Scuba Diving

Self Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus

March 2001 I had the opportunity to visit the Bahamas with a work event. While there I got PADI Scuba certified. This fulfilled a childhood dream of mine. I remember being 8 or 9 and stumbling across some adventure scuba books, I used to dream of swimming under the ocean and I wanted to be a Marine Biologist when I grew up.

Some Notes:

Pressure, ears and equalization:
This was something that always worried me about Scuba diving was pressure on my ears. While swimming I would occasionally hold my breath and dive to the bottom of the deep end of the pool and each time it would hurt my ears. A couple of summers ago at my Uncle's pool I tried this again, his pool is about 12 feet deep, when I got the bottom I tried equalizing my ears by pinching my nose and blowing slightly against my plugged nose. There was a big pop, it hurt and immediately came back to the surface. For the next five days or so I was extremely dizzy and had to stay home from work as I couldn't really even walk upright. Obviously this was concerning. In the course of taking my PADI courses I learned that every 30 feet is another atmosphere of pressure. In otherwords you feel much more pressure per foot in water than in air. So while it may take you driving for hundreds of feet up a mountain pass before your ears will feel the pressure difference, in water you need to equalize the pressure in your ears every 3-4 feet! Some of this depends on you inner ear and the way everything is put together inside your own head, so some experimentation is needed, but follow the rule of 3-4 feet tell you find otherwise. You can read all about it in medical terms here. You basically should never have a loud painful pop when equalizing, if that happens you have waited too long to equalize. So back to the pool example, if you wait till the bottom of the deep end to equalize you are too late, you need to equalize several times on the way down, this can be hard to do if your holding your breath, holding your nose and slowly swimming to the bottom.

Dives:

March 2001
Bahamas
March 2001
I had two certification dives.
I had two get your feet wet dives.

April 18th 2001
Point Lobos, just past Carmel CA
I went on a two tank dive with Richard Gartner and Stuart Lawrence, two of my work mates. This was my first cold water dive, I had purchased all of my equipment a couple of weeks prior and tried all the gear out in a local pool. The first dive I was quite nervous, first "real dive" by myself without an instructor, my first shore dive, the Bahama dives were boat dives, my first surface swim, my first surface swim through the kelp. We decided before diving to head for a small arch across the bay. Once I calmed myself down, I had some trouble getting down, due to not enough weights. Once down though Richard who was leading since he had dove here before, just took off. I mean he motored through the water without looking back at all, so much for a dive buddy. I think we actually ended up getting separated on this dive twice, I know once for sure. The second dive we ran into a plankton "swarm", I have never seen so much life in one place in my life. You could see only about 4 inches in front of your face while in the plankton.

May 2nd and 3rd 2001
McAbee Beach
As part of buying all my gear I got the PADI Advanced Open Water classes for "free". So one weekend Stac, the kids and I went down to Monterey with Richard Gartner for some advanced dives. We did two dives on Saturday, both were shore dives at McAbee Beach. The first one was locating a bucket of cement that sat somewhere on the ocean floor. The bucket is used by all the instructors, so it has stuff growing all over it and it does not stick out as a foreign object that much. Once I found it I had to use a lift bag to bring the bucket to the surface, a tricky maneuver since the volume of air expands as rise and you can end up with a runaway lift bag rocketing to the surface where the bag collapses and bucket comes sinking back on your head. I managed to do both. The next dive was a navigation exercise, where I had to do counted measured kicks and try to swim with a compass in a perfect square. This is not as easy as it may seem.

September 19th 2001
Lovers Point, Pacific Grove CA

Stuart Lawrence, Hank Humphreys and I headed down for a dive, we decided to go with a dive instructor to familiarize us with the area. We ended up heading out from the leftt hand side of Lover's Point as you face the ocean. We did two dives. It had been a little while since I had dove, and I had some trouble with my mask sealing properly on the first dive, so I had to take a minute on the surface to relax myself and catch my breath. This is I think one of the most important lessons about diving, is to make sure your relaxed and ready to go "in" the water prior to going down. If you have had a surface swim out to your dive location stop, rest and just relax yourself prior to going down. We ended up doing two dives on this one, I think we ended up getting separated on one of the dives and had to surface. We saw some huge spider crabs, very large sea stars, kelp and seals.

January 12th 2002
BreakWater Cove, Monterey CA

March 30th 2002
Kauai, HI
As part of our Hawaii vacation I wanted to also do some diving. One place I really wanted to dive was Tunnels Beach out on the North Shore, unfortunately the weather conspired against me and they canceled on me. But I did go diving with Fathom 5 out of Koloa Landing on the south side. Both were boat dives. The first was at Sheraton Caverns, just off the coast of the Sheraton hotel, this was a very cool dive with lots of underwater "canyons", arches and caves. I got to see tons of fish and very large sea turtle, the visibility was not super great for Hawaii due to all the rain, but much better than Monterey. The depth was around 60 feet. The second dive was closer back to the harbor, I can't recall the name. On the way to the site I got sea sick and ralphed like 5 times over the side of the boat. I thought that I was out for the next dive, but after throwing up I felt great. The dive shop owner noted "The reason they don't have guns on boats is that a sea sick person would kill themselves". We went looking for White Tip Reef Sharks, as they were known to frequent the area, but none were to be found. I did end up seeing more turtles and a Crown of Thorns.

April 4th 2002
Maui, HI

July 16th 2002
Channel Islands

Feb 24th 2003
Breakwater Cove, Montery

Feb 24th 2003
Blue Spring, Florida

Aug 5th 2003
Point Lobos, just past Carmel CA

Oct 12th 2003
Channel Islands

March 6th 2004
Point Lobos, Blue Fish Cove

June 17th 2004
Saxe Point, Victoria, BC

June 19th 2004
Ogden Point, Victoria, BC

April 14th 2005
Kauai, Hawaii

June 15th 2006
Point Defiance, Tacoma, Washingotn

May 18, 2007
Cove 2 West Seattle

May 9, 2008
Puget Sound Seattle

Cheat links

• My Dive Computer manual
• Cheat Sheet on how to use the dive computer