Today I got a little present at work in the form of two UPS boxes from California Digital Diving – our Aquatica housing and it’s various accessories have arrived! One box held the housing and the handles. The other (much larger) box contained the dome port, port shade/protector, strobe, sync cord, strobe arms, and various replacement parts, screws, etc.

Unfortunately, what none of the boxes contained was a readable manual. The Aquatica housing came with a very polite note from Aquatica saying that they had not yet printed the manuals, but if I send in the warranty card they’ll send me one when they’re available. The strobe manual was only in Japanese. I was able to figure some things out from the pictures, but I’m not sure enough of anything to risk dunking it in water just yet:

Other than inserting batteries and setting off a few test flashes, I didn’t try to do anything to the strobe. It has various exposed connectors that I imagine need to have things plugged into them before you get it wet. I do like that it makes a distinctive noise when it’s charging up, and has a light that switches from green to pale red to bright red depending on how charged it is. I tucked the strobe back into one of the boxes and started putting together the housing.

First, I attached the handles to the housing. Easy.

Then, I tackled the dome port and shade. This was a little trickier. The dome sits down on a ledge inside the shade, but it didn’t seem very secure, and had no obvious way to attach it. I did notice about a zillion teeny-tiny, headless screws that came as replacement parts with the shade. I looked closer at the shade and noticed it had similar screws set into its circumfernece in four spots – however, there were no matching holes in the plastic of the dome port base. I finally took a big hint from the tiny screwdriver (I forget what they’re called – the hexagonal-ended, L-shaped thingies) taped into the paper wrapping around the dome port, and just started screwing. The screws ate easily through the plastic at the base of the dome port, until they were halfway lodged in the dome port with the remaining half still in the shade. I shook it around a bit by the shade to make sure it was in there solidly, and it seemed to have worked.

To give it a “dry run,” so to speak, you’re supposed to fill it with paper towels (instead of an expensive camera) and soak the whole thing in the bathtub overnight. So I filled it up and snapped these pictures – the dome port does some funny things to the camera flash!

The whole contraption is now happily sitting in the bathtub – hopefully when I check it tomorrow morning, its innards will be nice and dry!

Today, we made our fourth successful Southern California beach dive – and they’ve all been in Laguna. I think I may have finally been convinced of the merits of beach diving (in Laguna anyway – you’re not going to drag me back to Leo Carillo or Old Marineland anytime soon!)

We hit Shaw’s Cove, in Crescent Bay (off Wave Dr, right next to Laguna Sea Sports). Shaw’s was actually the site of my first attempted beach dive back in November ’99 – the first place my scuba class went after the pool. It turned out to be a rather poor choice that day, with monster waves that kicked the bejeezus out of most of us just trying to go in for a skin dive. The instructor eventually called off the SCUBA portion of the day entirely, but not until I’d already been totally put off the idea of beach diving by my bad experience.

Turns out that when conditions are good, Shaw’s is in fact a very pleasant dive. The stairway down to the beach is a little bit longer than Diver’s Cove or Picnic Beach, but not nearly as bad as Marineland, Woods Cove, or a dozen others – in other words, we both found it pretty do-able. At the bottom, there’s a rocky point jutting directly out into the ocean from the right side of the beach; that’s what we planned to follow.

Not that we didn’t have a few hiccups on the way to the dive. First, there are no facilities at Shaw’s Cove, so I dragged poor Jeff on a mini-hike all the way over to Heisler Park for a bathroom stop. Then, I realized I’d forgotten my flat mask and snorkel, and would have to dive with my HydroOptix (not the end of the world, but I prefer to be able to see on the surface when doing beach dives). Then, I remembered that snorkels are mandatory in Laguna, and the lifeguards will turn you around if you don’t have one – so I walked up to the scuba store a few blocks away and rented a pink snorkel for the day. But wearing a snorkel always makes my HO mask leak – so I wound up borrowing Jeff’s old flat mask instead.

We finally suited up a little before 9am, and headed down to the beach. The surf was almost nonexistant; the occasional 1-2 footer just about reached my waist. Much better than the last time I was here! We made it in without incident, and descended near the rocky point.

We headed south until we came to the crack in the rocks known as “the crevice,” one of the main draws of this site. On a low-surf, low-surge day like today, it was easy to go swimming inside the crevice, through some rocky arches and swim-throughs. We saw lots of fish in there (mostly garibaldi), a huge pile of big lobsters hiding out in a crack, Proliferating Anemones (short pink/purple anemones with thin, short, tapered tentacles), chestnut cowries, and several partially-devoured spiny sea stars (by what, I can’t imagine).

Picture of the crevice from California Diving News:

In the middle of poking around in the crevice, we discovered our camera had been accidentally left on “Land mode,” so none of the pics were really coming out. Oh well!

After checking out the crevice, we continued south along the reef. Jeff spotted a sole in the sand, and an octopus curled up into a hole in the rocks. We also saw several obviously-new divers – Shaw’s is a popular place for classes. One guy was compulsively checking his gauges, and so completely unable to notice that I was pointing out a sole directly under him. Some others kicked up enough sand to reduce the 20+ visibility back down to 10-15 – still pretty good for a beach dive!

The biggest surprise to me was the temperature. On our last beach dive, at nearby Picnic Beach, we found it extremely cold at depth – low 50s! But today, it didn’t go below 66 degrees, even down around 40 feet. We were mostly up around 25, in 68 degree water. I could have done without the hood!

We’d definitely like to go back and check it out some more. Maybe we’re finally learning to love beach diving, which would definitely help save us some money! :)

Jeff and I just got back from a beautiful day of diving at Santa Barbara Island. We booked the trip on the Peace boat with California Digital Diving (owned by Ken and Rita Ashman). Ken was kind enough to round up a housing for our Canon digital rebel – apparently, it showed up at his place about an hour before he left for this trip, so it was a close call! We were hoping to check out the Ikelite, which is a bit cheaper, but Ken was only able to get the Aquatica (the main difference is that the Aquatica is metal, while the Ikelite is clear plastic). No complaints! He also loaned us a strobe, and gave us lots of tips and advice before sending us out to play.

We got off to a good start: the seas were surprisingly calm on the whole trip out. It takes about 5 hours to get from Ventura harbor to S.B. island, so the boat leaves at 2am while everyone’s asleep. Usually once the boat starts moving, I barely get any sleep; but this ride was so calm (and the bunks pretty comfy) that I slept straight through til morning.

We woke up at Santa Barbara to sunny skies, flat seas, no currents, and great visibility! Our first stop was at Black Cavern, where Jeff and I just puttered around a plateau in about 50 feet and played with the camera. Unfortunately, the strobe wasn’t working so well – but we did have fun playing with a sea lion who kept coming down to check us out. Back on the boat, Ken swapped out the strobe, and our second dive was in a fabulous kelp forest at a dive site called “The Notch.” Dive #3 was at one of the sea lion rookeries on the island, by Webster point. The visibility here was not so great, but Jeff had a good time trying to get decent pictures of sea lions!

Here are two of my favorites from the trip. Both were taken with the kit lens, which is basically a wide angle (though it can zoom to 50mm). The first is an island kelpfish, about 6 inches long; the second I like because you can get a sense of the kelp forest around the sea lion.

The rest of the pics are here: gallery.laityphoto.com/v/underwater/uw-20040906_santabarbara.

Well, not that lazy. Jeff and I rolled out of bed at the crack of 9:30 or so to pack up snacks and head to the beach – El Matador (in Malibu) with Michelle and Diana (both from IPAC). Michelle has frequently mentioned El Matador as her favorite beach, but I had never been there before. It’s a great place – several sandy coves seperated by rocky promontories, which are cut through by caves that you can wander through. On the hike down, we could see dolphins and sea lions playing in the kelp beds just offshore.

The surf was a bit high to do much swimming, but we did wander down and check out the sea caves. The tide had only been going out for a couple of hours, so it was still too high to risk dragging my camera along. Too bad; I’ll definitely have to go back sometime at low tide, because the caves were pretty cool. You have to scramble through one small one to make it to the second beach (which is often used by nude sunbathers during the week). The second one’s a bit easier to get through, and opens up into a large cavern. Depending on the time of year, it’s also a good place to spot anemones and starfish, a lot like nearby Leo Carillo.

No sea-cave photos, but I did snap this silly one of Michelle attacking a peach:

Tonight, my mom took a bunch of my friends out to dinner at my favorite lunch spot, South Lake Italian Kitchen (SLIK). The owner Donna is the main reason I keep coming back to this place; she’s spectacularly sociable and just a lot of fun to hang around with. We met up with Jeff, Ben, Kathy, A2, Michelle and Marianne, and posed for this rather unattractive picture of the lot of us:

Afterwards, Mom, Jeff and I dropped by Michelle’s house for drinks and animal watching. Tonight – in addition to her two adorable cats – we also spotted many orb spiders spinning webs, and one skunk who came up to the stairs to see if the cat food was accessible. Combined with yesterday’s raccoon sightings, I’m feeling like quite the wilderness girl this week.

Walking back from dinner at Far Niente tonight (thanks, Mom!), Jeff and I were distracted at the corner of Kenwood and California by the sound of something scrambling up a tree. Drawing a little closer, we could see it was a pretty sizeable racoon just a few feet up the trunk, frozen in its climb to watch us. We stood still for a while, and after looking at us for a few moments it continued on up the tree.

Then I noticed another little racoon face peeking out of the storm drain near the tree – but as soon as she spotted us, she dashed back into the drain (we were clearly visible in the light from a street lamp). After a few more such false starts, we walked on past the tree and stood still in the shadows until she felt brave enough to leave the storm drain. She paused next to the curb and called up to the one already in the tree – kind of a cross between a bird’s trill and a purr. Actually, it really reminded me of the noise made by the little venom-spitting dinosaur that kills Dennis Nedry in Jurassic Park. But cuter. He called back down to her, and she made her way up the tree to join him.

Very cute.

Last Tuesday, I visited my server (it lives in a friend’s office) to remove a DVD writer from it. The idea was to install that DVD burner at home, so I could start backing up all my photos; since I don’t normally have physical access to my server, I handle its backups over the network. Before heading up to perform the server surgery, I backed up my web site and gallery, something I’d been meaning to do for a while (I did not, however, back up the system disk, which houses Sarah’s website and the database).

DVD drive removal went fine. But when I hit the power button again, I got the dreaded error message:

BOOT DRIVE FAILURE

Hmm. Ben and I were both rather stumped, since the drives had both been working just fine 30 seconds ago. We tried again, with the same result. We tried switching the drives – no luck. We tried hooking them up one at a time to Ben’s computer, but it couldn’t see EITHER of them. Now I was really starting to panic; what were the odds that both of my hard drives died at once?

I took them home that night and continued trying to revive them. Linux rescue mode was no good (it claimed it couldn’t find any linux partitions on either disk), and I couldn’t bring either of them up on another computer, either.

After a while, the drive that houses my website (let’s call it “Fred”) started making a really terrible noise when it started up – kind of a “TICK-tock-TICK-tock-PING,” over and over until it gave out. Ok, I told myself, Fred’s clearly dead – but surely drive #2 (we’ll call it “Bob”) couldn’t also be completely ruined.

I set Fred aside and continued to attempt to rescue Bob. I had Bob set up as a slave on the primary IDE controller, with a perfectly good boot disk as the master. I hit the power button, heard a loud POP – and Bob began to smoke!

Being the calm, collected person that I am, I immediately jumped back about 5 feet and yelled for Jeff, who simply yanked the power cord out of the back of the server.

So, that was it – everything was lost – except, thankfully, for my website/gallery which I’d just backed up that morning! Jeff made a late-night Fry’s run for a new hard drive while I prepared to re-install the system and restore as much as possible from earlier backups (the last one was in January) and Netscape caches. I spent the rest of the week rebuilding thelaitys.com, and finally got it hooked back up in Ben’s office this afternoon.

Bob’s innards:

 

Makes a pretty good mirror:

Bob was actually rather an old drive, which had passed through several hands (and computers) before landing in my server. Our best guess is that Bob had been overheating for a while now, and damaged something crucial – and since it was sitting right on top of Fred, the heat may have gotten to Fred too. I guess they were both just barely hanging in there, and the power-down/power-up finished them off. As to what finally made Bob CATCH FIRE, I have absolutely no idea – but the new drive has been running just fine in there without incident, so I think I’m willing to believe that the root of the problem was the drive, and not the power supply in the server. (If I’m wrong, I hope Ben’s office has good smoke detectors!)

It’s going to take a little while before everything is back to normal; I need to re-enter all my dive logs, and Sarah has a lot of restoration to do for alphasarah.com. But GOOD GRIEF, have I learned my lesson about backups! (And about the wisdom of just backing up from one drive to another, as I often do on my home PC, since surely BOTH drives would never fail at the same time…)