Breakwater conditions today

[np251]

yeah, we had a blast. Epic conditions, awesome day and fab dive buddy.

You did the grand circuit KICKING? Man, thats cool. we actually got a little lost going to Met Fields on 2nd dive- always happens when we try to drop close instead of finding the big pipe early and following that in. I do think we found the 'structure' that exists on the "road to Metridium Fields". Maybe half a dozen big-ish rocks with a few clusters of Metridiums. Some squid eggs too and a couple BIG fish eating anemones sitting in the sand. Im going to take the GPS next time we do that and get the coordinates.

 

[fofo]

Hehe, yeah, it was fun! We would probably have made it to the wall, but we took a look around the barge, and we were distracted by the sea lions and stopped a few times just to enjoy the show, and Guy was using his single 100 ft3.

Yeah, there are actually several rock outcrops around the Metridium Fields, it's a very, very pretty area to explore on a day with good visibility (Kathydee posted a nice video a couple of weeks ago). And yup, the big fish eating anemones are very cool...

BTW, congrats in advance on your birthday!

 

[np251]

nice. Not sure id want to kick all that way, though. Good job.

Thanks for the birthday wishes...

 

[fofo]

Huh... I just noticed that with 50 posts I was upgraded from "Registered" to "Frequent Poster" and now I have two full stars. I see that you have three stars with 221 posts. So at this rate I'll earn my third star in... six years or so.

 

[Ben_ca]

Fofo,
How long did it take you to kick the 1200 ft? Last time we did it with scooters it took 14 mins... I figured 1400 ft (100ft per min)... (but then again we hit the pipe...) Sometimes I take a more meandering course I guess... kinda hard to stay on course doing barrel rolls sometimes

 

[fofo]

Hey, Ben.

Hmm, I've been thinking about a good way to estimate that, but I'll email Guy, since he was keeping a written record of depths and times he'll probably be better for giving you a number or a more accurate estimate.

I guess that 26-30 min would be a decent estimate, but that would leave only about 5 to 10 more minutes for doing down the pipe and have a 3 min stop on ascent for our 52 min dive, so probably closer to the lower figure. That's my guess, though! I'll see what Guy has to say.

Doing barrel rolls while scootering sounds like lots of fun!

 

[kathydee]

Huh... I just noticed that with 50 posts I was upgraded from "Registered" to "Frequent Poster" and now I have two full stars. I see that you have three stars with 221 posts. So at this rate I'll earn my third star in... six years or so.

Be careful, it can become addictive !

 

[Hepcat62]

Doing barrel rolls while scootering sounds like lots of fun!

You have no idea...

My hat's off to you guys - I'm WAAAY too much of a wuss to do that as a kick dive. Even if I somehow mustered up the will to try, there's no way I'd make it on a single 100...

 

[Guy Alcala]

Fofo,
How long did it take you to kick the 1200 ft? Last time we did it with scooters it took 14 mins... I figured 1400 ft (100ft per min)... (but then again we hit the pipe...) Sometimes I take a more meandering course I guess... kinda hard to stay on course doing barrel rolls sometimes

Ben, the dive report can be read here:

Yahoo! Groups

As to your questions, here's my recorded waypoint info as we went along. I've replaced the abbreviations I use for waypoints with more complete names. Note these are listed as waypoint name, pressure, clock time on beach or surface/dive time otherwise, bottom depth, temp, course from that waypoint if applicable. I also list distances if I'm surveying, but generally only make hashmarks every 100' (~25 K.C.s) if I'm swimming a long compass leg. 'Beach' is before we get in the water, 'Surface' in this case is off the wall at the '13' mark:

Beach 3425 / 1412 / --- / 60 deg. F. / ---

Surface 3375 / 1428 / --- / 53 deg. F. / ---

Bottom 3200 / 2 / 46' / 53 deg. F. / 340 deg. M.

(Line)
Inner End 3100 / 3-4 / 48' / 53 deg. F. /

(Line)
Outer End 2600 / 10 / 61' / 51 deg. F. / 000 deg. M.

Barge 2500 / 11 / 62' / 51 deg. F. /
(at bolts)

Leave Barge 2400 / 14 / 63' / 51 deg. F / 285 deg. M. / ~700'
(from NW end)

Turn Left 1050 / 34 / 45' / 51 deg. F. / 240 deg. M. /
(@ small met. reef ~80'SE of Big Pipe outer end)

Ascent 250 / 48 / 30'? /
(@RAB5)

On surface 125 / 51 minutes.


As you can see I was pushing my gas, and we didn't swim the whole grand circuit as I've previously done. My SAC rate was high on this dive compared to past Grand Tours, either due to my relative lack of diving recently, the fact that I wasn't solo (I usually have an RMV when solo .05 - .15 less than with a buddy), sea-lion distractions, or any/all of the above. For whatever reason, I had to do this as a truncated version of the Grand Tour, rather than the complete one I've previously done with the same tank and gas to spare.

I seem to have a been a bit off on my course from the barge to the intermediate reefs and from there to the metridium fields proper (which we never reached). I'm not sure why; when we got to the nav. course we hit the waypoints with no problem. The good vis. would have made that much easier than normal, but my miss distances were within my normal tolerance of +-5 deg. The ~700' leg from the NW end of the barge to the intermediate metridium reef would give a maximum radial error of 58.5' or so; the leg from there to the metridium fields somewhat less. Last time I did this I hit both dead on. The tide was coming in which might have pushed us a bit inshore, but not as far as we wound up before swimming to the Big Pipe.

I would normally record data at each waypoint along the nav. course as well, but didn't due to not wanting to waste the gas. Note that I use a wrist slate for all this; removing and replacing wetnotes from a pocket every time I need to note waypoint data would be far too wasteful of time and gas.

If you've got any more questions, just ask.

Guy

 

[fofo]

Thanks, Guy!

So, checking the map and the distances, we were swimming at about 57-60 ft/min (from the barge to the small metridium reef is about 1140 ft, and we covered that in 20 min, and we went from the base of the wall to the barge in 9 min, that's about 540 ft). Interesting...