Peter and I have liked John on line for several years now, and have done quite a bit of chatting with him on threads and by PM and e-mail, especially about instructional techniques. So, when he started talking about making a trip to the PNW this fall, we were both adamant that he MUST come and visit us and do some Puget Sound diving. Eventually, days and time were chosen and adjusted and plans were laid . . . and, in this case, did not "gang agley"!
Monday night, promptly at 5 o'clock, the white rental car pulled into the driveway, and out climbed two people we had never actually met before, but who were old friends. I was actually rather nonplussed at the unease that John's wife had, about coming and staying with people she had never actually seen -- this has become SO routine to me, after all the SB and other forum folks with whom I've formed friendships before ever being face to face with them, that it was hard to remember how anyone would find this sort of thing strange.
We got them installed in our guest room, and then sat down to a serious discussion of dinner options. It was a game of "after you, Alphonse", where no one was going to make a decision for fear of choosing something that didn't work for someone else, and eventually, Peter took control of the team -- and he and John ran down to Costco and came home with steaks and salad material, and we proceeded to have a lovely meal at home, killed two nice bottles of red wine, and talked . . . oh, yes, we talked. Poor, long suffering Molly, who is NOT a diver, managed to look interested and ask an occasional pertinent question. I really appreciate the effort she went to to keep her eyes from glazing over
The following day was diving day, and the weather dawned as lovely as you can ask from an October day in Seattle. We had a thin overcast and calm air, and moderate temperatures in the low 50's as we packed the pickup with three people's gear. John had, on our advice, brought nothing but his dry suit, hood, mask and fins; one of the lovely things about the way we dive was that we were quickly able to put together a backplate and wing that fit him and would feel familiar. Except for the five foot hose, of course, which really wasn't long enough for someone with John's frame. We fixed that later.
We arrived at the Edmonds Underwater Park to find plenty of parking and almost no other divers there, and this at ten o'clock -- a lovely and unexpected surprise. I took John to look at the map of the site, and we discussed the plan, which was pretty simple. Edmonds is a shallow site, with a maximum depth at the far boundary (and at high tide) of about 40 feet, and as John had never been there before, there was no need to make the navigation complicated. Out and back in an hour was the gist of it, and that is what we did.
We were lucky to have some of the best visibility I've ever seen at Edmonds, and when you have sunlight and clear water, the site is beautiful. The bottom is covered in green and maroon sea lettuce that waves softly in the gentle surge. It gave me a very peculiar optical illusion that the fixed structures were actually swaying back and forth, which almost made me queasy. The pipes harbored their usual complement of painted anemones, decorator crabs, and nudibranchs, and quite a few copper and quillback rockfish floated serenely above them. I called John's attention to quite a large cabezon, but I don't think he realized what it was.
We swam on and found what I call the "bed frame", a metal structure covered with metridiums, and often the home of a variety of nudibranchs, but not today. Today, it was full of painted greenlings, large, small and in between, all very jittery and almost confrontational. I don't think this is mating season for them, and they weren't in mating colors, but the behavior was consistent and rather odd.
Off to the right, we found the slices of culvert that I am always delighted to swim through, and then the small boats, which always harbor enormous ling cod, and certainly did today. I tried to get my hand in the picture of one of them, just to give it scale, but although he was quite amenable to being photographed, taking chances on being petted wasn't high on his list, so he kept moving off just far enough to prevent me from using any part of myself as a reference.
At about 35 minutes, John turned the dive on gas, and we headed home. About halfway back, we discovered that our "by guess and by gosh" estimate of the weight he would need in cold salt water, with an undergarment he hadn't used before, had been overly conservative, and we had a long surface swim home.
Lunch was at the sports bar just up the hill from the dive park, where they have a gas fireplace with a table around it, where I love to warm my frozen hands and feet after a dive. Unfortunately, somebody else had taken it, and although I offered to try to convince them that shivering divers deserved it more than they did, everyone else was willing to settle for a nice table in the sun.
Then we went to the dive shop, to turn in tanks and collect more tanks, and went home for a short internet interval -- it was funny to see all FOUR of us, in the same room, each on his own computer!
Late afternoon found us once again in the truck, with a few adjustments; I was now diving my 85s, and John had my singles reg with the 7' hose, so he could actually LOOK at things to his left on this dive Off we went to Cove 2, where Peter, in his role as education coordinator for the Moss Bay Dive Club, was to lead a "fun and skills practice" dive. It was amusing that, although these Tuesday night dives (which are usually just fun dives) are often very well attended, the one that was billed as "skills practice" attracted only two lonely divers. Kind of sad, actually, but they did have fun.
Once we knew Peter actually HAD a buddy, John and I kitted up and got in the water. We were octopus hunting, an activity which has been very rewarding at Cove 2 this fall. The plan was a deep tour of the cove, with a max depth of 100 fsw, and a route that visited a number of known dens. We dropped into incredibly clear, dark water, and when we found a crescent gunnel at the drop site, I had my sign that this was to be a very good dive.
And it was -- we found at least half a dozen gunnels, four Giant Pacific Octopuses (including the one under the Honey Bear, which quite a few of us believe is the largest octopus we have ever seen), two ratfish, so many decorated warbonnets that they actually got rather commonplace, and I even found a good-sized grunt sculpin as we were headed back in the shallows. (I'm quite sure John didn't know what it was, or even whether it was a fish -- they are such odd-looking critters, and this one was a bit tucked away under a metal bar.)
We surfaced to the spectacular view of the entire Seattle skyline reflected in still, black water, and John got to listen to me bouncing up and down and bubbling about the dive for the next half hour, as we waited for Peter to come back with his team. (One of the things about diving in completely unfamiliar territory is that everything is new, so every dive is a great dive; one has no yardstick to understand if a dive is really UNUSUALLY good or not!)
And of course, when Peter came back, he had to tell us that HIS team had found a GPO out in the open, and followed it around for over ten minutes.
At any rate, we had a wonderful day of diving, and as usual, John slotted neatly into our team, and aside from being woefully underweighted, I think had a very nice introduction to why Puget Sound has such a big community of avid divers. And we, once again, turned a friend into a better friend by actually meeting and diving with him!
Monday night, promptly at 5 o'clock, the white rental car pulled into the driveway, and out climbed two people we had never actually met before, but who were old friends. I was actually rather nonplussed at the unease that John's wife had, about coming and staying with people she had never actually seen -- this has become SO routine to me, after all the SB and other forum folks with whom I've formed friendships before ever being face to face with them, that it was hard to remember how anyone would find this sort of thing strange.
We got them installed in our guest room, and then sat down to a serious discussion of dinner options. It was a game of "after you, Alphonse", where no one was going to make a decision for fear of choosing something that didn't work for someone else, and eventually, Peter took control of the team -- and he and John ran down to Costco and came home with steaks and salad material, and we proceeded to have a lovely meal at home, killed two nice bottles of red wine, and talked . . . oh, yes, we talked. Poor, long suffering Molly, who is NOT a diver, managed to look interested and ask an occasional pertinent question. I really appreciate the effort she went to to keep her eyes from glazing over
The following day was diving day, and the weather dawned as lovely as you can ask from an October day in Seattle. We had a thin overcast and calm air, and moderate temperatures in the low 50's as we packed the pickup with three people's gear. John had, on our advice, brought nothing but his dry suit, hood, mask and fins; one of the lovely things about the way we dive was that we were quickly able to put together a backplate and wing that fit him and would feel familiar. Except for the five foot hose, of course, which really wasn't long enough for someone with John's frame. We fixed that later.
We arrived at the Edmonds Underwater Park to find plenty of parking and almost no other divers there, and this at ten o'clock -- a lovely and unexpected surprise. I took John to look at the map of the site, and we discussed the plan, which was pretty simple. Edmonds is a shallow site, with a maximum depth at the far boundary (and at high tide) of about 40 feet, and as John had never been there before, there was no need to make the navigation complicated. Out and back in an hour was the gist of it, and that is what we did.
We were lucky to have some of the best visibility I've ever seen at Edmonds, and when you have sunlight and clear water, the site is beautiful. The bottom is covered in green and maroon sea lettuce that waves softly in the gentle surge. It gave me a very peculiar optical illusion that the fixed structures were actually swaying back and forth, which almost made me queasy. The pipes harbored their usual complement of painted anemones, decorator crabs, and nudibranchs, and quite a few copper and quillback rockfish floated serenely above them. I called John's attention to quite a large cabezon, but I don't think he realized what it was.
We swam on and found what I call the "bed frame", a metal structure covered with metridiums, and often the home of a variety of nudibranchs, but not today. Today, it was full of painted greenlings, large, small and in between, all very jittery and almost confrontational. I don't think this is mating season for them, and they weren't in mating colors, but the behavior was consistent and rather odd.
Off to the right, we found the slices of culvert that I am always delighted to swim through, and then the small boats, which always harbor enormous ling cod, and certainly did today. I tried to get my hand in the picture of one of them, just to give it scale, but although he was quite amenable to being photographed, taking chances on being petted wasn't high on his list, so he kept moving off just far enough to prevent me from using any part of myself as a reference.
At about 35 minutes, John turned the dive on gas, and we headed home. About halfway back, we discovered that our "by guess and by gosh" estimate of the weight he would need in cold salt water, with an undergarment he hadn't used before, had been overly conservative, and we had a long surface swim home.
Lunch was at the sports bar just up the hill from the dive park, where they have a gas fireplace with a table around it, where I love to warm my frozen hands and feet after a dive. Unfortunately, somebody else had taken it, and although I offered to try to convince them that shivering divers deserved it more than they did, everyone else was willing to settle for a nice table in the sun.
Then we went to the dive shop, to turn in tanks and collect more tanks, and went home for a short internet interval -- it was funny to see all FOUR of us, in the same room, each on his own computer!
Late afternoon found us once again in the truck, with a few adjustments; I was now diving my 85s, and John had my singles reg with the 7' hose, so he could actually LOOK at things to his left on this dive
Off we went to Cove 2, where Peter, in his role as education coordinator for the Moss Bay Dive Club, was to lead a "fun and skills practice" dive. It was amusing that, although these Tuesday night dives (which are usually just fun dives) are often very well attended, the one that was billed as "skills practice" attracted only two lonely divers. Kind of sad, actually, but they did have fun.Once we knew Peter actually HAD a buddy, John and I kitted up and got in the water. We were octopus hunting, an activity which has been very rewarding at Cove 2 this fall. The plan was a deep tour of the cove, with a max depth of 100 fsw, and a route that visited a number of known dens. We dropped into incredibly clear, dark water, and when we found a crescent gunnel at the drop site, I had my sign that this was to be a very good dive.
And it was -- we found at least half a dozen gunnels, four Giant Pacific Octopuses (including the one under the Honey Bear, which quite a few of us believe is the largest octopus we have ever seen), two ratfish, so many decorated warbonnets that they actually got rather commonplace, and I even found a good-sized grunt sculpin as we were headed back in the shallows. (I'm quite sure John didn't know what it was, or even whether it was a fish -- they are such odd-looking critters, and this one was a bit tucked away under a metal bar.)
We surfaced to the spectacular view of the entire Seattle skyline reflected in still, black water, and John got to listen to me bouncing up and down and bubbling about the dive for the next half hour, as we waited for Peter to come back with his team. (One of the things about diving in completely unfamiliar territory is that everything is new, so every dive is a great dive; one has no yardstick to understand if a dive is really UNUSUALLY good or not!)
And of course, when Peter came back, he had to tell us that HIS team had found a GPO out in the open, and followed it around for over ten minutes.
At any rate, we had a wonderful day of diving, and as usual, John slotted neatly into our team, and aside from being woefully underweighted, I think had a very nice introduction to why Puget Sound has such a big community of avid divers. And we, once again, turned a friend into a better friend by actually meeting and diving with him!
