Here We Go Again

Christmas Day for cats is always a wrapping extravaganza!

https://youtu.be/09kOp2MAn2Q

Neko is one of the sweetest cats we've ever owned. And also one of the dumbest. His intelligence level is particularly well demonstrated by the moment when he turns around to attack the tissue paper moving behind him. It's moving because your tail is moving it, idiot!

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?

The video from the second day of my diving trip to the Hood Canal earlier this month. The first dive at the Flagpole pinnacle had the usual big shoals of rockfish, cloud sponges full of squat lobsters, a bunch of wolf eels and a giant pacific octopus deep in a hole guarding her masses of yellow eggs.

The second dive at Elephant Wall had a lot of pretty nudibranchs, and the rather odd sight of a wolf eel and a GPO sharing the same hole.

https://youtu.be/-Ucg8C-9IiQ

It really was a perfect weekend :-)

Barred owl branching fledglings, with parent flying in to feed. 6.30am, low light, maximum zoom, so grainy. Also me barely out of bed and handheld, so wobbly. Still thought it was worth sharing though! That barred owl baby takes the dead thing, then doesn't seem to know what to do with it...

https://youtu.be/n0mKmS3oGAk

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

Neko is two and a half years old, and still hasn't lost the urge to chase his own tail. Even to the point where he nearly falls off the cat tree. And I wish I'd carried on filming, because about a minute after I stopped, he DID fall off the cat tree...

Putting in a youtube link only, because youtube deliberately stopped embeds from playing ::sigh::

https://youtu.be/j1N8CFl7gZw

Last week's dive at the southern tip of Whidbey Island was a much more typical Puget Sound dive - a clay wall with ledges and holes, which means it's much less pretty than the last two dives I did. It's all very grey-brown, on the whole, though some interesting critters do live on the ledges and holes, and it was very fishy.

Labelling the critters was popular last time, so I did it again. Video here.

We took a sunset trip with Seattle Ballooning, who fly out of the Auburn area. The balloon launched from a small airfield on a gorgeous evening.



( Much more lies below )

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!