12 posts tagged “scuba”
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:
Commencement Bay
From dive boat with picture
From the dive boat
Updates this evening.
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.
A comment made to me as I arrived at the aquarium last night for my bi-monthly shark dive.
How true - it appears glamorous, until one realizes that most of what we do is clean the shark-poo off the fake coral, while of course 24 potential man-eaters circle us.
It was decided last night that we need some UW photos of the South Pacific Aquarium (read: shark tank) for purposes of making a grid map of the UW exhibits. Currently our method of cleaning the coral islands is to have duplicate sets of coral. We send down a pair of divers (with shark sticks) to an island, then send down huge trash cans full of replacement coral. We then remove a piece of dirty coral and replace it with a new, clean, identical piece. The dirty coral gets placed in a rubble pile and sent back to the surface once the bucket is full. So, in weeks to come, I will have photos.
Only 2 sharks of the 24 have posed threats. The sand tiger, ST2, himself has never made a move but his species has. I was bumped by one on a deco line on the East Coast once. Apparently they will snap very quickly at anything within their reach that hacks them off for whatever reason - so we keep our distance from him. And Lemon, the large, lovely lemon shark, once nudges a diver who held up her shark stick and it touched Lemon's nose. Lemon then swam to the far end of the tank and charged the diver, turning away at the last second. That was apparently several years ago; but still if Lemon is agitated, we get out of the tank. I love this job, I really do. I love diving open water of course, but there's something about the aquarium that's just too cool.
Here's our boy ST2. Note the obvious need for an orthodontist.
I got 6 pages of the dissertation edited yesterday, and need to get back at it today. Mom has her checkup later and needs to run about 1000 errands, then I will bring her home and go to school to finish working on the mess there.
A few of us signed up for a cool physics workshop in Seattle on Sept 1. Miss IGottaMoveNow was one. We signed up as soon as we got the info, but it was too late and we were put on a waiting list. I found out a few weeks ago that we made the cut to go, and emailed Miss IGMN. She would check on her availablilty, and let me know asw she thought they had reservations somewhere for 4-wheeling (!!!). Yesterday, I still had not heard from her that she was available, so I replied that she could not go. Of course within 8 hours of my declining for her, she decided that yes indeed she could go, so I had to email back and say oops I goofed. Another reason to love her. But it's am inportant part of mentoring her (why am I mentoring a teacher with 2+ years of experience??? Because she didn't get it the first time....) that I keep her close. Besides, there's that thing that my tech instructor trainer taught me: Keep your friends close and your enemies even closer.
Back to work. Have a great day.
