Saturday, July 2 at China Reef

 China Reef

As Ryan so deftly replied once when asked where we were diving "We went diving at can't see shit reef".  That about summed up the dive yesterday at China.  With maybe 10 feet of viz on top and worse as we went down it wasn't good.  On the surface I could still see my fin so I guessed that the the viz was about 10 feet but that wasn't the case.  Divers going down on China were Steve, Jim and Mark from out of town and myself.  We began our descent on the line and after we hit 30 feet Steve gave the signal to go up.  We didn't know what was wrong but Steve was the divemaster and if he says up we go up.  It turns out Steve was only counting two of us when there should have been three.  We waited on the surface at the front of the boat while Steve went to tell Captain Mike we couldn't find Mark, our other diver.  As it turns out Mark had gone back to get his weights readjusted and didn't go down with us.  Once we were all back together we went down the line and after about 45 feet the light from the surface was fully filtered out and it went dark, very dark.  This is a different type of dark from a night dive when you can see well with a light on.  In this dark all you see is the narrow beam of light from your diving light and most of it is backscattered.  If feels very confining and somewhat claustrophobic.  Once you've dove in Puget Sound for awhile though it feels like the norm in the spring.  I go down the line slower than other people to keep my ears equalized so when I hit the bottom I didn't see anyone.  I waited a moment and moved my light from side to side and finally saw a faint light off in the distance, which was probably only 10 feet.  I found them and followed along with the group.  Steve put us over the side onto the wall but it was difficult to see much and we kept  bumping into each other.  At least I knew the others were around.   I have a difficult time diving in these types of situations so I usually just end up looking at whatever I find in a particular place on the wall.  I really enjoy finding the small invertebrates and plants so it's usually not a problem to have some fun.  What is difficult is to get over and see what everyone else is looking at in these conditions since you don't always know where everyone is and we end up bumping each other with our fins.  This went on for about 18 minutes then Steve gave the sign to head up.  I still had plenty of air so I figured the others were running low.  The advantage of a steel 100 tank is I don't worry about air so much.  At the safety stop I only saw my diving buddy, Jim and we bobbed at 15 feet for 3 minutes.  We actually had to make a free ascent as we couldn't find the line to go back up on or someone was getting low and we didn't have time to go find the line.  Either way it worked fine and we made it back to the boat after another dive.