SCUBA

So, the day after Wild Waves, Lance and I went scuba diving with Kevin and Melissa Christensen. The plan was to meet at Edmonds Underwater Park at 8:00am. We woke up around 5:30, unsure of how long it would take to get there from Sara's house. We got there around 7:00. Our friends arrived about 8:00. Kevin drove up from Portland that morning and Melissa came across on the ferry that docked right next to the park. Lance had rented all of our gear the night before. We started getting our gear and realized that the dive shop had forgotten to give us our boots. So, we had to wait until the other dive shop opened at 10:00 and get boots from them-- so much for all of us diving together.

Here is Lance all suited up. Doesn't he look studly? And here I am trying my darndest to get the zipper up on my head cover. It is quite a work out just getting the suit on.

This is fun? The wet suit is SO hard to move in. There is an extra 30 lbs of weight on a belt around my waist, plus the rest of the gear. It is quite cumbersome. So here I am, looking quite pathetic, as we are just about to head out.

Edmonds Underwater Park is a man-made reef with sunken boats, wooden crates, tires and things that create a reef to attract fish. The area we were diving was not very deep. I think the deepest we ever got was about 35 feet. There were some really big Lingcod and Cabezoms. One Lingcod was so long that when it swam directly underneath me, I looked down to my feet. Its head was at my feet and its tail was at my head. Cool.

The Cabezoms have a HUGE head and a shorter body. They look like they crawl along the reef with their front fins.There are also all kinds of star fish. Some with 5 legs, some with 20, some red, some green, some purple. We saw schools of fish, lots of shrimp, crab of all variety. I like the crab that have seaweed growing on them to help camoflouge. There were little jellyfish attached to the seaweed all over. Amazing things.

I was having bouyance issues at the first part of the dive. My BC would not purge air and I couldn't go down very well. I was just starting to feel like I could control my bouyancy mostly with my breathing, when I looked up at a large kelp. Suddenly I was going up fast. My BC was not purging and I was surfacing quickly. When I got to the top, I found that my BC was completely empty and I was still floating on the surface. It was then that it dawned on me that my weight belt had popped off. It is a very dangerous and scary thing to go shooting to the surface. Luckily, I was only at about 20 ft when it happened. Needless to say, that was the end of that dive. Lance looked for the weight belt, but we were in so much "sea cabbage" that it was impossible. Fabulous, 30 lbs of lead at $4 per lb, and no weight belt.

Back to the dive shop. I got a new weight belt that had a much better clasp and new shoes because mine were too big and were chaffing my feet. We did our second dive with the Christensens. Had a great time.

I still had quite a bit of air in my tank from my first. Lance decided to go look for my missing weight belt with the remaining air while I bobbed on the surface. No luck.

Day two of diving, we went just the two of us. We stopped at a store in the morning for some snacks called "Ranchers Market." We thought it was going to be like normal grocery store. We walked in and felt instantly like minorities. It was an Asian supermarket-- the "Ranchers Market"-- of course, one immediately thinks Asian. Anyway, we saw some really cool fruits, the best seafood selection we had ever seen in a store, neat snacks. We found a rice cracker mix that had dried fish in it. We had to get it for Dylan. Anyway, we had fun.

Had a great couple of dives on day two. What a fun, crazy weekend.