It turns out that a 14-hour flight with Qantas is a lot like wasting an entire day lying around on your couch watching movies. Except that an airplane seat isn’t nearly as comfortable as your couch.

Two movies, two meals, many snacks, and six episodes of Buffy (watched on our laptops) later, we arrived in Sydney shortly before midnight on Sunday. After collecting our gazillion pounds of luggage and waiting in several different lines, we emerged into a Sydney summer night: humid, but cool and breezy. We managed to flag down a cab with enough trunk space for all our dive and camera gear, and headed towards our hotel.

We were both immediately struck by all the large, expensive-looking billboards. For some reason, I imagined Australia (even Sydney) would be LESS commercial than the US. But the density and size of these things dwarfed any signage in Los Angeles; all the sleek billboards lining the sharp curves in the road actually reminded us of playing the game Grand Theft Auto.

Driving on the left side of the road wasn’t too weird – but having the driver be on the right side of the car WAS. Go figure.

After a (fairly) good night’s sleep at the Darling Harbour Holiday Inn, we nabbed a city map from the concierge and headed out to explore the area. Our first stop was a 20 minute walk northeast to Sydney Tower, in hopes of getting some pretty aerial views of the city. $15 buys you the right to stand inside a glassed-in observatory and look at the city. It was very pretty. Kind of hard to photograph in the stark morning light, though. We got bored quickly, and headed on towards the opera house.

We killed time waiting for the next Opera House tour by wandering around outside, photographing the House and some random birds (ibis) in the nearby park. You know, trying to get as sweaty and smelly as possible. (Did I mention the cloudless sky and 90 degree temperatures? Thank goodness for the breeze.)

The Opera House was pretty impressive, both inside and out, but the only real highlight of the tour for me was stepping inside the main concert hall to watch the Sydney Symphony practicing for a few minutes. The acoustics really were something else in there.

We opted to cross the harbor and check out Taronga Zoo for the afternoon. The ferry terminal is just a short walk from the Opera House, and then it was just a 10 minute ride across to Taronga’s little aerial cable cars that zip you up to the top of the zoo.

Of course our first stop, once we learned of it, had to be at the giraffe enclosure to get a picture of us feeding carrots to the creatures. Jeff was alarmingly uninterested in feeding giraffes, but videotaped me getting slobbered on and then joined me for a very un-flattering (if accurate) posed photo.

After that, we mostly wandered around aimlessly. We caught part of a seal show, which included quite a performance by a California sea lion. It was nice to see one of our “buddies” up there, but a little sad to see him doing such undignified things as balancing a ball on his nose. (Also, the trainer referred to him constantly as a “seal”, which is a big enough pet peeve of mine that my head just about exploded).

Across from the show was a series of tanks for the zoo’s seals and sea lions, which housed an enormous leopard seal. You know, the ones that cruise around Antarctica eating penguins? It was a beautiful creature, although I was disappointed we didn’t get a look at its gaping jaws.

The two saltwater crocodiles did put on a bit of a show. One was in the back of the enclosure, perfectly still but with its mouth wide open. The other was crammed up against the glass at the very front of the enclosure, where you could get within an inch of it (or however thick the glass is). He was snoozing in the sun with his eyes closed – mostly. Jeff got a bit of a scare when he looked up from taking a picture into a pair of now-wide-open crocodile eyes.

After all the walking we did on Monday, we decided to make Tuesday more of a sitting-around kind of day. We found a pair of hop-on/hop-off bus services, Sydney and Bondi Explorers, that make loops through the city and outlying beaches. We boarded right across the street from our hotel, and made a loop through the western part of the city before switching over to the Bondi Explorer to go find some beaches to lie around on.

The traffic in the city was pretty nightmarish, and we soon discovered why: the Queen Mary 2 was docked in Sydney for a couple of days, and would be joined tonight by the QE2. Apparently it was quite an event, and besides all the cruise ship tourists flooding the city, plenty of locals were driving in to check out the boats. I have to admit, the Queen Mary was impressive – the darn thing just goes up and up and UP.

We hopped off the bus at the stop we figured was closest to Shark Bay in Nielsen Park, and quickly discovered that it wasn’t, really. After a bit of a hot, sweaty hike through an upscale residential district (covered with enormous spiderwebs and matching spiders), we finally found the entrance to Nielsen Park, at least. We just kept following whatever road we were on, until at last we discovered what apparently only USED to be called Shark Bay. It’s a pretty little cove with cliffs at either end, shark nets to keep swimmers from getting munched, a lovely view of the harbor, and no surf to speak of. And, thank goodness, a shop that sold water. We were pretty dried out by this point.

I went for a quick swim, and then we decided to go find the next “hop-on” point for the bus. With a little help from various locals, we managed to find it after only a 10 minute walk. Guess we should have gotten OFF at that one.

I was just starting to feel cool and hydrated again when we hit our next stop: Bondi Beach. We nabbed lunch on the boardwalk, and then headed over to work on our tans and bodysurfing. The waves were just big enough to be fun without being too scary; the water, though shockingly cold at first, was comfortable once you started leaping and ducking under and over the waves! And if you got cold, it didn’t take long to warm up again lying out on the hot sand.

Several hours and a good case of sunburn later, we caught the bus again back into town. We didn’t want to spend another hour and a half on the Sydney Explorer part of the loop, even though it would drop us off back at the hotel, so instead we jumped off at the Bondi Explorer stop that was closest to our hotel – still a 20 minute walk, a little more since my sweaty, rubbing-together thighs were totally killing me by this time! Always reason #1 on my list for losing weight…

Our tour bus driver had mentioned that there would be fireworks that night over the opera house, to celebrate the two cruise ships being in town together, so we decided to brave the crowds and head back into Circular Quay for dinner. We found a restaurant close to the harbor bridge that was only MOSTLY booked, but still had room for us. Our leisurely (and delicious) dinner was broken up by occasional trips outside to watch and photograph the arrival of the Queen Elizabeth 2 into Circular Quay, with an escort of fire boats (spraying water), police boats, and about a dozen helicopters. We polished off dessert and paid our bill just in time to join the crowd outside to watch fireworks.

I’m not normally a big fireworks person, but I have to say: soundtrack-free Sydney fireworks over the Opera House are something else. The fireworks themselves were impressive and diverse, but I think the backdrop was a big part of the experience. It was only a five or ten minute show, but I enjoyed it more than any fireworks I’ve seen – and Jeff even got pictures!

We sneaked out the backside of the quay and up a hill back into the Rocks district in hopes of catching a cab away from all the crowds, and – luckily for my poor legs – succeeded. And so ended our Sydney visit – the next morning we were off to Cairns for the diving portion of the trip!

Last Sunday, we took the Great Escape out to Santa Barbara Island. We boarded the night before, sharing a stateroom with our buddy Bonnie – which made for a “slumber party” atmosphere (poor Jeff). The boat left the dock around 1am, and we slept sort of fitfully as we made our way across the swells.

Half the time when you sign up to go to SBI, you wake up at Catalina because the conditions were too rough to make it. So I was both excited and annoyed when the divemasters pounded on our stateroom door at 6:30am yelling that we had 30 minutes to get in the water. Yay, we’re at Santa Barbara… but 30 minutes? Rushing into the water? Barely awake divers? That could definitely be a recipe for disaster.

The boat being only half-full (Suberbowl Sunday kept a lot of folks away) meant there was plenty of room on the dive deck, which made the rush to get wet a bit easier. Groups of sea lions frolicking around the boat helped speed us on, too! Our threesome plopped into the water by 7am, and we dropped down to a sandy area between ridges to wait and see who would show up to play. I was borrowing Lars’s hi-def camera again, this time with his Ikelite housing so I had full access to all controls, and a removable red filter.

I was quite happy to be doing a dive that basically entailed sitting still and letting things come to you, since the new camera was plenty of task loading already. Diving in a threesome is hard enough; diving in a threesome and covering ground makes for lots of lost buddy situations.

The visibility was amazing, and the heavy sand out at Santa Barbara Island meant that even if you (or the sea lions) kicked it up a bit, it settled quickly without mucking up the vis. I’ve never seen such a good combination of cooperative pinnipeds and clear water. Everyone had a good enough time at the first dive site that we stayed put for dive #2, dropping back in the water around 9am.

For dive #2, we camped out in the sand next to the edge of the kelp forest, and watched sea lions scare away schools of senorita. But out in the sand was where the sea lions really liked to play, both with each other and with us. We wound up forming a wide circle with each other, everyone getting photos of sea lions pestering everyone else.

This dive was also when we saw the largest number of juveniles. There is just nothing cuter than a baby sea lion, with their big puppy eyes and enormous whiskers.

When we surfaced, we realized we’d drifted a bit with the current. Normally, surface swims pretty much suck – but they’re a lot more fun when you have an escort of sea lions the whole way back!

We moved over to another site for our last dive of the day, but the sea lions still didn’t desert us. This was my 300th dive, as shown in my previous post, and a pretty pleasant way to spend it. Although I did have an embarrassing incident where my fin strap came undone – and at my current weight, my drysuit is so tight at the hips that I can’t bend over properly to put it back on! Jeff had to do it for me.

Everyone was out of the water by noon, and the boat started back to shore while the cook served lunch. I talked to some friends the next day who were supposed to go out to SBI on another boat, but bailed when they learned the plan was to just cram in 3 dives at one site for nothing but sea lions. It’s true that sometimes that can really suck – if the vis is poor, or the sea lions don’t show, those sites can be mighty boring. But we really had a great time, even just doing 3 almost-identical dives.

How can you not have fun with these guys?

More pics at the Santa Barbara gallery – and I’ll put together a video soon!

Saturday night, we met up with Bonnie and Mike at Vets Park to look for mating squid. They usually run just before or after a full moon, but we got reports as early as last Wednesday that they were out in force, a week early. Since I missed out on the squid run last month (Jeff made it, but I sissied out on the surf), I was determined to get in the water this time. With a video camera.

Bonnie beat us there, and called to let me know that she was looking at the “tiniest little waves,” which really made my day. Turns out her idea of “tiniest little waves” is maybe a smidge different than mine, but they were certainly do-able. The lulls were knee-high, with the occasional set of waist-high waves. Every now and then, a chest-high wave would come through, but they looked pretty low power.

So we piled down the stairs and headed in, Jeff toting his monster camera rig, and me clinging to my smaller video housing. I’d only made one surf entry with it before, and that was when the conditions were similar to a lake. I got a little nervous as we approached the water, but that’s not particularly unusual for me.

Since my hands were occupied with the camera, I went for a fins-on entry so I wouldn’t have to juggle them. If I had timed it slightly better, like Bonnie and Mike did, this would have worked out perfectly: when you get knocked down, you just start swimming. Pathetically, I got knocked down by a couple of 2-footers when I wasn’t even to knee-deep water yet. The bottom was full of ups and downs, so there was no getting past the surf zone by swimming – especially not trying to keep the camera out of the sand. I flailed in the surf for a few minutes, waffling over how hard to try to crawl forward, before finally deciding to back out and try again.

And I’m really glad I did. My second attempt went much more smoothly – I didn’t fall over til I was in water deep enough to start swimming, and hit a nice long lull besides. We kicked out to join Bonnie and Mike, and then descended in separate buddy groups to look for squid.

When we hit 70 feet, we started bumping into rug-sized patches of squid eggs. A few dead squid rolled around on the sand, and every now and then a handful of live ones would cluster around the eggs. Females carried new egg pouches to deposit, and fended off over-amorous males, who jumped anyone they could. A lot of them would approach the camera and check out the lights, pulsing red colors as they backed away from me.

One in particular really took a liking to Jeff, getting up close to his mask and investigating his camera.

The vis was only so-so to begin with, and that deep the bottom is super-silty and easy to stir into a brown haze even if you’re being careful (plus, the squid themselves kick up some sand in their digging around). So Jeff didn’t get as many good pictures as last month, but I did manage to capture a bit of squid action on camera! Click on the picture to see a :48 second quicktime movie:

Squid Run 1/27/07:

We also spotted a pipefish, bat ray, thornback ray, and hundreds of shy, half-buried sand crabs. The only bummer was how little time we were able to spend in the squid zone; when you’re at 70-90 fsw, you suck down air (and soak up nitrogen) awfully quickly, and after 20 minutes it was very much time to leave. It was hard to keep moving upslope when there was constantly something we wanted to stop and photograph, but as my air edged under 800psi it got easier to keep moving! We surfaced after a safety stop with just a little under 500psi left, and I made a textbook exit standing up. It’s always nice to end the dive NOT covered in sand from crawling out on your knees.

For the last 3 years, we’ve gone out on a 3-day trip with Truth Aquatics, and had fantastic conditions every time, with at least 2 whole days spent at San Miguel.

This was not one of those years.

The lovely swell rolling in from the northwest meant we had a hard time finding dive sites. I have to give major kudos to the captain and crew for effort, but sadly we spent a lot of time cruising around looking for spots with diveable current/surge, so didn’t get in as many dives as in previous years.

We did make it to San Miguel on Friday, which I didn’t expect after seeing those swell models. I was happy to get to spend a day with all the sea lions out there. I love pulling up to the first dive site at San Miguel, and seeing all the sea lions leaping out of the water and racing towards the boat. We dived Cooke Point, Tyler Bight and Wycoff Ledge, and had no shortage of pinnipeds.

Play with me!!

We also had no shortage of surge. The swell on the surface didn’t seem all that bad except for the occasional big roller coming through. But the long wavelength meant those big rollers were REALLY INTERESTING underwater! The first one that hit us took me completely by surprise. We were in about 50 feet of water, in fairly thick kelp and nice vis. All of a sudden I saw the kelp in front of me start whipping around like it was in a washing machine, and then BLAMMO! I went flying backwards in the turbulence; it felt quite a lot like getting caught in a breaking wave on a beach dive! I quickly learned how to hang onto a stalk of bull kelp and “tarzan” my way along to avoid getting slammed into rocks and urchins. One time I had a good hold, but Jeff went flying, and wound up a good 40 feet away. Forty foot surge. That was a unique experience.

That was the worst surge we had all weekend, but the occasional 10’+ surge wasn’t unusual at all the rest of our dive sites!

A rare non-surgy moment:

Still, I had fun. We were on a limited load trip with a bunch of photographers, so there was plenty of room for everyone’s enormous camera rigs. I think I even got some fun footage of the effects of the surge – though it may make me seasick to watch it!

Critter highlights of the trip: a school of what I think were kelp pipefish, high density of rainbow surfperch at Coches Priestos, a cormorant underwater, several super-juvenile sheephead that weren’t too camera-shy, nudis by the dozen, courting snubnose sculpins, enormous abalone, and lots of chestnut cowries.

Juvie sheephead, feeling safe in his gorgonian:

My favorite dive site was actually the last one: 9 o’clock reef, off the east end of Santa Cruz. It’s not always diveable due to current, but when we anchored there it was pretty mild. We dropped down into 50′ vis and an absolutely BEAUTIFUL kelp forest: equal parts bull and giant kelp, with each enormous, healthy plant spaced about a foot away from the next. Absolutely gorgeous. However, the vis started to deteriorate and the surge picked up, which made the beautiful kelp forest a beautiful entanglement hazard – I’ve never had to untangle myself so many times on one dive! Then we couldn’t find the anchor line to go back up (turns out the wind changed and the boat pendulumed away), and surfaced to some serious wind chop and a long swim against-current to the boat. Well, it STARTED as my favorite dive!

The ride back was… bumpy. But again, not as bad as I’d feared from those swell models last week.

The rest of Jeff’s pics are here:

3 Days on the Conception

If any of my surge footage is watchable, I’ll try to put together a few clips for your enjoyment.

I should take every Wednesday off from work and go diving.

If there was a guarantee that every Wednesday would be like last Wednesday, I’d have a serious discusssion with my boss about such an arrangement!

What was originally a girls’ ditch day (Bonnie, Carol and myself) turned into a slightly larger group when we realized there weren’t enough folks signed up for the boat to go out (they need 10). Carol talked Ray into coming along, as well as two other Sole Searchers and a LAUPS member. I got Walt, one of my ADP instructors to join. And somehow another 8 or 10 folks joined up at the last minute, so we wound up with 16 divers; a very comfortable number for this boat (the Magician).

And conditions were stellar! We passed the breakwater at San Pedro, and you couldn’t tell the difference between water outside and inside – totally flat. The sky was clear and sunny, and the seas remained that flat (glassy, reflectively flat) all the way to Catalina, and all day long. We had no wind, very little current, and 50 foot visibility (or more) on all our dives. Amazing!

Bonnie and I buddied up for the day, and dropped down for our first dive at Blue Cavern. There is actually a cavern at 60 feet, but we opted to stay shallower since she hadn’t been diving in a while (and I never need to be convinced to do a shallow, long dive instead of a deep, short one).

It was a beautiful dive site, but we had an interesting little almost-incident. I was diving about 8 or 10 feet below Bonnie on a slope, when my fin got tangled in kelp. Since I’m not terribly agile when diving in a drysuit, I was having a little difficulty untangling myself. Bonnie noticed and started to come towards me to help – but her tank came loose from her BC.

Now, this was just silly. Either one of us could have fixed the other’s problem easily, if we weren’t having our own!

I wound up able to free myself just in time to see Bonnie heading for the surface – whoops. Anyway, no harm done – I held onto her camera while she headed over to the boat’s swim step for a quick fix, and we continued our dive. But what were the odds of us running into trouble at exactly the same moment? Just goes to show, even when you have a buddy, you have to be able to take care of yourself.

The second dive was at Sea Fan Grotto, a favorite site of mine for the walls of gorgonians. Sadly, we went the wrong way and didn’t see the actual grotto for which the site is named, but it was still gorgeous. Best of all, during our safety stop, we discovered a bunch of super-juvenile garibaldi. And they were NOT SHY. I actually got footage of one swimming at my camera again and again; I’ve never seen such friendly baby garibaldis!

Our last dive of the day was at Bird Rock, a fantastic site for walls, big boulder piles and swim-throughs. Bonnie and I had a relaxing dive, marvelling at the huge schools of baitfish that swirled around. This is one of those dives that’s infinitely more impressive with good visibility, which we certainly had today!

As if three beautiful dives weren’t enough, Captain Jerry put a call into Mother Nature and arranged for two blue whales to visit us on the ride home. Seriously. TWO BLUE WHALES, at least as big as the boat (60′). I managed to get video of a few water spouts and a fluke – it was an incredible encounter. Until I post the video, you’ll have to settle for this picture of a piece of whale:

Back at San Pedro harbor, we swung by where the Black Pearl (for Pirates of the Caribbean 3) is berthed for a peek at the pirate ship. Then we pulled into our slip, where Bobby the resident sea lion was hanging out. A fishing boat returned right next to us, and started offering fish to Bobby. They’d hold a big fish out over the rail, and this enormous bull sea lion LAUNCHED himself 3/4 of the way out of the water for it. He made some great noises, too, and showed us his teeth – impressive!

So tell me again why I ever go to work on Wednesdays?

My Saturday began in the pool, with tryouts for the ADP “Outstanding Graduate” award, which comes with a scholarship to the next LA County instructor program (UICC). The award depends on a lot of factors (academics, diving, overall attitude, etc), but the pool tryouts are definitely an important part. Basically, it’s a chance to try your hand at the skills you’ll have to be able to do really well in UICC.

I’m not sure if the tryouts were fun in a sucky way, or if they sucked in a fun way. There’s something about shared suffering that kept it from being actually unpleasant, but some of the tasks were pretty trying. Only seven of us showed up, including Meca – and she didn’t plan on trying for the scholarship, or even doing the scuba portion of the tryouts.

So our Saturday morning went like this:

Swimming Skills

• 400 yard swim in under 10 minutes. This may actually have been my best moment of the day; I came in at 8:08, behind only David (who plays underwater hockey regularly and is an amazing swimmer and freediver).
• 25 yard underwater swim, then carry a 10 pound weight belt up from the deep end. Extra points if you swim up without pushing off the bottom. I wasn’t worried about this once since I’ve been practicing 25 yard underwater swims, but it was harder than I expected. I guess my adrenaline was going because I was nervous about being judged; that’ll suck up your oxygen pretty quick. I was seriously considering giving up and trying again when I finally saw the weight belt 10 feet away. Well, I couldn’t quit then! I made it, with the bonus points.
• 10 minutes treading water, 30 seconds treading water with your arms up in the air. No problem. We passed the time sharing bad jokes. Meca and I discovered that we have the same favorite stupid joke (you know that one with elephants and sheep?) What were the odds?
• 50 yard buddy tow with no swim aids (ie, fins). No problemo.

Skin Skills

• Skin DNR (ditch and recovery) – I’ve discussed this before ad nauseam on this blog. It’s not my favorite thing in the world, especially when you add a 40 foot underwater swim after doffing your gear, and before donning it. I managed the doff plus swim, but the return the swim-plus-don was too much. Oh well; the 40 feet were for extra points, and I was able to do the DNR going straight down. But I think this is where I started to slip in the rankings!

SCUBA Skills

• Buddy breathe combo. Drop down in the deep end with a buddy. One person takes off their mask, the indicates they are out of air. The other person shares their primary regulator, and then the two swim together to the other end of the pool (50 yards), sharing air the whole way. My incredibly powerful, easily-freeflowing regulator makes this a bit of a pain, but the return trip (on my buddy’s regulator) was perfect.
• Bailout. Jump into the deep end holding all your gear (and the air turned off), and put it on underwater. I did this quite well, despite having very little weight on my weight belt, which makes it hard to stay down before you get the tank and BC on. However, I didn’t want any additional weight – and in fact, could have done with a lot less – because of the next skill.
• 300 yard surface snorkel. In full SCUBA gear. With no air in your BC. AND CARRYING A TEN POUND WEIGHT BELT THE WHOLE WAY. This just completely sucked for everyone. My tank is so ridiculously negative that I actually don’t need any additional weights to sink, so the 6 pounds I took for my belt in the bailout really hurt me here! You wind up swimming at a funny 45 degree angle to keep yourself afloat. We all did ok in the deep end of the pool, but 25 yards of the pool are only 3 feet deep. It’s impossible to get in good fin kicks there, so it was a real struggle to stay off the bottom, while keeping my head high enough that no water got in my snorkel. I did a lot more stopping and resting than I should have, and I think this skill hurt me the most. But seriously. IT SUCKED. I know I wasn’t the only one who started to have serious concerns about drowning.

So that was my morning. After lunch with the gang, I drove around with Meca to do a little shopping (small gifts for our team leaders and safety divers). The shopping didn’t take long, but there was quite a bit of driving involved since I also dropped her back off in Santa Monica. She lives just about spitting distance from where I used to work at the promenade, so it was actually kind of cool to see the neighborhood. And I didn’t actually mind the extra drive, as she and I are never short on things to talk about! If I get nothing else out of ADP, I made a great new friend who’s also a good dive buddy.

I made it home in time to wrap presents, shower and throw on clothes and makeup, along with my new cowrie necklace from Marineland.

Then it was off to the banquet, held at a swanky athletic club in downtown LA with banquet facilities.

It’s always weird to see people that you know from diving (hood hair, mucus on their faces, ratty sweatpants) all dressed up and pretty! the girls in particular clean up quite nicely. You can sort of see my cowrie in this picture:

To end any suspense, I didn’t win the scholarship. I’m pretty bummed, actually, even though I agree with the awards that were given out. Meca won Best Academics, and David took Best Watermanship – neither of those were a surprise (except to Meca, who looked genuinely shocked).

I’d suspected that the Outstanding Graduate would come down to Kelly and myself (and it sounds like that was the case). I was genuinely glad when he won, but at the same time, I have to admit I feel a little rejected. Ray reminded me I should be really proud that I was one of the top contenders for Outstanding Graduate, when I began the course afraid to even go in the water when the surf was up. I guess that is pretty impressive.

ADP 2006 Graduates:

Well, I have until January to decide about UICC. In the meantime, I guess I’d better practice my DNRs.

The night dive was a bit more eventful. We stuck with the same group as the afternoon dive, and a similar plan. We entered a bit further to the south, dropped down at about 15fsw, and kicked straight out to 35fsw: Meca and me in the lead, then Sam and Mike, with Kevin following behind. Once we hit 35fsw, we were going to turn north, spread out in a line of four abreast, and sweep for the pilings.

At 35fsw, I signaled Meca it was time to turn. Sam and Mike kept on swimming, and we flashed our lights at them to get their attention. They slowed down and finned over to us – at which point everything got chaotic. Sand got kicked up, we couldn’t get ourselves into position, and the next thing I knew we were at 45 fsw. How’d that happen?

I navigated out of the melee, re-oriented myself, and started kicking. We basically had to abandon the four-abreast idea – by the time we’d reached 35 fsw again, I was pretty sure we’d already missed the pilings, and in all that confusion it was just easier not to worry about it.

This time I knew about the current, and figured we’d have to do at least 400 kick cycles to reach home. The current was even stronger than we remembered, though, and made it hard to swim shallower as well as hard to swim north. We inched our way up to 30fsw, by which time Sam and Mike were at 500psi.

They indicated they were going to go up, and we communicated that it was ok to split into buddy teams. Meca and I would remain under with Kevin.

Mike and Sam headed off, and Kevin told us he wanted to lead the dive (I guess we weren’t getting shallow fast enough). He took off like a shot, while Meca tried to flash a light in front of him to get his attention and ask him to slow down. He finally noticed we girls weren’t hurrying, and let us catch back up.

We reached 20fsw and kept heading north, while Meca kept me apprised of her air situation – 1000 psi, 900, 800. She finally hit 500psi and indicated she wanted to go up. I tried to communicate that we should do at least another minute where we were (I was only halfway through a safety stop), but she again gave me the thumbs up. This is where things got confusing.

To me, thumbs up means UP. I’ve been in a situation before where I really wanted to ascend, and my dive buddy wasn’t ready – it’s not good. I knew Meca was nervous (this was her second night dive, and she’d kept a hand on my arm the whole time), so when she gave me a thumbs-up even after my “stay here 1 minute” suggestion, I decided half a safety stop wasn’t worth freaking out my dive buddy by trying to make her stay put when she was worried. So I gave her a thumbs-up back and got ready to ascend.

We flashed our lights at Kevin, who turned to look at us. We gave him a thumbs-up. The last thing we saw was him flashing his light in our eyes, which I took to mean “you guys are being silly, why not stay down here and finish that safety stop?”

We’d discussed buddy separation procedures before getting in the water. If you get separated, you look around for a minute and then surface, without a safety stop. So we figured he’d be right behind us, and then if he wanted to go back down on his own, fine (although I can’t say I’m a fan of solo night diving).

Well, he didn’t surface.

We waited a few minutes in case he was just safety stopping. And he still didn’t surface. We couldn’t see his light. We were drifting in the current. Meca started to worry that his flashing his light at us had been a signal that he needed help, rather than trying to get us to stay put.

Another group surfaced nearby and we alerted them that we’d lost Kevin. Ray dropped down to do a quick look for him, while Meca and I headed in towards shore. About halfway there, we saw a diver surfacing just behind the surf zone and exiting – probably Kevin, but we couldn’t be sure. Meca headed on in to confirm that it was him, yelled back to me, and I yelled back to the “search party.”

This was all extremely NOT fun in the afore-mentioned surface chop.

Anyway.

Kevin was fine. He didn’t agree with our decision to surface, and didn’t consider himself part of our buddy team, so he just decided to finish out the dive on his own. We had a rather heated discussion about buddy separation, solo diving, when it’s ok to skip safety stops, and how I could have better gotten his attention. Meca should have felt comfortable finishing a safety stop with 500psi. But she didn’t (or else I misunderstood a thumbs-up), so it was OK to go up. We’d done a relatively shallow dive, and a safety stop is just that – it’s not mandatory. I should have made sure Kevin knew what we were doing – he didn’t see my thumbs-up. I should have grabbed him and waited for him to sign back.

But once we headed up, I maintain that Kevin absolutely should have surfaced as well. Solo diving wasn’t part of the plan. If he was really worried about a safety stop, he could have surfaced, told us so, and gone back down for a few minutes – at least then we would have known where he was.

Yeah. That was a fun walk back to the car.

Anyway, it turns out our group actually had one of the LEAST eventful dives! I’ll share one of the other incidents:

Divemaster A was the safety diver for divers 1, 2 and 3. After they descended, Divemaster B decided to join them. In his mind, he was just following and observing; not really part of the team. But as far as A and 1-3 knew, he was officially part of the group. That was problem #1.

Problem #2 was miscommunication. Diver #1 kept going deeper and deeper in search of the pilings, and didn’t realize that it was ok with the Divemaster if he just gave up at certain point. The current didn’t help, and they all wound up around 70fsw, strung out because some were speedier than others.

Problem #3: diver #3 had a sudden freeflow (when air keeps coming out of your regulator). He kept trying to purge it, but it kept freeflowing. He remained calm – but problem #4: he couldn’t get anyone’s attention. He was flashing his light in front of Divemaster B, who was “just observing” – but diver 3 didn’t know that, so he didn’t try to race on to the other divers. After 5 minutes of being ignored, while the freeflow depleted his air supply (it also makes it really hard to see – bubbles everywhere), diver 3 decided to take his chances on a solo ascent. From 70fsw. In the dark. Where there can be boating traffic.

At this point, Divemaster A notices that diver 3 has disappeared. She writes his name on her slate with a question mark and shows it to the two remaining divers. They shrug and look confused. She turns around and shows it to Divemaster B. He misunderstands the question, and writes on his slate: “No, I’m so-and-so.”

I find this hysterically funny, though obviously it wasn’t funny at the time!

So – now they all do an ascent. In the dark, in boat traffic, from 70fsw. Yikes!

Anyway, everyone made it back ok. But it was definitely a lesson in the importance of communication, taking your time, and sticking together.

That, and it TOTALLY SUCKS to dive with more than 2 or 3 people at a time in limited visibility. It was true at Lake Castaic, and it’s true in the dark. Ugh.

It wasn’t the best way to finish off ADP, but at least it was educational. We left Vets around 11, grabbed dinner at a nearby diner, and I finally made it home at 1am. I didn’t even have the energy to shower, much less rinse my gear; I left it to marinate in the trunk of my car and just collapsed in bed.

Then it was up early Sunday for some last-minute cramming before our final (written) exam. Luckily for me, the exam was given at the Glendale YMCA, an easy 5-minute walk. I think all our classes should have been at the Y!

October 7 was our last scheduled day of diving with ADP. Instead of the usual early beach arrival, however, we started off the day with a tour of the Long Beach Aquarium of the Pacific. We began by strolling through the California exhibits with occasional commentary by Brett, an ADP instructor who also volunteers as a diver at AoP.

(Once again, pics by Walt Conklin.)

Next, we headed behind the scenes for a look at the inner working of the aquarium. We strolled past the food prep areas and vet clinic, got a tour of the ozone generation and various pieces of plumbing, and got to see where the divers suit up and jump in to clean the exhibits and feed their inhabitants.

Somehow, we still had time to play with fake coral. (This pic by Johnny Wong):

We were finished checking out the aquarium by noon or so, and had time to get lunch and fill any tanks that needed filling before meeting up at Vets Park at 2:30pm. The plan was to do an afternoon dive over by Topaz Jetty in search of the old pier pilings, then navigate back to the Pearl Street stairs underwater. Then we’d repeat the dive in the dark for our night dive.

It was a bit of a walk down to the jetty, but at least it’s flat and paved.

I buddied up with Meca, and we joined Mike and Sam to form a group. Kevin Van Hook was our divemaster, tasked with following us around. We knew roughly where the pilings were, and at what depth, so the plan was to drop down in 20 fsw and do a sweep out until we hit the pilings (which should be in about 35 fsw).

Of course, we hit 40 fsw and still hadn’t found the pilings. Since we suspected we’d dropped down a bit too far north, we headed back to the 35fsw contour and started sweeping south. It only took a few minutes to hit the pilings – oh, the excitement.

Then it was time to start heading north, back towards Pearl Street. I’d measured the distance in paces that we had to walk to our entry site, and estimated it should take about 250 kick cycles to get back to the stairs. I took the lead with Meca: she kept an eye on the compass, I concentrated on counting kicks and watching our depth.

On the way across the mostly-featureless sand, we found quite a few interesting critters. I spotted a sarcastic fringehead out on the sand – it was weird to see the little fish naked, without his shell to hide in. Meca found a little horn shark perfectly camoflouged in the sand, then noticed a shell next to it that housed a small octopus. A few minutes later, I saw what I thought might be a scorpionfish half-buried in the sand. As we got closer, I discovered it was actually a California lizardfish! I hadn’t seen one before, and didn’t get much of a chance to investigate, as it got startled and disappeared. Oh well.

I reached 250 kick cycles about the same time Sam and Mike ran low on air. We’d been in 15-20 fsw for a few minutes, so we all surfaced to get our bearings.

We were only about 2/3 of the way back. Doh. Guess we’d neglected to account for the south-flowing current that had kicked up.

Mike and Sam headed in, and the rest of us dropped back down and resumed kicking north. Meca hit 500psi after another 150 or so kick cycles, so we surfaced again to discover that we’d just barely overshot our mark. We let the current take us back a bit as we kicked in and made an unventful exit.

The surf was about 1-2 feet that day, with an 8s period – totally manageable, but it was interesting to realize how much more afraid I would have been getting in and out a few months ago. The entries didn’t bother me at all, but there was quite a bit of surface chop once you made it past the surf zone; that was a bit more annoying.

We all sat around in the parking lot for a while, reviewing the material for Sunday’s exam while we waited out our surface interval. Meca and I spent the last half hour of our interval huddled in my car with the heating cranked up, trying to get warm before getting back in the water.

At last, victory is mine. I have conquered my fears and entered over the rocks at Old Marineland.

I achieved a partial victory last month, when my group did a beach survey at Old Marineland. We went for the easy entry then, at the cobblestone cove, which is a pretty long swim from the “good” part of the dive site.

Last Sunday, our entire ADP class headed to Old Marineland for an entry over the rocks at the point where the best diving is. This is the entry that scared the heck out of me two years ago with the Sole Searchers, and it was still a bit off-putting. Wonder of wonders, I was no longer afraid of the dealing-with-surf part. But the hike down to the entry still made me nervous.

Here we are starting down towards the rocks. Doesn’t look too bad from this angle, right?

(Note: all Marineland pics by Walt Conklin)

Once you’re past the “easy” part of the climb, you have to get over lots of various-sized rocks. Some are slippery, and most are what we like to call “ankle-breakers.” Remember, you’re wearing a tank and a weight belt, so you’re not at your most agile.

Once you’re at the water’s edge, the trick is to get yourself in a spot where you’re protected by bigger rocks. We had two foot swells rolling in at pretty regular intervals, and some spots along the rocky shoreline would have been completely impossible to do safely. We picked a “staging area” behind several big rocks where we could take a moment to put on fins and mask. Here’s Ray helping us clamber over to the spot:

(That’s my head at the bottom of the pic, with the blue snorkel.)

So now you’re hunkered down behind a boulder, trying to put on your fins in between waves (which raise the water level 3 or 4 feet and will try to take your fins away with them). You need to carefully time your entry. If you start to swim out right before a wave, you’ll just get knocked back into the rocks. Even if you wait for what you think is a decent swell and then start kicking, if a BIGGER swell is up next, you might get knocked back. So you need to wait until the largest swells are past, and then pick a good one to ride out.

Check us out – we all made it in without incident!

Meca and I were buddies again on this dive (as usually happens when we’re allowed to pick our buddies), and we dropped down right away before she had a chance to get seasick.

I’d say Old Marineland lived up to the hype. The boulders by the point are so large they form a series of wall dives, and are covered with all kinds of life. We saw cabezon, black-and-yellow rockfish,four or five different nudibranchs, a red octopus hiding in a hole, several lobsters and hermit crabs, chestnut cowries, scallops, schools of unidentifiable baitfish – it was just a great place to poke around and find stuff.

The ADP plan was to navigate to the cove and surface there – quite a swim. Instead, we opted to spend as much time as possible in the interesting area, so we surfaced a good 200 yards away from the exit. No problem; the current was with us, and we moseyed over to the cobblestone cove after fifty minutes in the water.

For the first time, I brought something back with me from a dive. Right when we dropped down at the point, I practically landed on an empty chestnut cowrie shell. Having just recently learned that it’s legal to take them (even if they’re not empty, but that seems a bit mean), I pocketed it as a souvenir of my conquering Marineland. I’m thinking of turning it into a pendant.

Since I bailed on the camping part, I woke up early on Sunday (Sep 17) and made the 40-minute drive up to Lake Castaic. I found a cluster of tents that I assumed was ADP, but no one was moving around. A quick phone call to one of my fellow students revealed that I was in the firefighter’s camp (a staging area for the nearby Day Fire), and needed to drive a little further to reach ADPers, down at the water’s edge.

We started the day with a lecture from Dave Bunch on diving in zero visibility, knot tying, lift bags, etc; then we were split into groups of 4 and sent out to do 4 different tasks in the lake. For each task, a different one of us was the “group leader,” calling all the shots.

I’ll say upfront, that was the hardest part of the day – dealing with bossing each other around. I don’t think we were the only group that uncovered some interesting personality traits!

Somehow, though, we managed to succeed (or almost succeed) at our tasks.

Dive 1:

Three floats were set up in a triangle, with a transect line strung along two sides at about 12 feet. We were to head out to the first float, take a reading on the third float, then descend and follow the line from the first float over to the second and third, while measuring distance in kicks. The transect line ended at float 3, and we spent a few minutes doing some quickie math on our slates to estimate the fin kicks back to the first float – then we headed off in the appropriate compass direction.

And here is where we sucked. Four people in a line heading the same direction – it’s just really, really hard, even when you’re holding on to a buddy line. Perhaps especially when you’re holding on to a buddy line, because it’s easy for someone to pull the wrong direction and get you off track. One person is monitoring their compass and “leading,” but if people start going even slightly different speeds the leader can wind up no longer out in front. Bob, as one of the fastest swimmers, was the designated compass leader, but there was so much cross-talk between the four of us that we wound up going quite a bit off to one side.

Eventually the divemasters, who’d followed our bubbles, came down to tell us to give up – we surfaced about 20 feet away from our target. Not too far if you’re navigating in 20 foot visibility, but for zero-vis we were way off course. We had a second try and didn’t do any better. In fact, the navigating-in-a-line turned out to be the bane of our day: each drill started and ended with a navigation from the beach to the starting float (on snorkel, with your face in the water) and then back at the end (underwater). The only times we nailed our target were when we were allowed to split into buddy groups (2 people are easier to keep in line than 4).

Dive 2

The second station was a lift bag exercise. “Lift bag” is a slight misnomer here; we were actually dealing with big 50 gallon drums that were chained to sections of pipe, which weighed several hundred pounds. Four of these contraptions were set up on a platform at the bottom, and we took turns in buddy pairs lifting and re-sinking them.

Things that were hard about this task:

• Finding the damn things in the first place, in the 0-to-6-inch visibility
• Communicating with one’s buddy via buddy line
• Getting air into the drums through a tiny hole in the bottom
• Knowing when to get the heck out of the way as they shoot to the surface
• Getting them back down in an orderly fashion. (We didn’t – they dropped so fast we totally let go, and they landed across the other three and had to be re-adjusted. In zero vis.)

The easy part of this dive was navigating back to the shore, as we did it in pairs rather than all 4 at once.

Dive 3

This was our best dive – and ironically, we didn’t have much of a plan ahead of time. At this station, there were pieces of wood, saws and hammers, and staples. Our job was to create four “marker floats,” squares of wood with a staple hammered in that could be attached to a line later. We had a complicated plan for who would saw, who would hammer, who would get tools out of the bag, and who would hold onto things, but we wound up mixing it up a little when we hit the bottom, passing things off to each other as necessary. We did stick with the one-person-sawing idea, which worked really well. We had all four marker floats “built” in a matter of minutes, and navigated off towards our starting point.

Dive 4

I was so ready to be done by the time we got to the last station – and so were the divemasters in charge there. A sweep line was tied off to the dock, and we were supposed to run a search pattern from there to find where three mortars were lying on a platform. The DMs gave us the rather large hint that the sweep line was “just long enough,” saving us time inching out the line; we went straight to the mortars and got to work.

“Work” was measuring the mortars so we could later calculate volume and weight. One diver pulled rulers out of the bag and handed them off; one measured dimensions of the mortars; one wrote down the measurements. My job was to hold onto the sweep line (don’t laugh) to make sure we’d be able to get back to our starting point. We did, and this time navigated back to the shore dead-on for a change. I guess we’d gotten too tired to fight each other in the line…

After the Dives

I was one of the divers who headed out to collect the dive floats which had been marking off the area. I hit my own float first and hauled up the anchor – not too hard, since my anchor/chain assembly is fairly light, but it was a long way down. I pulled up a good 70 feet of line, which had to be spooled up as I went.

Then I decided to go for another float, since I was already out there. As soon as I started lifting, I wondered if I was making a big mistake – this thing was HEAVY. I was barely staying afloat as I pulled it up, and couldn’t be bothered to spool the line as I went. I finally hauled out an enormous anchor and obscenely long length of chain. I guess the float’s owner expects to dive in heavy currents a lot? I made my way back to shore, spooling line as I went.

But that still wasn’t enough exercise: now it was time for the relay race. The ADP relay is a little funky: people take turns racing out to a float and back on full SCUBA gear (face in the water, breathing through your snorkel), skin gear (same), and swimming (no gear). I got drafted to join the opposite team since they were a little short, and volunteered for a swim.

By the time I was up, we were half a lap behind, but I narrowed the gap considerably. It’s funny – I certainly don’t look like I’d be able to swim all that fast. But somehow I pull it off.

The team I was on won by a few lengths – the final lap came down to two instructors on skin gear, pulling on each other’s fins as they took turns passing each other. Hilarious.