resort area by 8AM. The Fisheye crew was already there and so was an assortment of students taking various classes. Meeks Bay actually has two beaches, a small one north of a marina entrance and a larger one south of it. Both have adequate parking close to the sandy beach and both have rest rooms. The larger resort area beach we used also has a nice store for campers and beachgoers, so that's a plus for when you want a drink, snack or a souvenir (I got a handy nautical map of the lake and surrounding waterways).

My new 6-1/2mm ScubaPro wetsuit went on a lot easier than the recalcitrant 7mm Telos I'd become used to fighting with, but it still took me time to don my gear and make sure all was well. We did the buddy check, then gathered around instructor Kate who spent time going through the special considerations of altitude diving as well as the plans for the dives. One advantage of a group this big (there were probably 20 of us all in all) was that we had a couple of non-divers, and so I had someone to look after my 12-year-old son Morgan who'd come along for the experience. He'd brought his snorkeling gear and I was sure he'd have a great time, but he's still only 12 and I wanted an adult to keep an eye on him.

The water was a nice, refreshing 68 degrees Fahrenheit but I had put on my hood anyway, knowing that Lake Tahoe can get quite chilly during a dive. We swam out to one of the buoys so we could descend on its line to the bottom where we'd compare and record the depths shown on our depth gauges or dive computers. That was on the agenda to see if all were altitude-adjusted and whether readings differed or not. I had my Uwatec SmartZ computer on my left wrist and the Timex Helix on my right. At the bottom the SmartZ showed 42 feet and the Timex 41. Close enough.

Lake Tahoe is wonderfully clear and generally has great viz, but a group of mostly novice divers all gathered at the bottom can fix that in a hurry and so we'd soon kicked up enough sand and silt to make it advisable to move on. The bottom at Meeks Bay is sandy and shallow until it slopes away into the abyss at a 45 degree angle. There isn't a whole lot to see and so we swam along the slope at 50 feet or so. Visibility remained marginal for Tahoe and so our initial convoy soon lost sight of each other and split into smaller groups of twos and fours. It's amazing how quickly you can lose sight of other divers underwater. There weren't any boulders here or schools of fish, and so I mostly concentrated on buoyancy, checking my gear and instruments, and watching the occasional crawdad do its thing. Later I noticed that the temperature had actually dropped all the way to 50 degrees at some point and I never even noticed.

Morgan greeted us on the surface, clearly having a good time. We parked the gear at the shore and debriefed. Our assignment for the second altitude dive was to do a full dive plan, adjusted for altitude, pressure groups and all. Here's what Carol and I came up with:

Our first dive had been to 50 feet at Tahoe altitude of 6,230 feet. The 50 feet translates to a theoretical depth of 65 feet at sea level, so we round up to 70 feet. Our first dive was 29 minutes, so after that first dive we were PADI "N" divers. We then had a surface interval of 2:20 hours, and that brought us down to "A" diver status.

Our dive plan for the second dive was to go to 50 feet again. That again translated to a theoretical depth of 65 feet at sea level. We rounded that up to 70 feet, and found that as "A" divers with a residual nitrogen time of five minutes, that left us with an adjusted bottom time of 35 minutes.

That was that, and we conducted the dive in accordance with the plan. On the second dive I used my compass to navigate to the northern edge of the beach where the underwater scenery was more interesting. We saw some of the huge boulders that had fascinated me on prior dives at Meeks. We swam around and between them, all at non-intimidating depths of just 30 to 40 feet or so. It was a fairly long underwater swim back to the beach, and I used that to once again practice buoyancy at shallow depths where staying level is most difficult. Once you reach eight or ten feet or so, it's all too easy to pop up like a cork and you don't want for that to happen. Constantly correcting by adding air to the BC and then discharging it again is no good; you need to learn to achieve buoyancy by changing the average volume of air in your lungs. Carol barely ever needs her ScubaPro Ladyhawk BC's assistance to maintain buoyancy, and I am getting better at it myself.

We were done diving by two o'clock in the afternoon or so, then headed for lunch/dinner at Rosie's Cafe in Tahoe City. Rosie's alone would have been worth the trip with some of the best Key Lime pie ever, but we also needed to let the residual nitrogen escape from our systems before we tackled the 7,400 feet summit on our way back.

This wasn't the greatest diving ever, but it was fun and I finally have that altitude card in the bag. Not that the card matters. Diving matters, the preparation and anticipation, the people you meet, everything about it. I love it.

Posted by conradb212 at 03:40 PM | Comments (0)

July 23, 2008

Diving at altitude revisited

As we've all been taught in Scuba class, the laws of messieurs Boyle and Dalton describe how air pressure and density, respectively, vary when we dive, and that of Mr. Henry how gasses get absorbed in liquids and tissues under pressure. Nitrogen absorption and release rates directly affect the no-decompression bottom times and are therefore extremely important to divers. The whole pressure picture changes at higher elevations because the air is thinner at altitude.

What we learn in Scuba class always assumes that the pressure at the surface is one atmosphere, or 14.7 pounds per square inch. Course materials then show how a certain volume of air is compressed to half at a depth of 33 feet because the additional pressure of the water on top of us adds another atmosphere, or 14.7 pounds per square inch, for a total of two atmospheres, or 29.4 pounds per square inch. At 66 feet the same volume of air is subjected to three atmospheres and has shrunk to one third of its original surface volume. Conversely, if you blow a certain amount of air into a balloon at a depth of 66 feet, that volume will double once you get back up to 33 feet, and triple at the surface. This is an essential part of understanding diving physics.

However, does this still hold true at altitude? Let's think this through with the example of Lake Tahoe, which is at 6,230 feet above sea level.

At first sight, it would seem that once you are fully acclimated to the Lake Tahoe altitude level, theoretical and actual depth should be the same. At Tahoe you start out at a surface air pressure of roughly 0.8 atmospheres. If you then dive down to 99 feet you'd add another atmosphere's worth of pressure each 33 feet, for a total of 3.8 atmospheres. Then you go back up to the surface where the pressure is once again 0.8 atmospheres. So the pressure difference betwen surface and 99 feet is three atmospheres. At sea level you'd go from 1.0 atmosphere at the surface to 4.0 atmospheres at a depth of 99 feet, and then back up to 1.0 atmospheres, for the same pressure difference of three atmospheres. If anything, when diving in Lake Tahoe you have less total pressure on top of you at 99 feet than at sea level (3.8 ata instead of 4.0 ata) where you'd reach 3.8 ata already at 93 feet. So why then do the altitude tables show that 99 feet at Tahoe corresponds to an ocean depth of about 125 feet and not 93?

The answer is that while the math in the above paragraph is correct, it does not address the problem we're trying to solve. The problem is the uptake of nitrogen, and that means we need to think in terms of pressure ratios and not pressure differences. At sea level, the pressure doubles at 33 feet compared to the surface, triples at 66 feet, and quadruples at 99 feet. Now look at Lake Tahoe where the surface pressure is only 0.8 atmospheres. That corresponds to 26.4 feet of water. So when you dive Lake Tahoe, the pressure doubles at 26.4 feet, triples at 52.8 feet, and quadruples at 79.2 feet. This means that as far as nitrogen ongassing and offgassing goes, you need to divide actual depth by surface pressure to arrive at theoretical depth.

That's because in Lake Tahoe, four times surface pressure is reached at 79.2 feet whereas at sea level four times surface pressure is reached at 99 feet. Henry's law says, "At a constant temperature, the amount of a given gas dissolved in a given type and volume of liquid is directly proportional to the partial pressure of that gas in equilibrium with that liquid." The way gasses dissolve and expand in liquids and tissues in the body is very complex, but if for simplicity's sake we assume that nitrogen bubbles expand as we ascend to the surface, those bubbles will expand to four times their size from a 79.2 feet dive in Lake Tahoe and from a 99 feet dive at sea level. That is why we need altitude conversion tables (click here for an example of such a chart.)

Below is a table that shows what I call "altitude nitrogen atmospheres." The colored lines show what depth surface pressure multiples correspond to at various altitudes. If you look at the purple line you see that as far as dive tables go, a 132 feet dive at sea level corresponds to a 110 feet dive at 5000 feet altitude and a 98 feet dive at 8000 feet altitude.

It should be obvious by now that altitude conversion tables are used to stay within safe decompression limits. So they handle the nitrogen side of things. But what about oxygen? That's an entirely different ballgame. As anyone who has taken an Enriched Air Diving, or Nitrox, class knows, high oxygen partial pressure can become a problem. Oxygen toxicity can occur when oxygen partial pressure exceeds certain values. This can lead to convulsions and loss of consciousness, and thus quite possibly drowning. The recommended oxygen partial pressure limit is 1.4 ata. The 1.4 ata limit is used by Nitrox divers to compute the "MOD," or "Maximum Operating Depth" of a Nitrox mix. The formula used to compute the MOD is:

MOD = (1.4 / oxygen percentage x 33 ) - surface pressure in feet of water.

If we dive EANx32 (32% Nitrox) at sea level, the MOD is 111.38 feet. But what would the MOD be if we dive 32% Nitrox at Lake Tahoe where the surface pressure is only about 0.8 ata? The answer is 118 feet! Yes, the MOD for diving EANx32 at that altitude is actually 6.4 feet deeper than at sea level. In fact, those 6.4 feet apply to all Nitrox percentages. That's because oxygen toxicity depends on pressure and not on pressure ratio.

That creates an interesting situation: As far as pressure goes, 99 feet in Tahoe is only as much as 93 feet in the ocean. But as far as nitrogen uptake goes those same 99 feet are like 125 in the ocean.

If we dive air, oxygen toxicity is rarely an issue. At Lake Tahoe levels, an air diver would not reach the 1.4 ata partial oxygen pressure level until a depth of almost 200 feet, far deeper than the recommended recreational diving depth limit. For Nitrox divers, however, the MOD can become an issue. At Lake Tahoe altitude, the MOD for a diver using 36% Nitrox is about 103 feet, and that is actual feet, not altitude adjusted feet.

The table below shows altitude-adjusted MOD levels for air as well as Nitrox with oxygen percentages between 30 and 40 percent. Again, the MOD at altitude gets deeper because the surface pressure, converted to the equivalent of feet of water, gets less and less.

But what about altitude adjustment for Nitrox divers? Can they use the same altitude tables? Not directly. Nitrox divers know that in order to use regular dive tables, we need to first calculate the equivalent air depth, or EAD. The formula to compute EAD is:

EAD = (( Partial Pressure Nitrogen / 0.79 ) * (depth + 33 feet)) - 33 feet

You can generate Nitrox Equivalent Air Depth tables in a spreadsheet program with this formula, then use those values to generate a second table that shows Equivalent Air Depth for a given percentage Nitrox at a given altitude, and then use those twice adjusted depths to look up maximum no-decompression bottom times in standard dive tables. What you'll find is that using Nitrox at altitude almost cancels out the effect of altitude: At altitude the equivalent ocean depth is deeper than the actual depth as far as nitrogen goes. But with diving Nitrox the equivalent air depth is always shallower than the actual depth as far as nitrogen goes. Depending on the altitude, diving a certain mix of Nitrox means you can use the standard no-decompression sea level air tables. For diving Lake Tahoe, for example, using 34% Nitrox gives you about the same bottom times as diving air at sea level.

I should also mention that NAUI has plastic dive tables for EAN32 and EAN36 both for altitudes between 2,000 and 6,000 feet and 6,000 and 10,000 feet. The tables are based on the Reduced Gradient Bubble Model and show maximum dive times for the initial dive and a second dive. They are fairly basic and probably include a good deal of safety.

Finally, it's essentially all moot as no one is using dive tables anymore anyway. The dive computer does it all, and almost no one knows how theirs works. That's why I felt a need to figure out how it all fits together. It's still good to know these things. Thanks also to Brian at diverssupport.com for helping me understand all these concepts.

Disclaimer: Although I am fairly confident in my math and checked my findings and results against a number of authoritative sources I do not claim all of this is correct and no one should base their dive plans on what I wrote here.

Posted by conradb212 at 04:01 PM | Comments (0)

June 29, 2008

Full face mask and saltwater

Yesterday I got to experience a new piece of scuba equipment, a full-face mask - and also do my first dive in saltwater. Unfortunately, this all sounds much grander than it was. It all took place at a party at the wonderful home and pool of diving friends. One of the group had brought her full-face mask together with BC and a full tank of air so anyone could check it out. And the gorgeous pool was a saltwater pool, so at least technically I can now say I have been diving in salt water. I know the particulars of this initiation into salt water will only add to the teasing I must endure for having done all of my dives so far in sweet water.

Anyway, the full-face mask was interesting. I had always viewed them as professional equipment beyond the reach and realm of recreational diving. In the "masks" section of our scubadiverinfo.com website I described full-face masks as follows:

"Full face masks protect professional and advanced recreational divers in polluted water and from stings, also allow verbal communication, and alleviate cramps from having to bite on a mouthpiece for long periods of time. They are also warmer in very cold water, and the chance of the mask getting knocked off accidentally is much lower. Full face masks are also referred to as "Jack Browne" masks in recognition of the Desco engineer who came up with the protytpe design of a full face mask with an integrated air supply attachment."

In practice, the full-face mask first looks a bit intimidating. It's large and it has a fairly elaborate strap system. The second stage is built into the mask, so there is no separate mouthpiece. You don't bite on one either. You simply put the mask on, get your hair out of the way, and you're all set. You still breathe through your mouth. The nose is kind of blocked with a rubber piece. BC inflation works the same, with the usual up and down buttons and there was the usual backup second stage, though I am not sure how you'd use it with a full-face mask.

Go under and it's an entirely different experience.

The view is panoramic, and much more so than with any conventional mask I've tried, and by now I've tried quite a view different designs. I wish I could remember the make and model of the mask as, from the looks of it, not all full-face masks offer this panoramic view. As is, this one certainly stood out.

Breathing feels totally natural. It's through the mouth, but not having a mouthpiece to bite on is a huge advantage in my book. Most mouthpieces chafe on my gums or my jaw gets tired from the mouthpiece forever pulling this way or that.

Equalizing your ears is a bit different. The mask did not have the separate nosepiece I use to pinch my nose and blow against it to equalize. The advice was to either move your jaw from side to side or some variation of that, or to move the mask up to block the nose inside as it pushes against that rubber piece in the mask, and then blow against it. I can't remember exactly how I did it, but it was no big deal and certainly not a problem.

Since air flows inside the mask, there is no mask squeeze and you do never have to equalize pressure inside the mask. That's never been a problem for me, but some people forget to do it, sometimes with annoying consequences. All in all, not having to worry about it is nice.

Another big issue for me is mask fogging. I've tried just about every trick to keep my mask from fogging and it does it anyway. This is a real drag. I mean, you don't go diving to see a wondrous underwater world only to see it from behind a fogged-up mask. Sure, you can let some water in and swirl it around the lens occasionally, but that's hardly a satisfying solution. The full-face mask -- at least the one I tried -- did not fog up at all. I suppose it's because of the airflow. It's wonderful not to have to worry about that.

And then there is mask leaking. I was wondering how such a large mask would do. After all, the perimeter of the seal is a lot longer than that of a conventional mask. Amazingly, not as much as a single drop came in. Maybe that's again because of the positive air pressure. If the pressure inside and outside of the mask is the same, water won't come in.

As listed above, there are other reasons to wear a full-face mask. One is to be able to communicate with dive buddies who also wear a full face mask with communications gear, and with the surface. Since you don't have anything in your mouth you can talk, and an integrated microphone then picks it up. I didn't have the battery pack that powers the comms gear and so could not see how well it works.

As for the saltwater pool, it wasn't nearly as salty as I expected. It was also absolutely crystal clear and clean. I'll have to look into it for my own pool.

Posted by conradb212 at 04:38 PM | Comments (0)

June 20, 2008

Quarry Diving

I finally got to dive again and this time it was in a quarry.

Quarries start out as open-pit mines where rocks and other materials are extracted. Once the quarry is no longer used it may fill with water and become a great place for diving. The place I went to is Loch Low-Minn near Athens, Tennessee, a 10-acre lake in the midst of 100 acres of wooded land. Check the web and you find it listed as a McMinn County Highway Department quarry that yielded crushed limestone for concrete and roads in the early 1960s. Its use as a scuba facility came about when a couple by the name of Rick and Stacy Low purchased the quarry in 1996. They named the place Loch (Scottish for Lake) Low (for their last name) Minn (for McMinn County). This quarry is quite popular and has been featured in Dive Training Magazine a couple of times. The owners live on site and take good care of the grounds and the facility. Unlike many quarries, this one has a good number of scuba-related attractions. There are two wooden diving platforms, floating gates for buoyancy training, a navigation course, and any number of sunken artifacts ranging from statues to a Lock Ness monster to funky items like a toilet and such. There is also a large diameter tube to swim through.

Depending on the water level, Loch Low Minn can be as deep as just over 80 feet at the center of the lake. I'd been told that visibility is quite good for a quarry, resulting from the three springs that seep into the lake and all the vegetation that filters run-off from around the lake.

We went there mid-week with a couple of students that had to complete their open water certification. The quarry owners were not there, but had left the big rolling entrance gate unlocked for us. The quarry itself is completely hidden. You don't see it until you drive over an incline and then there it is, a still body of water nestled into rocks and woods. There's a beach and a wooden deck with benches for divers to prepare. A bunch of catfish and a few bass swam around, obviously expecting to be fed.

It was quite hot and humid and I dreaded donning the wetsuit, but my new 7mm Scubapro went on a lot easier than my old 7mm Telos. For one thing, the Scubapro is a medium-long and a better fit than the medium Telos with its short arms and legs. For another, the Scubapro's material is stretchier and softer. It'd been a while since my last real dive and I didn't want to embarrass myself in front of two students, so I prepped my gear slowly and methodically, making sure I didn't forget anything or do anything stupid.

The water felt wonderful, with a surface temperature in the 70s. Carol spent some time talking to her students about the dives ahead and the tasks they had to complete: buoyancy control, emergency free ascents and diver rescue. Then we went down, heading for one of the diving platforms.

As almost always, I had a few minutes of nervousness. Visibility was somewhat less than I expected, and there were rather dramatic thermoclines. The quarry bottom slopes away steeply from the beach and so we soon found ourselves in fairly deep water. I saw the bottom below me disappear, making me feel as if I hovered over nothingness. Then we hit one of the thermoclines that gripped and chilled my body. There was a minute or two when I had to fight a sense of panic ('what if I something went wrong with me?' 'what if I faint?') that urged me to head for the surface. It was over soon and I felt okay again, but the thought of something happening while underwater is not pleasant and I hope I'll never find myself in such a situation.

We soon reached one of the platforms and Carol went through the checkout dive drills with her students. I had the Olympus 770 with me and took pictures of them. Then I saw some of the sunken artifacts I had been told about. I went exploring but the visibility was such that the dive platform quickly disappeared from view. I did not want to get separated from the group and returned before I completely lost sight of it.

Exercises done, we all resurfaced. Carol debriefed the guys and then we set course to the far end of the quarry where we hoped we'd spot some of paddlefish that had been released into the quarry a couple of years ago. This gave the guys an opportunity to learn about compass settings. When asked how they'd reverse the course once we were there, they promptly made the beginners' mistake of trying to visualize what was opposite the original compass reading instead of simply adding 180 degrees. That explained, off we went.

Even though there wasn't anyone else in the quarry to stir up silt, visibility remained fairly low and I realized the value of Carol's bright-yellow fins that made her harder to loose than had she worn standard black ones. As we approached the other end we began seeing slender horizontal shapes in the water -- paddlefish. They seem to be curious enough to check out divers but they don't come close, so I never saw one clear enough to take a picture. While Carol and the guys hovered to look at the paddlefish I decided to drop down to see where the bottom was but at around 40 feet it already got pretty cold dark and I lost sight of the group, and so I ascended until I was at their level again.

Carol then took the lead again and guided us close to the rock wall at the far end. For all practical purposes, it looked like a wall dive. It may have only gone down to 60 or 70 feet, but with the limited visibility it was easy to imagine being in a much larger setting. On we went and back into open water where we swam through a series of hovering PVC pipe shapes. It felt like being in a video game where you got points for flying through a series of gates. The shapes, of course, had been deployed to practice buoyancy. I had hoped we'd also be able to swim through the corrugated metal pipe laying near one of the diving platforms. I had seen it on video and felt it was a clever simulation of an overhead environment without actually being one, but it was on the other side of where we emerged and by now we were at the end of the checkout dives.

We checked remaining air with Carol, needless to say, having used barely more than half of us heavy breathers. Oh, this was also my first time on Nitrox. Since I hadn't brought any scuba gear except my trusted Scubapro Frameless mask I was using borrowed gear. The BC, fins and gauges all worked fine for me, except some chafing on my gums from the different second stage mouthpiece, but I was wondering whether I'd feel a difference diving 40% Nitrox. I didn't. A couple of times I felt a bit like one does after hyperventilating on purpose but I could be wrong. I felt no different after surfacing than I usually feel after a dive, but we'd never gone deeper than 40 feet and total dive time had been just under an hour, so I'll reserve judgement until a longer, deeper dive.

Diving the quarry was fun. It's a very peaceful place with nothing but nature. Before we left we fed the very tame catfish and the pesky bass that always darted between the catfish and snapped away the food from them. I want to go back and have some more time exploring the various stuff placed on the bottom, and also the rock wall on the far end. I am pretty sure I'll get a chance.

Posted by conradb212 at 02:37 PM | Comments (0)

May 06, 2008

Warm-up in the pool

A pool does come in handy for checking out gear and seeing if you still remember how it all works. Once the water had reached 68 degrees Fahrenheit at Dim Cove (the name I have given my pool), I felt it was high time to get wet again after so long. So I pulled the whole setup out of the closet, hoped I had not stashed away some vital part of the gear in some place I now would not remember, and wondered just how I had managed to collect so many masks that in all likelihood I'd never use on a real dive.

Getting the gear out reminded me once again that scuba is equipment-intensive. And almost all of it is needed for a dive. Another good reason to keep it all in one place. A complete set of my stuff is in a large travel bag that I bought at CostCo for just this purpose. It's not a scuba bag, but perfect for the task. I hope it'll hold up to the abuse of many more airplane trips. Things are already beginning to fray a bit here and there. That's probably the difference between a $40 bag and one that costs hundreds.

I was also reminded again just how heavy those tanks are as I shlepped one from my garage through the house and into the backyard. Sure, my steel 95s are monsters and Carol forever advocates the use of smaller and handier tanks for regular dives, but there's just a huge difference between the effortless way happy, smiling divers carry their tanks around in movies and commercials, and how heavy the beasts are in real life. Every time I pick one up I think of cave divers with their doubles, or the deep divers who carry and clip on five or more. Maybe sometime in the future materials science has advanced to a point where compressed air containers, if they are necessary at all, will weigh a fraction of what they do today and people will look at today's gear with the same mix of awe, reverence and amusement we peruse a medieval Knight's suit of armor.

I was pleased that I still remembered how to get the gear assembled. No mistakes there. I know, this must seem trivial to seasoned divers but -- alas -- I am not yet one of them. And I swear, one of these days I'll even learn how to put on my fins more or less elegantly. As is, watching me put them on must be comic relief and raise doubts in onlookers' minds as to my suitability to go under.

But go under I did, and it was great to blow bubbles again. Everything worked fine and, as always, my 12-year-old son had fun looking down with his mask and snorkel and playing with my bubbles. He also practiced his underwater photographer's skills with a Casio in an underwater case. I let him breathe through my regulator just below the surface while I used my AIR2 backup. That's when I noticed a minor annoyance: the nylon tie that secures the mouthpiece of the AIR2 stuck out in the wrong position, poking me in the lip. No big deal, but I always get a bad feeling when factory-authorized service on a potentially life-saving piece of equipment is not done quite right. I mean, if the tie is put on wrong, am I totally sure everything else works okay?

After the 35 minute dive (if you can call practicing in a backyard pool a dive) I was reminded that the end of a dive is really not the end of a dive. That comes only after everything has been taken off, rinsed, put somewhere to dry, and then finally stowed away in its proper place.

Now that my son is old enough to take a scuba class himself, I find myself wondering if I think he's ready for it, and whether I'd be scared letting him dive. I know it's a parent thing to worry, and I'll let him decide if he wants to and when he is ready.

Posted by conradb212 at 02:53 PM | Comments (0)

March 31, 2008

Free diving

When I think of diving, I think of breathing underwater. But most of us dive long before we learn how to use Scuba. When I was a kid, diving to me meant getting to the ten-foot bottom of the public pool, and it made my ears hurt. For a while I practiced breathholding and timed myself. I can't remember how long I managed to go without taking a breath, but it seemed respectable to me back then. I never did learn how to equalize my ears free diving. At Three Sisters in Crystal River, Florida, a sharp pain in my ears kept me from going deeper than eight or ten feet or so. Yet, free divers go much, much deeper than that.

I just finished reading "The Dive -- A Story of Love and Obsession" by Pipin Ferreras. It's the story of a Cuban free diver who set record after record together with his wife, Audrey. A fatal accident killed Audrey during a dive to 170 meters (558 feet) and the book recalls Ferreras life and is also a tribute to his wife. Earlier I had read "The Blue Edge" by Carlos Eyles, also a man who pretty much dedicated his life to free diving, albeit for different reasons. But whether it is records, spear fishing, or just being one with the sea, it is hard for me to imagine how it is done.

Scuba and free diving both take place in the water, but beyond that everything seems different. Scuba dives can take an hour or more. Free dives a couple of minutes or maybe three for accomplished free divers. Scuba is slow and measured movement; free diving means darting down and back to the surface. Scuba means dealing with the gas laws so as to avoid embolisms, narcosis, the bends; free diving has none of that as no additional nitrogen is introduced into the body.

Competitive free diving, of course, has its own rules and governing bodies. There are different categories. In "Constant Weight" the diver follows a line to a certain depth and then swims back up, all on his or her own power. In "Variable Weight" the diver uses a weighted sled to go down, then swims back up. In "No Limit," the diver uses a sled to go down, then inflates an airbag at the bottom and holds on to that to get back to the surface. The depths reached are almost unimaginable. How can they do that?

Apparently, in free diving the rules are all different. With no compressed air to counter-balance the enormous water pressure, the lungs and other air cavities inside the body compress enormously. Conventional equalization of the ears and sinus only goes that far; beyond a certain depth the divers do "water equalization, " i.e. they let salt water into the sinus system in a practice that is described as entirely unpleasant. And another phenomenon takes place when a "blood shift" keeps the lungs from collapsing. It's a residual from ancient times perhaps, from our genetic past, but it works (not that I'd ever want to experience it).

The kind of free diving described in "The Dive" requires extensive planning and preparation. Safety divers on scuba are deployed at regular depth intervals, including the bottom. In those extreme record attempts, that means a diver has to wait at almost 600 feet on Trimix. Breathing gas goes very fast at that depth and it's clear that timing is everything. Once the safety divers are down, the free diving attempt must be made exactly on time. And even so, the deeper safety divers won't be back on the surface to partake in the celebrations as there are hours of decompression time.

Wherever there are records and titles, there are politics and competing agencies and bodies, and apparently that's no different in free diving. In his book, Ferreras describes his life and career, and his intense personality that more or less made him an outcast. Already relying on his own certifying agency, after his wife died in her record attempt he came under intense criticism. One of his own crew wrote a book accusing Ferreras of negligence and wrongdoing.

Knowing my tendency to get deeply involved in topics that interest me, I promised myself not to start research on free diving after I finished the book. But in this day and age that's hard to do. Wiki provides an overview, and Audrey Mestre's final dive is right there on YouTube. Yes, the sled's camera recorded how she is trying to inflate the lift bag at a depth of 558 feet, and it won't inflate. You can watch the whole thing.

Posted by conradb212 at 03:37 PM | Comments (0)

March 26, 2008

Mark Fyvie (1972-2008)

People die every day, by the thousands. From natural causes and from accidents. Unless a death happens in our families or we are confronted with it in some other way, we barely notice. Even the gruesome stuff we see on television or read in the newspapers doesn't really affect us. This only happens to other people, not us. But every once in a while a death does affect us. It can be a celebrity, like Princess Di or Steve Irwin, the Crocodile Hunter. And sometimes a death affects us just because we can somehow relate, through some connection. That's what happened to me when I read about the death of Mark Fyvie. He died on March 10, 2008 inside the Ginnie Springs cave system in Florida.

Running the scubadiverinfo.com site, I get almost every diving-related accident notice via Google news. I don't post them but file them away. It makes no sense to highlight just the danger and the bad things that can happen. Life is dangerous, even one's bathroom where most domestic fatalities occur. I don't see Better Homes & Gardens Magazine report on that very often. It's not necessary.

I first heard of this accident after Carol's certification trip to Ginnie Springs. A cave diver had died the week prior. He had been deep inside the cave system. There had been silting of the system as a result, it was said, and apparently the diver had gone in there by himself with experimental rebreather equipment. I looked it up on Google News and found just three references to it. Compared to the international coverage of the shark-related death during a shark feeding trip, that's a virtual news blackout. In fact, it was just the Gainesville Sun and the local High Springs Heralds that reported at all, or at least that is what Google picked up.

The reports were brief, but what caught my eye was that this was a diver from my native Switzerland. His name was Mark Fyvie, and the paper reported he'd been diving alone, entering the Ginnie Springs underground and underwater caves through the Devil's Eye entry just past noon. When he had not returned by 9pm, another diver by the name of Corey Mearns went looking for him, and Mark Fyvie was found 3,800 feet into the system. The IUCRR (International Underwater Cave Rescue and Recovery) non-profit posted a new thread on the cavediver.net forum entitled "Fatality beyond the Hinkel" in the afternoon of March 11. The report said the diver had used a side mount/no mount rig for passage through a suspected new lead. It was reported that an IUCRR recovery team brought out the body at 9AM on March 11.

I then searched through Tages Anzeiger, the big local newspaper in Zurich, Switzerland but did not find a mention. However, I quickly found Mark Fyvie's website and this is where everything became very emotional. Zurich is my hometown. I grew up there. Zurich Divers, which he started and ran, was Mark Fyvie's diving homebase. His personal site was not in German but in flawless English, which surprised me. I can usually tell translations from German into English, but his English was perfect.

I saw Mark's credentials. He'd been diving since 1993 and a diving instructor since 2000. He had almost a thousand dives to his name. He was a PADI IDC Staff Instructor, an Emergency First Response Instructor Trainer, a DSAT Tec Trimix Instructor, a DSAT Gas Blender Instructor, and an IANTD Technical Cave Instructor. He was also certified as a Closed Circuit Rebreather cave diver, Trimix diver, cave scooter diver, and specially trained on the Megalodon rebreather. So Mark was certainly no noob or amateur. A look at Mark's diving highlights is a trip around the world. He'd been diving and cave diving all over the place, with extensive cave diving, sometimes weeks at a time.

Mark reported on a two week dive trip to the Ginnie Springs area where they'd penetrated 3,800 feet, past the Hinkel restriction. In April of 2007 he did his Megalodon training with a true diving legend, Jill Heinerth of RebreatherPro.com, and Jill was highly complimentary of Mark both as a person and as a skillful diver. Mark himself, on his site, was completely aware of the pros and cons of rebreathers. "Some people who dive rebreathers think that once you buy one you must do every single dive with it." Mark wrote, "I don't agree at all. A CCR is a dangerous device that could kill you at any time, why take the risk of using one on a simple dive that could be done more safely with open circuit?"

Another entry from November 2007 describes a full month of cave diving with the Megalodon rebreather in the Americas. This is where he got his CCR Cave and CCR Trimix certifications and also descended down to 272 feet in Eagle's Nest. He was enthusiastic and wrote, "Now I realise what closed-circuit rebreathers are for - it's totally changed the way I can dive caves." He went on to say, "The bad part is finding a dive buddy for this kind of diving. Even in cave country it's tough and I had to do most of the dives alone. ... Now, feeling rather limited by the duration of my CO2 scrubber, I purchased a new radial scrubber, which should easily be able to handle durations of up to ten hours. I can't wait until my next trip in February."

Again I was surprised by the consistently high quality of his English, then found that Mark wasn't Swiss. He'd been born in South Africa, then had lived in New Zealand, Australia, England, Germany and finally Switzerland. He was truly an international citizen, always traveling and exploring new things and places. Switzerland was not going to be his final destination and even after having been away from my native country for over 30 years, I chuckled at Mark's comment that he yearned "for a place where he can shop on Sundays, take a shower after 10pm". It's true. Your neighbors may call the police if you take a shower after 10pm, shops are rarely open, bars close early and at least in my days, you had to register with the police if you moved from one neighborhood to another.

What made me cry was another part of his website. It was about his wedding. He had proposed to his sweetheart and they were going to get married on September 6th of 2008 in Venice. Mark had it all planned out, described every step. He had his whole life ahead of him. It is just so very sad.

At this point I was abundantly clear that this was not just another reckless diver who didn't know what he was doing. This was an extremely accomplished, very smart man who planned meticulously and left nothing to chance. I have done quite a few things in my life, have moved around, seen many different places, have had different careers, but nothing like Mark who was only 36 years old when he died. Looking at his many other interests, I saw that he'd been learning Japanese and wanted to live there someday, was enthusiastic about biodiesel in Australia, Pilates training in Switzerland, all on top of being a certified Cisco engineer.

But there was more. Mark also initiated a discussion forum for English speakers in Switzerland, the englishforum.ch. There was a need for that as Swiss German is as close to a legal secret code as it gets. Mark had commented that while "he was fluent in German, he was completely baffled by Swiss-German and unable to understand even more than a few words." That's because you cannot learn Swiss German. It is only a spoken language. So Mark created a place to help English speakers in the Swiss society. I know the software he used as I use it to run a large forum/community myself. His setup was, of course, completely up-to-date and nicely customized. An "In Memoriam: Mark Fyvie (1972-2008)" was posted on March 13. Within days it had over 300 replies and testimonies to what a great and wonderful person he'd been and how many he had helped. His work had touched people's lives. From all I read about him, I guess he just couldn't help helping others.

Jill Heinerth herself wrote a post and tribute to Mark, her student and friend. She said Mark was a "peer among a very elite group of the world's extremely accomplished and capable technical divers" and that "Mark contributed more to the cave diving community than can ever be measured." In a eulogy on her own website at rebreatherpro.com, Jill wrote "But the reality is that manipulating your own atmosphere for life support is the most dangerous thing you will ever do. Add to that advanced activities like cave diving and exploration and we are on the razor’s edge."

In the end, Mark's time was up, much too soon. In my reading I have often come across divers' frustration when a fatality is simply dismissed as drowning, leaving up to speculation what actually may have happened, and why. Sometimes it's obvious, often it is not. The Megalodon is a rugged, modular and highly regarded electronically-controlled closed circuit rebreather with redundant electronics and a HUD display made by InnerSpace Systems. Mark had indicated he had purchased a radial instead of the standard axial scrubber. The radial scrubber would be able to last as much as ten hours underwater. Inner Space says CisLunar scrubbers also work on the Megalodon and according to an evaluation of the Meg on spiralbound.net, others do as well, though only the CisLunar is mentioned as being radial. Whether or not that made Mark's unit experimental I don't know.

Now one is not supposed to dive solo, though I've read of many wreck divers who feel solo is actually safer under certain conditions where panic can easily result into two fatalities instead of one rescue. As is, my Cavern/Cave Diver Workbook by the National Association for Cave Diving says to "dive with a properly trained and equipped diving partner and maintain diving team continuity throughout the dive." However, that only seems to be a philosophy and not a requirement. As far as safe cave diving goes, "The NACD strongly advocates diving with a partner as the best approach to safe cave diving." Mark had already concluded that finding a suitable buddy for extended time diving was difficult and that he had to do most of his dives alone.

It is equally important to let others know one's dive plan in case something goes wrong. His dive plan was known as he was enthusiastic about his plans and wanted to share with his friends, and at least that aided in the recovery.

The rest is mystery. I'll likely never know what happened, exactly, and it is none of my business. I did not know Mark personally, but his story, so well documented, deeply touched me. May he rest in peace and his loved ones find some sort of solace, nearly impossible though that is.

Posted by conradb212 at 08:23 PM | Comments (0)

March 17, 2008

The Florida Springs

Carol took another flock of her students for certification to Ginnie Springs, Florida, and I was reminded how much I like those springs. And also how peculiar it is that a good deal of my diving experience to-date is in the springs of Florida and not some of the more exotic dive destinations like the Carribbeans. So while she was assessing the skills of her students I began searching the web for more information on the springs, and as usual, one thing led to another and before I knew it I had spent the entire weekend just reading about the various springs.

It's really an amazing thing, those Florida springs. I mean, when it comes to Florida, most people think of sandy beaches, the keys, spring break madness, alligators, swamps, and -- if they are old enough -- perhaps Miami Vice. They'd probably associate Florida with diving, but in the ocean and not inland and certainly not in some of the clearest, freshest water anywhere. But that is what you get in Florida's springs.

How did it all happen in what most people think is just swampland? Well, the northern part of Florida has a vast underground aquifer with several hundred springs. Together they discharge almost ten billion gallons of fresh water a day, with some of the larger ones contributing hundreds of millions of gallons to that total each day. It's all part of a giant storage system. The water originates as rainfall that then penetrates limestone where it is filtered and accumulates in fissures and holes. Combined with carbon dioxide and decaying plant matter, the water becomes mildly acidic and, over many thousands of years, enlarges cracks and holes and creates passages. What it all means is that there is a vast underground system of caverns and caves, many interconnected, in northern Florida and this is the source of all those springs.

The term "springs" is perhaps a bit inadequate because the vast freshwater resources contained in the Floridian limestone system creates all sorts of natural wonders. There are, of course, springs, and they often come right out of the ground. Somehow I associate springs and rivers as something that originates higher up, in the mountains, and then makes its way towards the sea. But Florida's springs come from underground. When you dive, you often see holes at the bottom, with water pushing out of them. Sometimes it's just little boils in the sand. You see them in the clear water, see individual grains of sand twirling around, and feel the flow when you put your hand on them.

But all that water also created grand caverns, nearly endless caves, and also many sinkholes. When we think of sinkholes we generally think of the evening news reporting on a hole in the ground that all of a sudden opened up, collapsing a road or swallowing a home. Those sort of things are usually blamed on human transgressions such as draining or over-using the watertable. However, sinkholes also happen naturally when water slowly eats away at limestone until a ceiling collapses and forms an open entry into the underground spring system.

A good explanation of all this can be found on the "The Journey of Water" webpage of the Florida Department of Environmental Protection.

What does all this mean to divers? It means that Florida has perhaps some of the best diving in the world, and it is in places where you'd never expect it. Instead of sandy beaches, tropical islands, and dive boats, Florida diving seems all shallow rivers and small ponds, some of which covered in duck weed and hard to spot. Once inside, the water is usually crystal clear. That's because it is not stagnant like in a lake, but constantly replaced by the vast volume of water from the underground springs. This phenomenon is exploited by a good number of popular parks and campgrounds located around those springs. People go there to swim and snorkel and just have a good time.

To me, this is what makes Florida's springs so fascinating. There is endless variety. To some people they offer an enjoyable get-away in one of the well-maintained parks with their lush, prehistoric-looking groves and clear, refreshing ponds. Some come to watch the Manatees which like to hang out in the springs. And some dive the caverns and the caves where things can get quite extreme. Manatee Springs state park, for example, both contains a friendly pond and the entrance to a vast underwater caves system that's testing the very limits of courage, skills and endurance in the exploration of many thousands of feet of labyrinthine cave.

During my online explorations I was reminded again of the thin line that separates harmless, enjoyable fun from entry into a deep twilight zone that's as challenging and dangerous as exploring outer space. When Carol and I last dove the Catfish Hotel sink in Manatee Springs state park, I both marveled at the dreamy underwater world that looked like right out of a Pixar movie and shivered knowing that the dark cavern at its bottom was the starting point of Sheck Exley's explorations into the black unknown of endless caves and also where just a few days prior a young man had died when the water had sucked him into the cave.

Ginnie Springs where Carol certified her class likewise has a bright and a dark side. The water in the small spring/pond area is gin-clear, as the location's name implies, but just yards away, underground, lies a massive cave system that has claimed many lives. None other than the great Sheck Exley almost died at Ginnie early in his cave diving career. And, as she later found out, a week before Carol's certification trip, a cave diver had perished deep inside the Ginnie system. Sometimes, a dark side lies just beneath the sunny, friendly surface, and most never even know it's there.

I was reminded yet again of the interesting role Florida's springs play when I found a website dedicated to Florida Springs with almost 50 trip reports and descriptions of springs, rivers and sinkholes in the state's northwest, north and central regions. The site offers an hourlong DVD, entitled "Florida Springs -- The Unexplored Florida" on a good dozen of the more interesting springs. I ordered it and it arrived just a couple of days later. Watching it was an experience. Not only did I see some of the places I had been to myself, but I was reminded again of the secret nature of those treasures. Even the state parks are mostly visited for picnics or swimming and not that many divers know about them.

I also realized once again how diverse the springs are. Some are popular and easily accessible whereas others are virtually unknown or closed off to public access. Some are bright and friendly, others look dark and forbidding. In some you are not allowed to dive at all, in others you pay a fee at the park ranger's office, and some require special permission. According to the DVD, there are even some where you need to check in with the local sheriff and get permission there.

All of this made me want to go back. I'll most likely never dive a cave, will never see what Carol saw, but I may get my cavern certification and poke around some of the better known ones. I cannot wait.

Posted by conradb212 at 04:31 PM | Comments (0)

March 08, 2008

I feel like a total scuba failure

I feel like a total scuba failure. I really do. It's been since last August that I was diving, a couple of pool sessions not included. I really feel awful about that. In a few short months it'll be two years since I got certified and all I have to show for it is about 30 legitimate dives. And this website. How could I create this rather comprehensive website, write the equivalent of a book into this blog, and only have 30 dives to my name? I am not a slacker or procrastinator. How could this happen?

I think of all the excuses I could have for not going diving. I have no dive buddy here. Work doesn't leave me enough time to go diving. Diving trips cost a lot of money. It's cumbersome to get all my dive gear together. There's no place close-by where I can go diving. The small class of people I go certified never stayed in contact. I wasn't ready for a wreck dive in the ocean when my local dive shop invited me to go. I couldn't leave my 11-year-old son on the shore when I was all ready to participate in a salvage operation organized by a local group of divers. And so on, and so on

But those excuses don't really wash. I may not have a regular dive buddy here, but others have overcome this obstacle. I even do the diving website for a local group of divers who regularly invite me to come to their meetings and go on their trips (I never do). My work really isn't a problem. I run a suite of websites and can do most of my work from anywhere as long as I have a computer and internet access. And finding someone to look after my cat really shouldn't keep me from going on a trip. Yes, dive trips can be quite expensive, but it's not that bad. I could afford one or two year. Yes, I don't live by the beach on a tropical island where I can go dive anytime, but Lake Tahoe is closeby and so is the Northern California coast. And if the four people in my dive class didn't respond to my emails, hey, they are not the only people to go dive with. And my gear, well, it's really all neatly packed in my dive bag. It's a lot of stuff, but I do know where it all is, and I keep it all properly maintained.

So it gets back to the same thing: how can I be enthusiastic enough about diving to get certified, do my advanced class, take the Nitrox class, read enough books about diving to -- in theory -- become an expert, do all the research to do this website, and still not go dive on a regular basis?

It's not that I don't want to. I absolutely cherish the memories I have from my few dives. I think of my first night dive and how spooky that was. I think of snorkeling with the Manatees. I think of diving underneath all that duckweed at Catfish Sink to see a magical world and take a picture looking up from the bottom, exactly where the great Sheck Exley once took a picture. I think of testing all those underwater cameras. And I think of locating Rubicon wall in Lake Tahoe and then descend to 110 feet in 48 degree water. I think about the five minutes of fear and uneasiness I always have before I go under (less so in my most recent dives). And I think of the thousands of pages I read about scuba, then summarized in book reports for this website, and how I resolved to experience some of what I read firsthand.

Yet, here I am with my 30 dives. Fact is, I never did actively seek a local dive buddy. Maybe I am the kind of person who needs a kick in the butt to do something. I don't see myself that way, but at least as far as Scuba goes, apparently I am. That bites. I hate it. Sometimes it seems like, for me, diving is like going to a party. I need a major push to go, but once I am there I really enjoy myself and resolve to accept invitations more often.

As is, I have no one to blame but myself for the measly 30 dives in my scuba log.

Posted by conradb212 at 03:36 PM | Comments (0)

February 15, 2008

The submersible Rinspeed sQuba car

Back in 1977, in the James Bond Movie "The Spy Who Loved Me," Roger Moore's agent 007 had a very special Series 1 Lotus Esprit that converted from a sports car to a submarine. The Lotus had propellers and rudders and even a battery of harpoon launchers to help Bond fight off the bad guys. The submarine Lotus was more than just a prop; it did go underwater and the rudder and propellers worked. However, it wasn't actually water-tight, and so a stuntman with Scuba gear operated it inside behind the dark glass. The picture to the right shows a scale model of the submersible Lotus.

Well, now there is a real diving Lotus. Rinspeed, a Swiss tuner and builder of exotic concept cars and other futuristic vehicles built the Rinspeed sQuba, a drivable, divable concept car that really works. Based on a Lotus Elise, the electric-powered sQuba is the brainchild of Rinspeed founder Frank M. Rinderknecht, who never forgot that submersible car from the James Bond movie. “For three decades I have tried to imagine how it might be possible to build a car that can fly under water. Now we have made this dream come true,” Rinderknecht said.

How did they do it? First, there had to be some practical thinking. For example, even though the Lotus Elise is a very small car (only about 150 inches long), the enclosed volume of about 70 cubic feet would have required adding 4,400 pounds of weight. The necessary ballast tanks would have made for a large, bulky vehicle that didn't look anything like a sleek sports car. So Rinspeed decided to build the sQuba as an open vehicle with its passengers using built-in scuba gear while underwater. The car floats on water, then sinks when the doors are opened and water enters the car. However, without passengers it surfaces on its own.

What all did Rinspeed do to make this possible? Well, they removed the combustion engine and replaced it with a variety of electrical motors. For operation on land, the main electric motor makes 73 horsepower and 118 foot-pounds of torque at 4500 rpm. Rinspeed estimates the top speed to be "over 75 mph," but given the weight (less than 2,000 pounds) and power it's probaby over 100 mph. Floating in water, the sQuba uses two propellers in the back, powered by an 800 Watt electric motor each, good for a speed of about four knots. Underwater, propulsion is via two electric 5-horsepower Seabob jet drives that breathe through rotating louvers and expell the water through light but twist-resistant Carbon "nano tubes." That gives the sQuba an underwater speed of about two knots. Power is supplied by rechargeable Lithium Ion batteries. Rinspeed states "the sQuba's filling station is the water reservoir,” referring to the electric hydropower the Swiss are experts in. Operating diving depth is around 33 feet.

When going under, the car's occupants use an integrated air supply system with two gas tanks -- one 15 liters, the other 18 liters -- and Scubapro regulators, specifically Scubapro's classic and very reliable air-balanced G250V second stage. The Scubapro gear and the tanks are mounted behind the passengers.

The sQuba is chuck full of interesting technology, and not only for underwater operation. On land, it uses a laser scanner system to essentially drive itself. For underwater operation, Rinspeed and its partners designed a cockpit and instruments that's inspired by the elegant shape and lines of a Manta Ray. Individual instruments seem to float and have dials that are lined up like lenses. The main control cluster is futuristically lighted and sits behind a protective sheet of glass with a fisheye effect. Controls can be operated even with diving gloves.

How real is the Rinspeed sQuba? Real enough for an impressive video of its operation on land, floating and diving. You can see the movie as well as pictures on Rinspeed's website. It works. But it's also a concept and not meant for production at all. For that, it'd need a more powerful motor, and the market for diving cars is likely very small. But none of that matters. Concepts are limited only by the imagination. "For three decades I have tried to imagine how it might be possible to build a car that can fly under water," said Frank Rinderknecht. "Now we have made this dream come true.” Very cool.

Posted by conradb212 at 12:37 AM | Comments (0)

January 17, 2008

The Dive Computer Blues

January is never a great time for divers unless, of course, you're lucky enough to have booked a dive trip to some sunny paradise, like I promised myself I'd do, but never got around to it. So it's cold outside and the last dive seems ever farther away and you don't know when you get to dive again. That's when you spend time reading dive magazines, go to scuba sites, or catch up on reading dive books. This morning I perused the latest issue of Alert Diver, the bimonhtly publication by DAN, the Divers Avert Network. It's a 64-page saddle-stitched production that makes up in good content what it lacks in commercial design and polish. I like reading it and learn something new every time.

What caught my eye this morning was an article entitled "Deep Calculations, Deep Trouble -- Exploring Safety in Dive Computers." This is a topic I am greatly interested in. I love computers in every shape or form and cannot imagine life without them. But dive computers are somehow different, and I don't feel anywhere near as at home with them as I do with any other computer, and that goes for the ones under the hood of cars and such. I trust my dive computer, and like everyone else, I think dive computers undoubtedly revolutionized diving and made it safer and more convenient. But there are dark sides.

The DAN article, written by Rick Layton, reported on the results of a recent Scuba STAR Network safety survey that investigated how scuba divers use their dive computers, what they know about them, and what experiences they've had with them. The survey didn't have a huge sample, just 42 divers, and may or may not be statistically significant. However, the results are pretty much what I expected, and they are alarming.

The survey said that only 10% of the divers actually learned to use their dive computer with an instructor or in a class. The vast majority simply used the manual that came with the computer, if anything at all. A oood half felt that the training materials were lacking and too complicated or disorganized. The survey also showed that divers are unhappy about the almost total lack of dive computer training in formal scuba classes. They suggested at least a review of all the common features, advantages, disadvantages and problems associated with different types of computers.

An appalling 60% of the respondents reported problems with their dive computer. Many felt screens were unreadable. Others reported blank screens, erroneous data, frozen computers, loss of some functionality, battery problems, and so on. Some computer failed to register depth, failed to display desaturation time, reset themselves, stopped displaying remaining air, or had inadequate rapid ascent warnings. As a result, almost 2/3rd of the respondents said they take along dive tables, and almost a third carries a spare computer.

That is certainly no vote of confidence. And I could definitely relate. Although my own dive computer has worked flawlessly for the year and a half that I have had it, I consider it far from perfect. Its user interface is virtually impossible to figure out. So much so that I have essentially given up trying to understand all the many features it has. I gave the manual several serious tries, but it is so poorly written and organized that I simply cannot figure it out and always give up in frustration. Too bad that there is not a large enough market to warrant a separate "Idiot" book for dive computers. That I understand. But why the manufacturer of my dive computer cannot have a tech writer overhaul their atrocious manual is beyond me. I mean, it could save lives.

The same issue of Alert Diver had another article on dive computers. It was entitled "Living with Dive Computers" and written by Dr. Neal W. Pollock. Dr. Pollock, a research physiologist at the Center for Hyperbaric Medicine and Environmental Physiology at the Duke University Medical Center, listed the various advantages of a dive computer, but also the many things it cannot do, or cannot do yet. However, he starts out saying, "You should know not only which buttons to push to make your computer work, but which mathematical model or model derivation it employs for decompression computation."

I agree, of course, that divers should know which buttons to push, and it's really, really sad that I, who consider myself somewhat of a computer expert, do not know which buttons to push to properly use my dive computer. Heck, I can barely see half the tiny little numbers and symbols on its tiny little low-contrast LCD. But now I am even supposed to know which mathematical model it employs for decompression calculations and, presumably, what that means to me?? Though I have a doctoral degree myself, and in a technical discipline, I don't think that expectation is remotely realistic. And if it isn't for someone like me who always wants to know how things work, I think there are others who may struggle with the concept.

But let's say it'd indeed be prudent to a) learn what buttons to push, and b) know the mathematical models that are used in dive computers. What would that mean? I'd say even the former is nearly impossible. Virtually every dive computer is different. I've seen more than one Scuba instructor unable to explain the operation of a student's Dive computer, and those were good instructors. Dive computers do not have a common interface, like Microsoft Windows or the Mac OS, or eve common controls, like computers have a mouse or a touchpad. So instructors may begin spending as much on dive computer basics as they do on dive tables.

Then they may have to get into the difference between table-based computers and model-based computers. Table-based is simple; the computer just uses the dive tables and quickly calculates all you need to know. But most dive computers are model-based, i.e. they make all sorts of assumptions. The oldest and most traditional model uses the Haldane models, named after the Scottish scientist who developed the theories and tables for the British Royal Navy. Haldane tables and concepts still form the basis for most die tables and dive computers, but there are many others as well.

What this means is that a diver would have to know not only about the Haldane theories, but also about statistical models, variable permeability models, reduced gradiant bubble models, slab models, Series models, and EL (exponential/linear) models. Add to that the various proprietary models, hybrids and assorted secret sauces manufacturers use in their computers, and the likelihood that many divers know what mathematical model their dive computer uses and what that entails is essentially nil.

Can we hope for standardization? Probably not. Will there be ongoing research that in conjunction with advancing technology will result in ever more sophisticated dive computers? Definitely.

Posted by conradb212 at 10:47 PM | Comments (0)