Here We Go Again

I finally got the video edited from the Titan Nuclear Missile Silo dive last month. I went off on the Sevens tour right afterwards, and then I came home, got caught up, and caught covid. So it took a while, but it's done.

I did this dive a decade ago, but my dive buddy had never done it and wanted to go. Not a lot changes down there - it's all rusting metal and algae - but it is fun to do once in a while. It's an experience, for sure. Though clambering about through dark tunnels on uneven floors in full cold water dive gear is strenuous!

The video starts with the equipment room, which is quite small and shallow, and filled with junk and doors leading places you don't want to go. Then it moves on to one of the missile silos - water that's 110 feet deep with another 40 or 50 feet above the surface (the missiles were large). There are a few fun additions down there, like a Fallout Vault guy toy and a plastic skeleton.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SgRg0K7UyQ

No more diving or hiking for me yet since I still have a bit of the covid cough. If I had to catch it, why couldn't someone have given me the damn thing in winter?

I went diving today - took a friend to see the Corsair plane wreck in Lake Washington that I first visited a couple of years ago.

https://youtu.be/2OiC8MqPWM0

Eric normally dives a rebreather, some space age tech that means he uses only tiny amounts of air because he has a scrubber system that removes the CO2 (it will also absolutely kill you if you don't maintain it with extreme care, which is why I won't touch one, but that's another thing). For reasons that don't need exploring at this juncture, he was diving on open circuit today, and using air like normal people.

Because Eric normally dives a rebreather, I have no idea how fast Eric goes through a tank of air. We were down at around 80-90 feet (24-27m) which is reasonably deep and means you use air faster.

We followed the line down to the wreck, found the cockpit and engine sections. I asked him a couple of times if he was okay for air, and he didn't give a number for the amount he had left, just said it was okay, so I went with it. He had a bit of a buoyancy control issue at one point because buoyancy is different between a rebreather and open circuit, so he floated up a bit and then dumped some air and came back down. We looked around a bit more, and then he pointed to the line that went deeper to the more scattered bits of the plane wreck. I asked him again if his air was okay and said he yes, so off we went.

And then he poked at me and went 'Nope, nope, turn around,' so we did and started back the way we came. (He explained later that he'd got the lines mixed up, and thought he was pointing at the line back to shore, and only realised otherwise when he saw we were going down, not up.)

Soon after we turned around, he was poking at me again, and clearly trying to tell me something, but I couldn't figure out what. There's a diver sign for 'I have no air' where you drag your hand across your neck like you're slitting your own throat. He said he did that, but I didn't see it. All I saw was him pointing at his regulator in his mouth. I looked at it and it wasn't leaking or anything, and I was trying to work out what he was trying to tell me, and then I realised he wasn't breathing out. And he's pointing at his reg while holding his breath - oh shit!

So I gave him my regulator to breathe from while I used my secondary, and we grabbed onto one another and slowly swam up to the surface with both of us breathing from my tank exactly as you're supposed to, and everything was fine. I don't think I've practiced an air share drill since the rescue diving course back in, er, 2013, because I'm a terrible slacker. They say you should practice air share drills and stuff regularly, but it's not the same when you're expecting your dive buddy to tell you they have no air as when it comes out of the blue. But we're both experienced divers and knew what to do, and I have to say Eric was a lot calmer than I might have been if I ran out of air and my dive buddy couldn't figure out what I was trying to tell them.

Anyway, after we got back to shore, he told me he had his back-up cylinder of air for emergency use in the car, but hadn't bothered to take it on the dive because he 'wouldn't need it'. Eric! There's no point having an emergency 'just in case' air supply in the car! If you take it with you and don't need it, that's fine, but if you don't take it and you DO need it... sigh.

This is the video from last Saturday's dives at the Hood Canal. When we booked months ago, we were debating between last weekend and this weekend. Given that it's been raining much of the day, we made the right choice!

We saw a free-swimming wolf eel. I love those ugly guys, and it's always great to see them like that, because mostly you just see the head poking out of a hole, which gives no indication of quite how much eel is hidden back there. This one was about 6 feet long.
We also saw a giant pacific octopus sitting out in the open instead of tucked into a cave. Unfortunately this one was deep, at around 90 feet/28m, so the lighting is bad. Anywhere my light shines on it, it looks insanely red, and anywhere out of the light just looks green, which is the only colour that makes it that deep. Still cool though!

https://youtu.be/PVmp2GazWUs

I mentioned there were a lot of sharks, right?

https://youtu.be/NVnnBjGJKq0

For the afternoon dives at Roca, we started diving on the other side of the rock - the side with all the current and surge. We dropped in negatively buoyant and sank straight into shark soup.
The silky shark dives at Jardines de la Reina in Cuba were amazing. There were probably 30 sharks under the boat. I have video with 18 in one shot.
This was something else. Sharks above, below, out into the blue - mainly white-tips hugging the wall and silvertips further out, but a few were rule-breakers who broke the trend. You could be kicking full-on to stay in one spot and hoping you weren't kicking a shark in the face (I'm sure the sharks were too smart for that) because everywhere was sharks. And after 10-15 minutes, when you'd blown through a third of your air, you let the current take you around the point to hang out and chill on the lee side again. Among the most exhilarating dives of my life.
And this is why you sometimes want a naval base in a National Park/UNESCO World Heritage Site. It keeps the shark-finners away...

With the fic draft done, I finally stopped slacking and finished editing a video from my dive trip over the New Year.

The Revillagigedos Islands, 240 miles plus from the tip of Baja, Mexico. A Mexican National Park and UNESCO world heritage site. A diving bucket list.
The Boiler at San Benedicto Island was the second day of diving we did, but I made the video first because the thing the Revillagigedos are most famed for is the giant oceanic mantas. I've dived with mantas off Hawai'i, the reef mantas. The smaller mantas. The mantas there are basically being fed, with lights put in the water in a cove to attract plankton, which is manta food. The mantas are eating and you just happen to be there.

The Pacific Ocean is huge. Diving at The Boiler, you hang off a precipitous wall and the mantas come. They could go anywhere, but they choose to come and check out the weird bubbling creatures, circling around you and looking you right in the eye as they pass. Some of them will hang with you for the whole dive, just because they can. I wonder what they think we are?
The Boiler would have been great dive site anyway - great wall, amazing visibility, lots of pretty fish, ledges full of white-tipped reef sharks. But it's hard to stop looking at the mantas. 1080 recommended.

https://youtu.be/hZ9EuALoRfU

I did a couple of dives in the last two weeks. The first was at Mukilteo, one of central Puget Sound's typical junk diving sites. I dived Mukilteo once in about 2013, and was so underwhelmed I didn't go back until now, so my expectations were low. That meant it wasn't hard to be pleasantly surprised!

The central feature of Mukilteo is the geodrome, a large icosahedron, which the giant plumose anemones love to grow on. Other than that, there are various bits of pipe and other stuff out there to provide hidey holes, and one of them had a wolf eel in. A wolf eel day is always a good day.

Video is here.

This past weekend I dived a scattered plane wreck in Lake Washington. In 1950, two navy Corsair fighter planes collided on a training mission and plunged into Lake Washington off Seattle (the pilots were rescued). One plane survived mostly intact and was later raised, restored, and now lives in a museum. The second plane broke up on impact and still lies in the lake at around 80-85 feet.

The plane is in multiple pieces, several of them just large chunks of mangled metal and wires, but the engine and propellor shaft are clearly recognisable, along with a section of that distinctively bent Corsair wing. (Corsairs really were quite ugly planes, but sometimes that helps to identify them!) This was Lake Washington, so not much to see other than the plane, I think I only spotted six fish the whole dive.

What's left after 70 years in the mud.

The weather is very changeable now, with wind and scattered showers a feature of many days, so outdoor activities require more thoughtful scheduling...

I had a lovely dive at Titlow Beach near Tacoma on Sunday. There are a few areas people dive around there, but the most common one is the pilings which are the remnants of an old jetty. It was a funny sort of day - the tide calendars said slack tide would be at 11.39am, so we got in the water at 11.10. We swam out from the beach a bit through the shallow pilings and found some pretty stiff current that was tough to swim into, so we hung onto the pilings and waited. And waited. 11.40 came and went with no sign of slack tide, so we decided to drop down to the bottom, where the current is always weaker than at the surface and swim out to the main pilings.

That worked well, but we had to stay on the shoreward side of the pilings, because the seaward side still had current that was hard work! Andyway, the vis was great for the area, well over 20 feet, and since the site is so shallow (my max depth for the dive was 32 feet) we had sunlight on the bottom and we could see without needing lights! The pilings are covered in giant white plumose anemones. We didn't see anything particularly cool or unusual, but the whole dive was just pretty and it's always nice to be able to see XD

I had a request to name the fish, so I've tried doing that with this video. I haven't labelled the same fish every time (buffalo sculpin were everywhere again, though not as dramatically coloured as at Skyline where the background was more vivid). Do not ask about the small sculpin at 3.10-it's a small sculpin, they're a nightmare to identify...

https://youtu.be/LjVsTSzxnaA

Lake Washington is fairly narrow, but it also gets very deep, so it's crossed by two bridges which descend to float on the surface of the water - one of these is the I-90 bridge. In 1990, while the bridge was closed for resurfacing and widening, some poor engineering decisions were made and many sections of the bridge sank. The piece at the westernmost end lies in shallow enough water for easy recreational diving.

The current I-90 bridge still floats in the middle, and of course it's directly over the sunken portion, so even on a beautiful sunny day, the bridge dive is a night dive - there's no daylight making it under there. You can feel the vibrations of the big trucks through the water while you're underneath the current bridge. Besides the intact section of bridge, there's a lot of other debris down there - from big stuff like girders, to general detritus like traffic cones and hubcaps. Some of the fish make use of it all for hidey holes.

We followed the line of reflective poles down to the sunken section of bridge, swam along the outside of it, then swam back in over what used to be the roadway and sidewalk/pavement. When you get back to the daylight in shallow water, there's a lot of weed.

I would have got much better video if I'd remembered to take my camera in December, when I first did this dive. The water last week was soupy with plankton, visibility only about 10 feet, as opposed to 25 feet or so in December. On the other hand, I was chilly when I got out of the water in December and perfectly toasty last week, so you pick your poison!

I confess the shot of my dive buddy in his car at the end is cheating a little - that was taken on a different day when we dived Three Tree Point and my camera stopped working after just one underwater shot.

I can't embed the video here, because youtube want you to watch it there so they can advertise on it, so here's the link. HD highly recommended!

I was going to do something like edit the underwater video in a logical order, even if it was starting from the end and working back, but I received a demand for whale sharks ASAP, so here's the video from day three of my trip.

In late summer and autumn, whale sharks come to the soupy, plankton-filled shallow waters of Bahia de los Angeles. The bay is stunning, ringed by beautiful desert mountains; the water is warm, and snorkelling with the whale sharks is wonderful! They emerge from the gloom, grey and white spotted giants carrying a collection of remoras. There are huge shoals of herring out there too, attracting sea birds.

There's a theory that we're supposed to stay at least six feet away from the whale sharks, and avoid touching them. It's a great theory, but nobody explained it to the whale sharks, who are very big, and can swim a lot faster then I can. If they're heading right for you, there's really no getting out of the way (and I wouldn't want to kick one in the face with my fins trying). I did get gently brushed on the arm by the tip of a tail on one occasion...

We took a late afternoon dive at Punta Don Juan afterwards, which was a lovely site with more stingrays than I saw anywhere else on the trip. I had a technical issue with my camera, though, so I didn't get much footage from that dive.



Enjoy the whale sharks! I certainly did :-)

I finally got to go diving! The weather and the tides agreed to coincide with my schedule last week, and I went to visit the fish for the first time since January.

It was a very fishy dive - in the deeper water, it seemed like there was a buffalo sculpin lying on every rock, and the shallows were full of little saddleback gunnels. The water here may be murky and green and cold, but you can't say it isn't colourful down there!