Where did I go with my force fins?

[Soakedlontra]

Yesterday evening I took my Force Fins to the pool session of my Dry Suit class at the local swimming pool. Unfortunately the media was not allowed inside the building so no pictures were taken. Hopefully by reading this post your imagination will work in the same way as when you look at a real photograph or listen to one of those new age visualsomething tapes with a soothing soundtrack and mellow voiceover, which some folks use to relax by inducing the seeing of certain things.

The water was light blue and looked crystal clear like the one I saw in Belize few years ago… at first glance. When I finally went to the deep end of the pool I realized how misleading my first impression of the quality of the water was:depressed:. Old plasters were floating around here and there, fluff and strings were lying motionless on the bottom and god knows what else was drifting around in the chlorinated water column like dead jellyfish.

When two other female students and I sat on our knees (how many times I bumped my knees on the bottom despite of cranking up air in my suit? I cannot remember!) with dismay I could not help noticing that the woman in front of me had a couple of plasters, which formed the familiar X plaster shape typical of comic strips injured characters, dangerously and slowly peeling off from the skin of one of her calves…:shocked2:
"I guess that’s why a State law forces the pools to use chlorine on top of oxygen (is that right?) as a disinfectant: to prevent us from getting plaster induced infection diseases” I thought.

The last time I used a snorkel was sometimes in the late summer or fall of 2008. Yesterday at the pool I had to use one because well it’s obvious I was part of a class of Open Water students, even if ‘indirectly’. A 5ft hose and a snorkel don’t really get along very well. The bloody thing was always in the way when I had to do certain drills. Not to mention that when I had to swim to another part of the shallow end of the pool instead of grabbing the regulator I kept my snorkel in my mouse and water began to get into my mouth and I wondered “Uuummm…that’s strange!...” Eventually I realized what was wrong and quickly switched to the regulator hoping that nobody was looking…

Before even getting to that point I could not even sink…. I thought I did not have enough weights so I asked for more and put them on. Still I was able to sink with a great effort of mad fin kicking and willpower-stubbornness…Then my instructor asked me if my exhaust valve was open and at last I saw that my left arm was all puffed up like an inflatable sausage. Earlier on my buddy took the valve off the suit and rinsed it under the bathroom sink. By the time I saw what he was doing it was too late and I anxiously watched him cleaning the valve detached from the suit (I was going to do it but without taking it off from the suit later) “I hope it is going to be all right” I thought (months ago he could not resist the temptation and like a little kid he took apart his dry suit valve for maintenance just to discover that he couldn’t put it back together again! So at the end the manufacturer sent him a new one…Sometimes you have to learn in the hard way!). I thought that I turned the valve all the way open, but I guess I must have done the opposite.

The highlight of the pool session was inflating the suit with so much air that my feet began to float upward. Like an acrobat (or a clown) I had my head down while the air in the feet was pulling me to the surface. It took several attempts to get that technique where I was supposed to arch my back and kick like a maniac, without gesticulating with my hands, to push my body head up and feet down again and keep my arms first all stretched upright and then pull my right arm down and bend my left arm to let the air out from the exhaust valve (do you know what I mean?) right. When at last I got it right it was a really good feeling to stop that mad ascent and being able to be neutrally buoyant and float like one of those plasters in the water column peacefully.

After that I tried the other technique: the somersault underwater circus act! Well without bragging about it too much it looked like that I got it right after the first attempt! It was easier than the previous one. It put less stress on the feet and therefore I did not need to kick so hard and paddle my hands like a drowning dog.
So whether I will remember to do a somersault, instead of the other technique, in the unfortunate scenario that I have too much air in my feet and I am heading to the surface in an upside-down uncontrolled ascent or not while diving in the ocean is hard to tell.

Happy Dry Suit SAFE Diving!

 

[sambolino44]

Well, I haven't posted much lately because I haven't gone anywhere new with my Force Fins, but I have been doing lots of local dives at our favorite spots. Most recently with a new buddy who has a complete HOG rig, including turtle fins.

I've heard the word "transparent" used to describe how, when something works right you don't notice it; you don't think about it. That's the way my Force Fins have become: transparent. I don't think about them anymore, they just work.

Instead, I'm thinking about things like, how's my new buddy doing, or look at that neat grunt sculpin that Soakedlontra pointed out. Or occaisionally thinking about some other piece of gear that isn't quite as "transparent" as my Force Fins.

 

[uncleavi]

Well said.

 

[Soakedlontra]

Last Friday I submerged my Force Fins into two magical Keystone dives! The first one was under the pilings during late afternoon. After this dive I thought that instructors should also start teaching how to scuba dive with your belly up!

Gearing up near the jetty

and walking all geared up to the pilings

This time the current was mellow and we could surface swim straight to the pilings. We submerged and as usual I began to look downwards at the bottom cruising through the pilings with care in order to avoid crashing against all the animals that covered those vertical pieces of lumber like icing on a birthday cake (the current, even if it was weak, was still pushing us around).

It must have been my lucky day because when I was scrutinizing every inch of the bottom I had no idea that I was going to bump into a strange looking six legged crab that I have never seen before in the wild and that the Seattle Aquarium displays it in one of the small tanks on the wet table!:shocked2:

Heart Crab!

After spending some time with this hairy fellow I decided to screw up my trim and lifted my head upwards to look up towards the surface!

Uauh! We have some swimming guardian angels up there!

and I kept looking up more and more until my neck felt that it was almost ready to snap and detach from my body once and for all!

I was only between 20 and 30 ft. of water!

When it was time to turn back I was forced to look back down again like any other scuba divers and good lord!:shocked2: I detected a fish that discreetly was trying to hide itself among the blades of kelp by being exactly like a blade of kelp!

It was the most beautiful Cabezon that I had ever seen!

Later several Helmet Crabs run away from me as fast as they could almost tripping on those blades of kelp making it clear that they did not appreciate my company at all!

My buddy and I swam as close as we could to our car. Eventually the bottom became so shallow that even with all the weights in the world I couldn't stay down anymore!:depressed:

 

[Soakedlontra]

After the amazing day dive at the pilings and a surface interval of over one hour my buddy and I did our first night dive at Keystone Jetty (and my first night dive with my dry suit!). (In order to dive at night here divers have to pay a fee and make arrangements with the ranger of Fort Casey State Park).

Instead of taking the camera with us we took another diver and...it turned out to be a mistake! Why? Because our diving styles could not have been more different! The last straw for me was seeing him literally uprooting from a rock a Giant Pacific Chiton in the style of the young 1950s/60s Jacques Cousteau!

Anyway...so there are no pictures to look at but underwater photography tips to read!If you want to take a decent picture of a kelp greenling do it at night because they all seemed to be totally hypnotized by your dive light! The tubesnouts too are more relaxed than during the day. You can get so close to them and almost see the underwater world reflected into their tiny eyeballs!

For the first time at this site I saw the rather good looking scaly lithodid (another species of crab displayed at the Seattle Aquarium in the Life on the Edge - Outer Coast pools...if I remember well!). Nearby a bright orange baby Puget Sound King Crab was crawling around on top of a rock. I spent some time looking at this pretty small lumpy pyramid on legs while all at sudden a ling cod swam by it and almost knocked the little guy over!

Sailfin sculpins appeared at the bottom of the rocks that form the jetty. I saw three of these funny looking fish. They swim by 'vibrating' their dorsal fins that look like a sail! (I never have seen them at the jetty before).

Then we paid our respects to the almighty Giant Pacific Octopus! Finally I was able to see what looked like the full grown adult GPO squashed inside its den with suckers as big as quarter and huge mantle that all the local divers have been talking about!
The plump mollusk was not an attention seeker, the brightness of our dive lights did not convince it to crawl out its rocky tight home whose doorsteps were littered with shells of unfortunate crabs and clams.

After flooding the entrance of the GPO’s den with our lights we all turned them off and shook our hands to see the water sparkling with biolumiscence. Time went by and it was 9:30pm in a flash! Like Cinderellas we were supposed to leave the parking lot at a specific time (in our case 10pm!) so we swam back to the beach. On the way there I exchanged a quick glance at what looked like a sleepy starry flounder, just to mention another animal that you may see at Keystone Jetty and that belongs to a never ending list of creatures that find their homes there.

In a hurry I undressed and packed my soaked gear in the car, the Force Fins ended up at the bottom of the my diving bin as usual, what the hec! They can handle the weight! Back home I made one last effort to hang all that dripping stuff in the shower, next to the water heater and lean the Force Fins against the bricks of the fire place before hitting the sack and lay my bones horizontally without any weights! I slept like one of those boulders at Keystone Jetty!

 

[Soakedlontra]

As far as I know shore deep dives on or nearby Whidbey Island are muck dives. The T-Dock at Mukilteo is one of them. I did two dives there last Saturday: the first one was an afternoon dive where I plunged my Force Fins to a depth of 100 ft (my max. depth so far until I take Nitrox and Deep Diving classes) and the second a night dive.

For the first dive I rented the biggest tank available at the local dive shop (as mentioned in a previous post about doing my 100th dive at 100ft). This time I carried that monster behind my back! My air consumption is getting better but still is higher than my male regular buddy's. I may have been able to get by with his HP 100 Steel but the thought of having extra air just in case made me feel more relaxed. I needed some help to lift that bloody thing when it was all hooked up to the rest of my gear but it was not too hard to walk around once it was resting on my shoulders and back (however I wouldn't want to participate in a marathon with it...)

Voila' 100ftw! The bottom kept 'sloping' down to an unknown depth. It is very easy to look into that darkness without realizing that that same darkness could have dragged me down as if I were hypnotized and became an underwater sleepwalker…

The world of a muck dive is the confusing world of flat fish! At Mukilteo there were so many different species of this kind of fish that trying to identify them all gave me headache and quickly I gave up!

Is this a Starry Flounder? English Sole? Speckled Sanddab? C-O Sole? Halibut? Pacific Sanddab? Rock Sole? Left-eyed or right-eyed? etc.etc...

...and what is this? The same fish as above?

I think I was able to stay at depth for about 10/15 minutes (that sounds a bit too much, though...). When it was time to turn around we took our time and slowly swam back up

Miraculously I spotted a suspicious fleshy lump that was hiding underneath a crab shell. I swam closer to find out what it was. It turned out that it was a Red Octopus. I tried to get my buddy's attention but it was all a waste of time. He looked at me and signaled 'Uh!?' and then kept swimming. Unfortunately he had the camera...bummer! He had not a clue of what a photographic opportunity he had just missed...

We surfaced into a pink-red-orange sky. The sun was already setting behind Whidbey Island. The Mukilteo Ferry (which takes you to Clinton, Whidbey Island) was approaching. Some of the lights in the nearby hotel rooms were on. Bored old couples may have been watching television instead of the sunset; families may have been getting their screaming kids ready for dinner; young couples may have indeed romantically been watching the ferry mooring at the terminal in the scarlet water while listening to its booming horn and, at the same time, looking at the divers' lights that dotted the water below and other guests may have been listening to the post dive tales from divers who were lucky enough (like us) to have found a parking spot right next to the public beach access and the hotel!

After our first dive we walked back to the car and began to undress. With some concern I noticed that my left foot was soaking wet!
"Oh dear! After about 15 dives on my second hand $350 drysuit I have already a major leak!" I thought in frustration...:depressed::depressed:

By the time we hiked all the way to the ferry terminal restrooms and ate a slightly better version of backpacking food we geared up to do a night dive. Man! It turned out to be the most amazing night muck dive ever!

This young Rock Fish was as cute as Nemo!

This is the first of the 5 red octopuses that we saw during the night dive!

The fourth one was an incredible sweet baby octopus few inches long! It was transparent and with dark spots! I desperately tried to grab the camera and get the settings right before the little ghostly ‘tentacled’ creature disappeared but I was not fast enough...

We moved on and kept swimming back to shore when another extraordinary sight appeared in front of my eyes! Another Red Octopus! But this time there was something about this one that was pretty unusual! It was incredibly bright red and even fluorescent blue in some areas of its body and its webbing was all spread out and behind its tentacles and webbing the hopeless legs of a crab emerged!

The octopus was eating a crab right in front of my nose and the nose of a sculpin that was totally oblivious of the deadly struggle that was going on few inches away from its body! I signaled my buddy to stop! It took a while for him to notice my swinging light. Eventually he turned around and saw that horrible, yet ‘beautiful’ spectacle!:shocked2:

By no means the octopus was in a hurry to have a fast-food meal. Our lights did not make it to release its deadly sucking grip on the crab with shaking legs. The 'naive' creature did not realize that its stubborn hunger and determination exposed it to the possibility of becoming the meal of a fellow predator. It got lucky that we do NOT hunt marine animals! (Who knows if later on after our lights disappeared leaving that sandy-silty-muddy bottom in complete darkness a huge ling cod swam by and swallowed both of them in one gulp!..Sometimes I wonder about Nature…)

Anyway this time I was able to locate the camera but I was so excited that I forgot to press the Macro button and the images turned out blurry…(What the HEC! There is always something that gets in the way in one way or the other!) After taking a couple of still pictures I decided to shoot moving pictures while my buddy became the light technician and was holding the light to the subject so I did not have to guess in the dark where to point the camera!

'Enjoy' those out-of focus images!

YouTube - Red Octopus eating dinner

 

[Soakedlontra]

Last Sunday was another beautiful warm day. My buddy and I were in a good mood and couldn't wait to take our Force Fins at a new dive site: Possession Beach Waterfront Park on the southern end of Whidbey Island. The parking there was not quite ideal for scubadiving. We had to park the car temporarely near the beach to download the gear and then move it to the parking lot further way from shore on a hill. So this kind of situation wouldn't be a big deal if your memory doesn't begin to play tricks on you...

We were happily getting the gear ready on a picnic table

when all at sudden my buddy realized that he did not download the weight belts! Off he went and walked up hill to the parking lot to get them. While he was doing that all at sudden I realized that I had forgotten my mask at home! Fortunately we did remember to bring the bag with spare gear where there was a spare mask. I was not very happy about that because that mask was bulky and did not fit my face very well. "What the hell! Thank god that I have one!" I thought.

When my buddy came back with the weight belts he began to dress up and guess what? He realized that he had forgotten his ankle weights in the car! "Screw it! I am not going back up again!" He remarked. So we decided to limit our depth to about 80 ft (instead of 100) for the first dive. We agreed to play it by ear and get psychologically ready to abort the dive if his buoyancy ended up being totally out of whack and/or my spare mask flooded beyond any attempts to see through it. While we were discussing all of that we realized that we forgot to leave his wallet and my keys in the car... So off I went and walked up hill to the car to hide them...

You can imagine that by the time we were all geared up and ready to hit the water a strange karma was surrounding us. Diving with your significant other can be the best diving experience ever but when things begin to fall into unexpected places and the good mood melts like an ice cream left under a tropical sun it is very hard to resist the temptation to bicker with one another...Arguing on land can be a therapeutic thing for couples (letting things out of your chest always brings a good feeling of wellbeing, doesn't it?) but underwater is strongly un-recommended!

...he is not looking at the camera...that means that he is already annoyed!

here is a picture for you!

...when your significant-other-buddy turns into a sea monster you are really in trouble...

 

[Soakedlontra]

Water has usually a soothing and relaxing effect on the mind so I hoped that underwater we were able to cool off our spirits and shut all the bickering off!

Instead coping with the spare mask (there was no room for my fingers to close the nostrils from the front so I had to shut them from below and I constantly had a layer of water that kept my nostrils submerged...All the attempts of clearing failed "Better not inhaling through my nose!" I thought), my unstable buoyancy (now that I think about it I was using different tanks and I was probably overwheighted) and my significant other buddy who was going up and down like a yo-yo because he did not have ankle weights supplied us with fuel for bickering with bubbles and hand signals during the first part of the first dive. When we finally reached our depth and began to swim back up we finally relaxed and marveled at the fact that we were in the middle of a 'colony' of Orange Sea Pens that slowly were swinging calmly and patiently with the current.

An Orange Sea Pen looks like one animal from a distance

instead it is a colony of polyps like a coral

The animal can retract all of its body completely into the sand

Unfortunatelly for the Sea Pen there is also another animal that lives in the same moonscape muddy habitat...

the Striped Nudibranch! and guess what does it eat? Orange Sea Pens!

During the first dive it seemed that there was a huge underwater party going on!

A Striped Nudibranch hurries to go the party!

Those Striped Nudibranchs were absolutely everywhere! In some spots they were on top of each other at the base of Orange Sea Pens taking bites off of those hopeless 18 inches long orange animals.:shocked2::depressed:

Orange Sea Pens, Striped Nudibranchs and, of course, flat fish are not the only one that hide themselves under the sand. During a safety stop I saw this guy

...any guesses?

We also saw white elongated blobs that littered the bottom...

...any ideas?

To cut a story that is already too long at the end of the second dive my buddy and I were smiling at each other and remarked how great it had been diving among Orange Sea Pens!

 

[Soakedlontra]

when all at sudden my buddy realized that he did not download the weight belts! Off he went and walked up hill to the parking lot to get them. While he was doing that all at sudden I realized that I had forgotten my mask at home! Fortunately we did remember to bring the bag with spare gear where there was a spare mask. I was not very happy about that because that mask was bulky and did not fit my face very well. "What the hell! Thank god that I have one!" I thought.

When my buddy came back with the weight belts he began to dress up and guess what? He realized that he had forgotten his ankle weights in the car! "Screw it! I am not going back up again!" He remarked. So we decided to limit our depth to about 80 ft (instead of 100) for the first dive. We agreed to play it by ear and get psychologically ready to abort the dive if his buoyancy ended up being totally out of whack and/or my spare mask flooded beyond any attempts to see through it. While we were discussing all of that we realized that we forgot to leave his wallet and my keys in the car... So off I went and walked up hill to the car to hide them...

After reading the Possession Beach Waterfront Park dives post my significant-other-buddy pointed out to me that I did not remember exactly what went on between him, the gear on the picnic table and the car at the parking lot that day: he put his suit on and realized that he had not downloaded the weight belts from the car. I offered to walk to the car to get them (I was not so dressed up like he was), he then told me that he wanted to do it because he was the one who had screwed it up. He walked up to the car just to find out that he had forgotten the car key on the picnic table! He walked back to the picnic table to pick up the car key and walked up again to the car (are you still following me?). He picked the weight belts up and walked back down to the beach. He put his hood on and gloves and guess what? He realized that he had forgotten the ankle weights in the car! At that point he said " Screw it, I am not walking back up there again!" (I am not kidding it was like acting in one of those Laurel and Hardy's movies...the scary thing was that it wasn't a movie!)

Another thing that he pointed out to me was that I had forgotten to upload an image to the original post and here it is!

Now that I have put the records straight I can have a good night of sleep!

 

[sambolino44]

She left out the part where, when we stopped by the grocery store on the way home I discovered that I had left my credit card at the dive shop before all this began. What a day!