13 posts tagged “diving”
My new twitter name will be Stardiverr1, if they ever get it working. My phone is verified there now, anyway. THe links on this page:
http://twitter.com/Stardiverr1
all point back here:
Sigh.
The teacher from hell at school has managed to get a lovely article about herself in the teeny local newspaper for attending a workshop at NASA, to collect data and teach a class that she doesn't teach. The article made her sound like superteacher, and pretty much implied that it was a wonder that NASA had actually been able to launch anything into space for the last few decades without her presence. The entire staff is in hysterics.
Int he meantime, the aquarium was awesome last night. I got 95 minutes in the shark tank and it was excellent. Got a pile more sand tiger teeth, too.
What a hell week, timewise. I wonder if this will ever end?
First, what lies above?
The Lady Washington. If you don't remember her from Pirates of the Caribbean, you can see the shots you missed in the movie read about her here:
Dive 1, North Wall of Point Defiance, from the Ocean Quest. Max depth about 85 ft (yes I followed the wall a bit). Sighted lots of huge shrimp, many buffalo sculpin, 3 wolf eels in one den, and one medium-sized GPO. THe fishing line all over the bottom made me ill. 65 minutes.
Dive 2: Zee's Reef. Max depth about 60 ft. Several HUGE GPO's and the occasional pair of wolf eels. Ratfish at 40-0 feet, which is unusually shallow for them. More shrimp. Giant rockfish under a rock with part of the lower jow on the left side of his face sliced pretty neatly by a hook; old injury. 70 minutes.
Dive 3: Sunrise Beach. Usually one of my favorite sites, but not today. There was a ripping current; Capt. George said about 5 knots but I think that was a but much. We did the bottom swim from the boat drop out to find the reef itself, which took about 5-6 minutes. We began to swim the reef at about the same time the current kicked up. I spoted another GPO den with eggs all over the roof, so this lady will die before winter, for certain. The eggs looked good and she was doing a great job of protecting them, so her legacy will live on. Many scallops. I got tired of fighting the current and began to pull myself along the rocks, dislodging a few scallops along the way. When disturbed, scallops flap their shells and flutter away just like Gene Scallop.
At about 22 minutes, one of my buddies looked at me and did the "not really OK" sign and thumbed the dive. Because of the current and the number of morons in fishing boats above, we thought it best to stay together and so both grabbed hold of Jim. We made a perfectly stunning ascent, 3 min safety stop at 15 ft and all. We hopped back on the boat to find the other buddy team already there, having decided to abort long before we did. Spouse and one other diver had elected not to dive at all. Smartest decisions of the day, really.
Off to school tomorrow. Meetings. Three days of meetings. Oh please.
Link to all dive sites today.
Lady Washington at dock:
From dive boat with picture
From the dive boat
Updates this evening.
One more teaching day, and then 2 days of exams, and then a worthless day when students show up for 25-min classes to turn in their books and pay their fines and demand to know their grades which aren't done because their exams aren't yet graded and the late work t hey turned in at the last minute (more on this later) isn't in the computer gradebook yet.
Groups are finishing their scavenger hunt defense later today. I need to write this up for the conference in the fsall before the deadline passes. I might even need to publish it. But the dissertation calls....... maybe this will be not too much work since I already have all the student work done. I'm farther ahead this year than I've ever been, so perhaps the classroom will even get clean and organized before school is out and I can spend my last day doing true finish-up stuff. Woo hoo.
Looks like I won't get to dive this week. I've never missed a night, but the district has decided that we are conducting interviews for the open science position on Thursday and out dive was moved to Thursday night. If the last interview is at 4, and over at 4:30, and we debrief until 5, I could make it on a mad dash. We'll see. In any case, I will scram over as fast as I can and at least help pull people out of the water, but I for sure won'[t get there in time to go see if Qannick is out to the public yet. Dang. I may treat myself to a day at the beach next week if the tides are right and do some diving. There are no dive-police there so solo won't be an issue.
Oh, and we have a new principal. The rest of the staff (who met her during the interview process) is pleased with the choice. I liked her on paper and in person, but she's my 9th principal and I've worked for the good, the excellent, and the shouldn't-be-in-the-business, so I can pretty much work for anyone. I've found what I can't stand is when the rest of the staff has no confidence in the principal and the whole mood is sour. This past year has shown me that I can make even weak leaders step up to the plate; I just don't want to have to do that anymore. I want to do my job and be held accountable to high standards and have excellence expected of me and be supported in the process. I want someone to come down on my colleagues when they are slacking and to discipline and write them up when they are openly ineffective or breaking rules.
Now I'm off to polish the biology exam and work on some last-minute grades. I love long daylight hours up here now. I really hate getting up and going to school in the dark and coming home in the dark.
We dove the North Pacific tank in two teams. First team was on SS and did a good deal of vacuuming, using the new system. My buddy were on SCUBA and I wiped down the windows, relocated some kelp that had somehow moved, cleaned up visitor-deposited trash, and scrubbed off the large rocks. The vacuum-ers were in the center mostly, and the fish were totally freaked so swam madly around by the windows which made our jobs, um, interesting. I like the freedom of not being tethered, but like also having the voice com unit with the AGAs that we have on SS.
Then I planted, well, tried to anyways, some lovely sand dollars. Place them in rows, think military, were my instructions. I swam the bucketful of lil guys to the designated sandy area, and found that I needed to chase away the skates and flounder before starting to work. I placed about 150 of the sand dollars, painstakingly in rows, one at a time. About that time, the sand began to vibrate and out popped one more flounder. Not one single body part had been visible. He had to have been under at least 3 inches of sand. Needless to say, all my sand dollars went flying - I replaced them all, and moved to a nearby spot to begin another "planting." About that time, the flounder, or maybe another one, re-appeared and settled himself right back down into the center of the re-positioned battallion. Argh. I finished the second planting, then while I was repairing the first planting yet again, one of the skates came back and sent my second effort scattering to the winds. I did the best I could yet again, but the email from the DSO this AM said that the fish were still wreaking havock with the display. Grrrrrr.
Most depressing of all was our call to go over to the Beluga tank and assist with a feeding procedure for one of the beautiful whales, who had become mysteriously ill. Unpleasant, to say the least.
Back at the aquarium today for other volunteer duties. Stopped by to see (and photograph) ET and the new girls. This is ET, all 3400 lbs of him, sitting right below the bridge where he can talk to all the visitors:
And here is Basilla, resting in her favorite underwater spot:
It is hoped that when breeding season starts in January that ET and these two ladies will be interested in one another.
This is a pitiful photo of our white tip shark. Note white tips on tail fin.
She is about 8 ft long, but seems much much longer when she decides to lay on your head while you are cleaning coral. She only did that twice last night. We think it's just that she likes bubbles. Last night though, she mostly just wriggled her way under my fins while I was kneeling in the sand to work on the coral. Then I couldn't move for fear that I would kick her. I wasn't worried that she would snap if I did; I just did not want to be rude to her.
