So: I have a new drunk/stupid story! (Which brings me to a grand total of two, count them, two drunk/stupid stories. I am so boring.)

The weekend of August 19th, I flew to Arizona for Sarah’s bachelorette party. Sarah is NOT having a wedding (sniffle), but at least she knows how to throw my kind of party: five chicks hanging out, telling stories, and drinking. Even better: three of the five chicks have just become nurses, and already have a good stockpile of funny and/or disgusting tales to tell.

Most of the party took place at the house of one of Sarah’s friends. After several hours of gabbing indoors (topics covered: school, Prozac, divorce, weddings, breast implants, just to name a few), and many, many beers, we adjourned to the patio where those of us who felt like smoking could do so. We didn’t bother to turn the lights on; we just hung out in the dark swinging between topics as wide-ranging as the spread of AIDS and the hamper story. (If you don’t already know the hamper story, I’m not telling it here.)

After beer number seven, I decided to make a trip inside to the bathroom. I stood up, and Sarah’s dog Ruby got up to follow me. It was dark where we were, but well-lit inside the house, so I had no trouble finding the screen door and walking around it…

…BLAMMO, face-first into the sliding glass door I’d forgotten was there.

And then, another, smaller, blammo as Ruby did the exact same thing.

My poor, previously-broken nose was sore for 5 days. But wow… good party.

Hanging out with my old suitemates Sunday morning, not at all hungover (but very, very tan):

We pulled up to the parking lot at Nicholas Canyon in Malibu at 7:30am Saturday morning, and wandered to the edge of the hill to check out the waves below. The original plan was to dive right below the parking lot: there’s a rocky area to the left and sand to the right, so we could practice both types of entry. However, the surf was up (as in, big red letters saying “HIGH SURF ADVISORY” on the LA County beach website), rendering the rocky entry too risky. The sandy entry would have been do-able (and by do-able, I mean for crazy ADP people; not for divers just out for fun). But it was chock full of surfers: several dozen crowded the area. I was amazed at how rarely they ran into each other, but it seemed unwise to throw a bunch of divers into the mix as well.

A semi-paved path headed downhill to the west, out to more sandy beach. Some mild rip currents were muddying the waters out there, and making for less-perfect waves, so it was surfer-free. That’s where we decided to dive.

The surf… well, like I said, it was up. Kevin described it as 3′-5′ surf, but I’m pretty sure I saw some 6 and 7 foot faces. Whatever: they were big. On the plus side, there was both a long period between waves during sets (15 seconds or so), and nice long lulls of smaller waves between the big sets. With timing, it was totally do-able.

We all put on our skin gear (except for a few safety divers on scuba) and went for it. Well, mostly we stood around waiting for the lulls.

After the last big wave of a set had crashed, the next batch of divers would start crabbing sideways into the water, and flop onto our stomachs to start kicking as soon as possible. I made it out without incident (hooray!), and we started the long surface swim to reach a decent depth to set the floats.

After floats had been anchored, it was time to head back in. This is actually the scariest part for me. When you’re going out into the water, you always have the option of bailing and heading back to shore. But once you’re past those breakers… well, now you don’t have any option. You have to go through the surf zone to get back out.

My buddy and I took our time finning back towards the beach, and relaxed on the far side of the surf zone, bobbing on the swell. We faced out to sea, keeping an eye on the swells coming in and waiting for it to get flat, indicating the next lull.

When we were reasonably sure we weren’t about to get smacked by one of those 7-footers, we fired up our fins. Even the small waves had a decent amount of power when they broke right behind you, so everyone came out on hands and knees to avoid getting knocked on their faces.

The downside of crawling out of the water? You drag your equipment through the sand. I apparently managed to get some pretty serious sand inside the inflator hose on my BC, because when I hooked it up to a tank for my scuba dive, it stuck every time I tried to put a little air in. (Resulting in it adding more and more and more air until the BC gets overfilled and vents out the emergency valve.)

Doh.

We tried rinsing it, we tried whacking it, we tried to take it apart. No luck. A few folks tried to convince me that I could just orally inflate, but I wasn’t really up to that level of task-loading on a high-surf beach dive! We were going to be doing navigation exercises in 1-foot visibility: I didn’t want to be worrying about taking my regulator out of my mouth every time I needed to add a little air to my BC, something I’ve only recently begun practicing in the pool. I guess I should practice doing it on my next easy boat dive, just to get more comfortable for when this happens again.

So, once again, I sat out the actual beach dive. I made myself useful by hiking back up the hill to retrieve water, snacks, and my camera, so I could record others getting their asses kicked by waves.

Not one of the biggest ones:

Once again, I tried not to totally waste my time: I played a bit near the surf zone with Kevin. Both of us got whacked pretty good by some of the larger rocks that were getting knocked around, and built up some really impressive collections of pebbles in our wetsuits and booties.

As the divers finally headed back into shore, I pitched in where I could: yelling “wave!”, helping to take off fins, grabbing floats from divers as they hauled them through the surf. I was pretty bummed about missing the dive, even though it sounds like I didn’t miss much.

Then it was back up the hill again and time to eat. That’s something all divers are pretty darned good at.

Rinsing out my gear at home that evening, I was astounded at how many pebbles worked their way into nooks and crannies of my BC. (Not to mention sand, but at least that eventually goes down the drain.) I basically brought home a few pounds of beach – and I didn’t even actually dive. Yikes!

More pics here: Nicholas Canyon

This week in ADP went a bit better than last. First of all, I’d had an additional two weeks to get comfortable in the water (thanks to some extracurricular pool and ocean sessions with Ray). But the main reason was probably just that conditions were nicer. (That, and I refused to humiliate myself by wussing out again!)

Our second beach dive was at White Point, a south-facing beach on the Palos Verdes peninsula.

Those arrows show our approximate path. Here’s what we did:

• Point A: We had the choice of doing a fins-on or fins-off entry here over cobblestones and rocks. The 1-2 foot surf made this a pretty simple matter, though I realize it would have made me pretty nervous once upon a time.
• Point B: The first order of business was to swim over to this rocky promontory and practice “washing on” and “washing off” the rocks. (Did anyone else just have a little Mr. Miyagi moment?) Aside from the fact that my washing-on turned into more of a washing-off when I let go of my handhold at a bad moment, this went fine. Next, we took turns towing our buddies over to Point C (my team left everyone else in the dust!)
• Point C was where all the real fun happened! First we tried another wash-on/off, this time onto a little step halfway up a steep rock. Basically you just let a wave deposit you up there – much easier than it sounds. Then, we got to play around “shooting the channels.” You can just barely make out a series of crevices in the satellite image: deep channels in the rocks that turn into shallow tidepools. A skin diver (wearing a wetsuit and gloves) can ride the swell in and then back out, and go for quite a ride in these channels. Kind of like a waterslide, but with more rocks. Our instructor pointed out that water never goes THROUGH rock, so you don’t really have to worry about getting creamed by a rock as long as you flow along with the water. Still, it’s a good idea to keep your hands in front of your face.
• Nothing too exciting happened at D. We waited for everyone to catch up, and practiced freediving down to the bottom.
• Point E was our exit spot for the skin dive, and also our entry for the SCUBA portion of the day.

Strangely, I have very little to say about the actual SCUBA portion of the day. It was supposed to be a navigation exercise, using floats and transect lines to form points and edges along squares and triangles. But it turned into a bit of a cluster-you-know-what due to missing anchors, tangled lines, and miscommunication. My buddy and I tried to do some squares and triangles on our own, only to discover that people on the surface were moving the float around that we’d used as a fixed point.

We had a nice dive on our way back into shore, though, and got a chance to see White Point’s characteristic thermal vents. Huge white bacterial mats form on the rocks next to the vents, and sometimes you can feel the temperature change (though not, apparently, through gloves).

In the afternoon, we all gathered in the picnic area for our first ADP picnic, a Carribean-themed BBQ. I somehow talked Jeff into driving down for this, despite the hour or more that he had to sit in traffic to get to Palos Verdes. Next time I make him come, I’ll also make him take pictures, so that my ADP blog entries aren’t so boring-looking.