SB Newbie in So Cal, getting ready to get wet again!

[headhunter]

Thank you all for your kind greetings.

I look forward to meeting some of you as I start diving again. I've got some gear issues to catch up with and I believe some skills that need to be polished in a pool first. Then I'll be back at the beach.

Buying a new wetsuit will have to wait until I've lost the last 7 of the 40 pounds that I've decided to lose. I started on Jan. 5 with the "I'm going to lose weight this year" resolution. As of yesterday, I've lost 33 lbs. and will reward myself when I arrive at my target weight with a new wetsuit. I've actually got my eye on getting a custom 7 mil nitrogen-blown neoprene skin-in semi-dry. My old one was actually so old it disintegrated when I tried to put it on!

In anticipation and with great enthusiasm, last Monday I did an "out of the water" survey of old beach dive sites I used to enjoy from Deer Creek Road at the Ventura County line to White Point on the Palos Verdes penninsula. This will obviously mean more to the local crowd than to someone in Malta. For those of you not in the area, it boiled down to an enjoyable six-hour drive down the coast in Los Angeles starting just north of Malibu. I wanted to see if I could find all of the old spots I remembered and see if they were still accessible. I set out to find 15 spots in all and thanks to a bit of research on the Intenet found every one of them.

I found one that appears to no longer be accessible at Christmas Tree Cove due to a landslide. I guess "accessible" is a matter of opinion. I saw an access from "private property", but I don't know the people and am not even quite sure who's back yard actually leads to the stairs carved into the cliff. I'm certainly not going to don climbing gear to make it down the cliff face from the public side of the cove.

See some of you soon! (I'm sure I'll have questions for the board before that.)

Christian

 

[cys]

I was actually thinking of taking a class from Tamara Kendel in San Diego when my basic abilities are back up to par. I've read some very positive reviews on her teaching ability.

Tamara was a great DIRF instructor. I highly recommend her. I picked up innumerable refinements from her class. Some of them big, and some of them subtle. I gather the class takes on different complexions depending on who is present. On the big refinement side I learned for the first time that I had one lazy foot during the execution of the frog kick. On the subtle side I learned that the mouthpiece on power inflators generally always "finds" cave line and should be removed in environments where one follows a line. I have pages of notes with stuff like this. While the major theme was fundamentals -- kicks and trim and holding everything together while being distracted, there was much much more. It was an extremely worthwhile experience.
ChrisS

 

[headhunter]

Tamara was a great DIRF instructor. I highly recommend her. I picked up innumerable refinements from her class. Some of them big, and some of them subtle. I gather the class takes on different complexions depending on who is present. On the big refinement side I learned for the first time that I had one lazy foot during the execution of the frog kick. On the subtle side I learned that the mouthpiece on power inflators generally always "finds" cave line and should be removed in environments where one follows a line. I have pages of notes with stuff like this. While the major theme was fundamentals -- kicks and trim and holding everything together while being distracted, there was much much more. It was an extremely worthwhile experience.
ChrisS

Thanks for the info. At some point she sounds like the right instructor for me.