Twice on the boat and twice my drysuit became a wetsuit. This time it was just my arm. The new valve I had installed loosened up and I forgot to check it before we went down. At 90 feet when I went to close down my valve it began twisting and I could feel water flowing down my arm. Steve and Steve were in front of me dropping deeper and flashing their
lights that they found something interesting that I should photograph. I was keeping my arm below my shoulder so the water didn't flow into the rest of my drysuit. I also kept my arm bent so the water didn't flow into my glove. I wasn't going to abort another dive so I spun the valve closed and
continued turning it, tightening it up enough to stop the leak. I fixed it properly when we arrived back on the boat.
 |
| Hudson's Dorid |
The dive call was 6:30AM at the shop and we loaded the boat in the dark. Buildings lit the Seattle skyline in the early morning dawn as our senses awakened to the resplendent colors of sunrise over West Seattle. We splashed in about 8AM and headed over the wall towards our final depth. The Octopii were deep in their holes avoiding our lights. The visibility improved considerably over Rockaway the previous weekend allowing me to follow Steve and Steve as I was sometimes left behind while taking pictures. Sharpnose and Decorator crabs littered the wall with a multitude of Copper Rockfish interspersed with Lingcod and an occasional Sail Fin Sculpin. I thought Steve showed me a Mossy Head Warbonet but my picture proved otherwise. The Nudibranchs were sparse with only a few making a showing on the way back to the boat in the shallower depths.
 |
| Golden Dirona |
Back on the boat it was Tortilla Chicken Soup for breakfast in our warm cabin on the boat. Nothing tastes better after a dive than soup. Alas though, we had no cookies or desert. Ben was not the captain today. We headed to Devils Boulder and jumped back in the water after tying up to the buoy. It was back down to 70 feet. The problem with a second deep dive after the first at 100 feet is we don't get much time on the bottom. This is when nitrox would have been good to have. Steve came up to me when I was photographing a fish and he started pointing at his dive computer. At first I thought something was wrong then realized he wanted me to look at mine. I wasn't sure why he did since I thought I still had 8 minutes on my no deco time. Wrong! It was down to 2 minutes and we still had to swim back to the line. At the line we hit 0 and my computer decided I needed to go into deco. I was docked 5 minutes until we reached our safety stop and it dropped to 4 minutes. Plenty of time to take pictures of Steve and Steve's happy faces since I couldn't really hold onto the line without crushing a few sea creatures I'm so fond of.
 |
| Safety Stop |
Back on the boat the sun was out and we headed back to the dock. Oh, what a beautiful day.
 |
| Steve |
 |
| Steve |
No comments:
Post a Comment