We had quite a weekend September 16/17.

Saturday started out in Malibu, where we made a shore dive at Point Dume. The night before, our course director emailed out instructions. The basic outline was: enter the water in front of the lifeguard tower, surface swim out to the pinnacles, dive around the pinnacles, and navigate back to the lifeguard tower underwater. We were to estimate the distance from the tower to the pinnacles (by counting fin kicks). The details of compass headings and air consumption calculations were left up to us.

The pinnacles at Point Dume are notorious for their often strong and unpredictable currents, which can make compass headings hard to follow, distances impossible to accurately measure, and air a precious commodity as divers struggle to swim up-current. Luckily for us, we arrived to discover a reverse of the normal current situation: we’d have a hard swim out to the pinnacles, but an easy ride back (assuming nothing changed while we were diving).

Meca and I, having about the same air consumption and nearly-identical gear configurations, were assigned as a buddy team (much to our delight). The surf wasn’t too bad, or else I’m just getting used to it – a bit of both, I suspect. It was a surprisingly long swim from our entry straight out to where our instructors anchored the float in about 25 feet of water. We stopped there for a moment to catch our breath, and took a compass heading out to where we could see one of the pinnacles breaking the surface of the water.

And then it was time to start counting kicks.

The current was indeed running northwest, at about .3 knots as I later calculated. That may not sound like much, but it’s plenty when you’re in full scuba gear and trying to cover a 400 meter distance (which is what it turned out to be). And keeping track of your kicks. And (in Meca’s case) battling seasickness.

We alternated between snorkeling on our stomachs and kicking on our backs, leapfrogging with another team who’d entered the water along with us and joking about how little distance we seemed to covering. We kicked, and kicked, and kicked for FORTY MINUTES.

Once we finally reached the pinnacles, we couldn’t stop kicking and rest – every pause would push you back away from your goal. So Meca and I quickly did our final checks and dropped down to the base of the middle pinnacle (in about 30 feet), where we could relax out of the current and catch our breath as we perused the area.

I’ve often heard the Point Dume pinnacles described as one of the best shore dives in the area, both for the abundance of marine life and the good visibility the site frequently enjoys. Vis was only about 15 or 20 feet today, but that’s not half bad for a beach dive around here.

And the life really was incredible. We circled the middle pinnacle (which is fairly small) and then swung around to the deeper pinnacle (much larger and odd-shaped). One of our tasks for the day was to write down 10 species we hadn’t “handed in” on a previous ADP dive; usually we’re responsible for writing down 5 new species, and a few folks were concerned about finding 10. Really not a problem, and I didn’t even have to resort to listing boring things like algae or garibaldi.

We saw a sleeping horn shark, two well-camoflauged cabezons, a zebra goby (the second one I’ve ever seen), sunflower stars (further south than I’ve ever seen), half a dozen other varieties of starfish, schooling blacksmith and senoritas, sea pansies and sand dollars. I could have spent an hour poking around the pinnacles – but alas, we had to conserve two-thirds of our air for the swim back.

Sea pansy with the sand blown off:

I was hoping to scare up more interesting critters in the sand on the way back to the float, but didn’t see anything other than sand dollars and a small sole the whole (20 minute) swim back. We tooled along on a reverse heading from the one that took us to the pinnacles, staying in about 25 feet of water. When I reached 800 psi, we surfaced to see if we were close to (or past) the float, and discovered we were about 100 meters short of it. Since the current was still pushing us towards the float, we decided to just stay on the surface and make our way towards shore.

Up til then, I’d been surprisingly un-sore considering the amount of kicking involved. But as soon as I had to start walking up the sandy beach – whoah. My ankles hurt. My thighs didn’t want to work. My feet were almost numb.

And we weren’t done – we still had underwater hockey!

Most of us didn’t even have time for lunch (and by “most of us”, I do NOT include me – this sort of thing is why McDonald’s drive thrus were invented), and we all assembled sandy, sore and tired at a community pool in Santa Clarita after an hour’s drive.

What is underwater hockey, you ask? Well – it’s pretty much exactly what it sounds like. Two PVC “goals” are laid down at either end of the 7′ deep part of the pool, and a heavy “puck” is dropped onto the bottom. The players are in fins, mask and snorkel, and carry handheld “sticks” to shove the puck around with. So the trick is to dive down, push the puck towards your goal (while keeping the other team from nabbing it), and hand off to another teammember before you run out of air and drown. Then you bob on the surface, not quite long enough to catch your breath, before dropping back down to keep your teammate from drowning. And so on, until someone scores a goal.

Just warming up:

It reminded me of a boxing match, in that play becomes more and more sluggish the longer you go before scoring a goal. “The best way to rest is to score,” I heard more than once, and they weren’t kidding.

In one sense, I’m not a competitive person – I don’t really care if I win or lose. But in another sense, I am competitive – I’m determined not to suck. We were joining a regular underwater hockey team’s scrimmage, and there were plenty of really good players to embarrass ourselves in front of. So I pretty much went all-out, and was rewarded by making one of my (winning) team’s goals. And scraping some interesting patches of skin off my legs on the bottom of the pool. And inhaling more pool water than is really good for you.

But it was fun.

The original plan for Saturday night was to all drive up to Lake Castaic and camp out together – but things were thrown a bit out-of-whack by the inordinate amount of time needed to fill 10 scuba tanks at the local Sport Chalet. We killed the two hours of tank-fill time getting dinner, by which time it was almost dark. A few folks headed on up to camp, but I opted for the 30-minute drive home and 45-minute morning drive. I’d been waffling on the “camping” thing all summer, so this was not a big surprise to anyone.

And the weekend was only halfway over!

(Picking up after the lifeguard search-and-rescue stuff, September 9)

After a brief visit home to pick up Jeff, we headed up to Santa Barbara to spend the night on the Truth, which was scheduled to cart all the ADPers out to Santa Cruz Island on Sunday. The Truth Aquatics boats are as nice as Southern California boat diving gets. We’ve been going out on 3-day trips with them every winter to the northern channel islands, but this was the first time I’ve driven all the way up to Santa Barbara for just one day of diving.

The trip out was uneventful, thanks to Drammomine. I haven’t been seasick since I started popping those pills the night before a trip, about a year ago – huge relief. We passed several enormous pods of playful dolphins, who (naturally) disappeared every time I brought out the video camera. Johnny managed to snap this shot of Anastasia Frigida as I huddled on the deck:

It took a while for the Truth to find a good spot for our first exercise, which was to be search and recovery. We wound up at a popular harbor, close to several dozen small craft and fishing boats. In retrospect this may not have been ideal.

We broke into groups of four again, and this time each group had a divemaster whose job it was to go drop an aluminum can for us to find. The plan was to station 2 of us at each end of the boat so we could triangulate the exact position of droppage, which would be coordinated by sending OK signals back and forth between us and the DM once he reached his position.

But just to make things more interesting, the search-and-recovery exercise was mixed up with some surprise rescue exercises. First one DM started flailing and yelling for help, and a few of us jumped in to “rescue” her. I lost track of the DM who was dropping my can until I saw him also flailing and yelling for help – from pretty far away. Sam and I swam out and towed him back, and nearly got run over by a guy piloting a small skiff out from one of the nearby boats to help another “rescue.” Oops. Guess we should have put up big signs saying it’s fake.

After a long swim, Sam and I got our DM back to the boat and up the swim steps. I thought the “rescue” had pre-empted the can-drop, and that now we’d send him back out and get a sighting on the location of droppage. But alas, we learned he’d dropped the can before he started “panicking.”

Doh.

At least one in our group had been paying attention from the boat, and another had marked the spot in the water where we retrieved our DM, so we decided to give it our best shot. Meca and I suited up in full dive gear to do an expanding circle search pattern around the PLS (point last seen); Johnny came with us in skin gear, and Sam stayed on the boat waving at us which direction to go.

When we thought we were in roughly the right spot, we dropped down: Meca on the line, and me as the “anchor.”

It was too bad this was a working dive, because otherwise it would have been a lot of fun! We nearly landed on a pair of mating sheep crab on our descent, and then realized the whole area was absolutely crawling with sheep and decorator crabs. I turned circles in place and observed the marine life (more crabs, greenlings, plenty of curious fish) while Meca made one… two… three… four expanding circles.

Nada.

We surfaced and talked things over with Johnny, who thought the PLS was actually a little farther over. Meca and I dropped down again, doing another search pattern adjacent to the original one.

Still nothing.

By this time, Sam had joined us in scuba gear. He and Meca dropped down for some more searching, and Johnny headed back to the boat to gear up.

Johnny came back and took over Meca’s end of the search, and she and I headed in – did I mention the water was below 60 degrees and I wasn’t wearing gloves? Brrrr.

By the time we finally admited total defeat, we’d basically missed out on the chance to do a second, “fun” dive. Communication between the search teams and the boat fell apart pretty quickly once we were in the water. In fact, I found out later we’d been completely out of the loop for a “missing diver” stunt that two of the DMs pulled.

Back on the boat, our DM seemed surprised we hadn’t found our can. We pointed to the area we’d searched, and he thought we had it about right. It eventually came out that he hadn’t emptied the can first – so, being full of freshwater, it’s possible it floated away. That, or my team was just lame.

So, that was the first half of the day, during which Jeff had a pleasant, hour-long dive with drysuit-clad Carol.

We moved to a second dive site, and were let loose for the third (or for my team, second) dive of the day. No strings attached: go do what you want.

It was a pleasant enough dive, with schools of opaleye, a few different types of nudibranch, island kelpfish, and a brief sighting of a harbor seal. But mostly, it was cold. I’d gone with a wetsuit for the day, anticipating a workout doing rescue and search stuff. This dive reminded me why we’re drysuit people now. I was freezing the instant I hit the water, and I didn’t get any warmer. I somehow managed to stay down about 25 minutes before admitting to Jeff I was freezing.

Our first Stearn’s Aeolid:

So… all in all, a rather frustrating day. I think we all learned a lesson about task loading, and chaos during rescue situations. My group was pretty bummed we didn’t find our can, even though we weren’t the only ones. And I basically only got one “real” dive in, and was freezing the whole time.

But at least I had great company for the day. All my new ADP friends plus Jeff – how better to fill a boat?

Hot chocolate and warm cookies post-dive:

More pics from Jeff here: Santa Cruz 09/10/06.

On Saturday, September 9, I was able to sleep in for a change – the ADP candidates weren’t due in class until 9am. I can’t even describe how nice it felt to leave the apartment in daylight.

Apparently, Long Beach lifeguards regard their sleep more highly than LA County instructors; those were our teachers for the day, and the reason for our “late” start. We gathered at Los Alamitos Bay in Long Beach for a few hours in the classroom going over search and recovery techniques with the lifeguard dive team. These are the guys who search along the hulls of container ships in the harbor for contraband, go over every inch of the area where a gun was thrown into the water, or recover bodies and wreckage from accidents. Serious guys.

But they were a lot of fun, too. We had the chance to look at some of their gadgets, hear their stories, and learn from the best.

Then it was time to practice. We broke into teams and headed to the little beach on the bay, where we were tasked with recovering airplane parts (of various sizes) and three dummies that had been dropped around floats in the harbor. In buddy pairs, we took turns going out to the float, dropping down the anchor line, and conducting expanding circular searches out from the float. One buddy stayed at the anchor point holding a reel, letting out line to the searching buddy, who quickly disappeared into the murk.

Unlike the ocean a few hundred yards away, the bay bottom is extremely silty. When you step into the water, you sink into several inches of muck that puffs up into brown clouds, and it’s just worse the deeper you go. All it takes is a wave of your hand near the mud, and you can wave goodbye to visibility for a few minutes.

Mike and I were the first buddy pair in the water, and he only did about 3/4 of a circle before he found an enormous piece of airplane. We took it up, brought it back down for the next team, and went in to give them a turn. I felt like we’d barely had a chance to try the search pattern.

So after the next team had found the large piece, and then searched fruitlessly for 15 minutes for the various small parts that were in our area, Mike and I were sent back in to finish the job. This time Mike took the anchor spot, and let out about 25 feet of line for me to wander off and search.

I did a few circles around him. Every time he was facing the same direction as we started, he’d give two tugs on the line to indicate that we needed to let more out, and I’d tug twice back to agree before he spooled out another 2 feet of line. I made three or four expanding circles, and found two 6-inch metal chunks half-buried in the mud. Visibility ranged from 6 inches to 2 feet, so my mask was usually panning back and forth right over the ground.

After I’d found a second piece and been down for about 15 minutes (the max alloted), I gave Mike the “reel me in” signal (three tugs) and headed back as he spooled in the line. Even though I was looking for him, I didn’t see him until our faces nearly bumped into each other!

Everyone seemed to have a surprisingly fun time for our first near-zero visibility dive. All the parts were found (eventually), and lunch was waiting for us at the restaurant next door when we wrapped up around 2pm. That’s downright early – these lifeguard hours are easy!

Thanks to the Long Beach lifeguards for giving us a chance to learn their tricks – on their own volunteered time. We really appreciated it!

In case 10 weekends of wall-to-wall ADP wasn’t enough, we were all given a project for September: on our own time, divide into groups and do a beach survey. This shall entail:

• Getting a group together on a free weekend. This is quite a task in and of itself, logistics-wise.
• Selecting a beach everyone is interested in.
• Writing up everything there is to know about said beach
• Diving at the beach, AND
• Conducting a formal survey of a roughly 200′ by 50′ patch of underwater, using lines, buoys, and slates to record depths, substrates and marine life on a grid.

I joined up with a bunch of folks who decided Old Marineland, on the south side of Palos Verdes, would be a fun dive. None of us had actually dived it before, but OML is a famous dive spot among locals; it tends to have nice conditions and really cool stuff to see, if you can manage to get in the water. There’s a bit of a hike down (and hence, back up), and the most popular entry is off some rather tricky boulders. A slightly easier entry is offered at a cobblestone beach, out from which there’s mostly sand.

Cobblestone beach, as seen from the walk down – that’s us with our float:

I remember this dive site as the location of one of my first beach dive attempts with the Sole Searchers, where I was roundly scared away by the surf pounding on the slimy boulders (at entry #1) and the surf tossing around all the loose rocks (at entry #2). Jeff and I huffed all the way down and back up without actually diving.

This time, we had better conditions. Eight of us gathered in the parking lot above OML, and were ready to hit the water by 10am or so (downright late in the morning by ADP standards). We spent a bit of time coordinating logistics of the survey in the parking lot: how to stay in formation, how to signal each other when we were done taking readings, whether or not to lug the floats along with us (we did), etc. Then it was down the once-scary hill, which didn’t seem as hard as I remembered it, and onto the cobblestone beach (not wanting to wrangle the floats over the already-tricky boulders), which didn’t look as scary as I remembered it. So far, so good.

And it stayed that way. Meca and I were first into the water with a float (with Mike’s help ‘tossing’ it out to us), which we dropped towards the west end of the cove. Then we hit the bottom and started unspooling line in the direction of the reef (west towards the boulders). Even with my fancy new PVC line spool, assembled the night before, working with lightweight line underwater was a bit of a bitch. We persevered, and laid out 100′ of line over… sand. Boring, boring sand. We finally hit a bit of rock at the end, where the reef appeared to just be starting.

Back on the surface, we were joined by Sam and David sporting float #2, which they anchored at the end of our line. We decided instead of doing either side of a single line, we’d just go straight down the middle of one long line, and hopefully catch some actual topography. Sam and David dropped down with their own 100′ marked line and laid it out over a slightly more interesting section of reef than the first line.

By this time, the remaining two buddy teams had joined us at float #1. We broke into groups of 4, each on one side of the line, and headed out to survey the area.

It’s incredibly easy to do this on land. Put a line down on the grass. Line up perpendicular to the line, everyone arms’ length apart. Take 2 steps forward. Write down what you see. 2 more steps. Repeat. Etc.

It’s a bit nastier underwater, because of surge pushing you back and forth, so every 5 feet in each direction becomes more like “5 feet plus or minus another 5 feet.” Additionally, keeping even 4 divers in a straight line is – well – damn near impossible. We didn’t use a buddy line because we thought there would be kelp (there wasn’t). Passing the “stop, go” signals back and forth was also a little tricky due to difficulties getting each other’s attention, so everyone wound up with a slightly different number of readings.

Our site survey area, on a Google Maps pic of OML:

Still, I had a really fun dive, even just checking out the “boring” side of Old Marineland. We saw plenty of fish, including a big school of jack mackerel and a rainbow seaperch (my first). Spanish shawls, sea hares, keyhole limpets and chestnut cowries all made appearances, as did a few soles in the sand. Mike spotted a batray in the shallows on his way out. So, despite our less-than-scientific underwater survey, we all had a good time – and learned a few things for the next time we try a site survey.

I first stumbled onto an episode of The Crocodile Hunter while I was on break from Pomona, at home in South Carolina channel surfing with my mom. It took about five seconds to draw us in – we couldn’t believe this person actually existed, charging in to grab crocodiles and snakes without fear, all the time positively on fire with enthusiasm and excitement. Say what you will about Steve Irwin’s hands-on methods: he made nature shows fun again, and we were hooked.

I didn’t have cable back at Pomona, and I tried in vain to describe Steve’s antics to my friends for a year or two until I remedied the cable situation. By that time, Steve Irwin was practically a household name, famous for his passion, insanity, and the childlike wonder he never lost towards wild critters.

Jeff, although not as big a fan of Steve, liked his shows well enough to dress up with me as Croc Hunters for our first Halloween together. Kids swarmed him as soon as we walked in the door.

We were out diving all day Monday, and came home to an email that Steve Irwin had been killed by a stingray. I hoped it was just another internet hoax making the rounds, but it didn’t take long to realize that the story was authentic.

I’m hearing “at least he died doing what he loved” a lot, a sentiment which has never rung true to me. He may have loved making documentaries, but I doubt he enjoyed taking a 6-inch serrated barb to the chest. It’s just a terrible, sucky thing to happen, and there’s no point trying to make it any more palatable.

Although not usually one to get weepy at celebrity deaths, I have to admit I’m really sad about this loss. No more Steve Irwin late-night interviews where he overwhelms his host with his energy (and his animals). No more good-natured spoofs of his style in commercials and comedy routines. No more chance to visit Australia Zoo and check him out in person one of these days – a dream of mine for years. I always thought his kids were so lucky to grow up with such an interesting and amazing dad – and now they won’t.

I guess what it comes down to is this: it made me happy to know that someone like Steve Irwin existed on this planet. Now he doesn’t, and I’m not ashamed to be sad about it.

(Yes, I missed a weekend… I was in Tucson, walking into sliding glass doors, while my class went to Catalina for the day.)

But I was back in plenty of time for our next beach dive: rescue drills at Malaga Cove, on the northwest tip of the Palos Verdes penninsula.

I’ve been to Malaga before, though not for SCUBA. I’ve snorkeled, and hung out at the beach. It’s a nice place to hang out for a day, if you don’t mind not having any bathrooms. And if you don’t mind The Hill. The distance from top to bottom probably isn’t any worse than many of Southern California’s beach diving sites, but it’s steep.

By 8am, we were heading down The Hill, all geared up and lugging whatever we’d need for the next few hours: floats with anchors and bottles of water, snacks, etc. In other words: heavy. By the time we hit sand at the bottom of the paved path, most of us were ready to drop our burdens right there. But oh no, this is ADP – we keep walking. Sigh.

We finally set up camp just a little bit down the beach, away from boogie-boarders and surfers (despite the relative lack of surf: 1-2 footers, no problem).

Then we spent the next 5 or 6 hours going in and out, in and out, in and out of the surf. Think I’m kidding? First we took the floats out and set them up in a line. Then we started with rescue drills on skin (fins, mask/snorkel). We split into groups of 6, and then did the drill 6 times so everyone had a chance to play rescuer – but all but two in that group went in and out of the surf zone (2 stayed on the beach to help the others come back out).

And once we’d finally done skin rescue six times… it was time to do it all again ON SCUBA. Now the “victim” sank down on the bottom at the float, and the rescuer started from just behind the surf zone, swam out in full scuba gear, went to bring the victim up, ditched all the gear, and then did the skin rescue back into shore.

Whoof.

It went really well, though, especially considering I’d missed the rescue pool session and my rescue class is 3 years behind me. I don’t think I “killed” my buddy too badly, and only swallowed a small amount of seawater myself, despite the set of 2 footers that started breaking over my head while I was being dragged in. Timing.

Then, at 2pm, it was time for the fun dive. We hauled our gear back to the bottom of the hill, and then broke into buddy teams to enter over the rocks into the kelp bed. Despite the unpleasantness of the entry (clambering over slimy rocks when already exhausted – I was not at my most graceful), I had a fantastic dive.

For starters, visibility was 15-20 feet, much better than is typical at Malaga. We found two octopi, one curled up asleep in a half-buried shell. The whole area was full of juvenile fish of various species; in particular, I stumbled across least five mostly-blue super-juvenile garibaldi, juvenile rock wrasse, and young blacksmith and senoritas. We also bumped into a large school of salema, a fish I hadn’t seen before.

On our exit, we surfaced a bit too far west where the feather boa kelp was too thick to easily paddle through. We dropped back down and returned to our entry point, and hauled our tired butts back up the rocks. And then – back up THE HILL. I’m proud to say I made it on one trip (mainly because there was no way in hell I wanted to make that walk TWICE).

By the time everyone had finished putting away gear and debriefing, it was 4pm and we were seriously starving. Luckily, enough of us had remembered to bring food (and one person remembered to bring a bbq), so even without formal planning ahead we pulled off a halfway decent bbq. You’ve never seen people inhale hot dogs so fast. Divers can eat.

So, pretty much no downside to our rescue day. I had a great time with the drills, managed the surf without fear (it wasn’t terrible surf, but it was worse than I would have been comfortable in a month ago), and even got a dive in that was 100% for-fun.