Well, a successful day of diving. Well, maybe not a day, more like a single dive of about 40 minutes, but still very cool. We left around 10am, and had to get to the dive shop to rent stuff and get air ahead of time, so by the time we got to Whytcliff Park it was around noon (gotta love traffic).
Things that sucked were the gear! Oh $GODs there is a lot of junk! First there is a poor fitting rubber straight jack… erhm, wetsuit, which gives you about 50% mobility, and is not flattering at all. After thatn you throw a 40 pound weight belt around your waist, making moving anywhere fast a chore. Follow this with a BCD (boyancy control device) which is fine, except that attached to it is a air tank (not a bad thing, just a heavy thing) and an octopus of a regulator, with hoses for inflating the BCD, a regulator and secondary regulator. Oh, did I mention the gloves? The ones that are hard as smeg to get on without a pair of vice grips and a ceiling harness setup to get the fscking things half onto your hands?
We went in slow and easy, and went down slowy to about 10 feet to go along the floor and explored around the floor and wall, heading down to a depth of about 30-40 feet. Most of the time I was kneeling on the floor, wondering how the hell Joker and JokerWife managed to float just a foot or two off the bottom without crashing into it. I’m glad there was no wall to fall down 🙂 When I tried the float thing I just ended up heading towards the surface (a bad thing).
Coming out was heavy again, and a bitch trying to walk on the rocks with 80 pounds of stuff on your back. Oh, and did I mention it was cold? Yea, coming out it was pretty cold. Not terrible, because it was a good day. The main point of a wetsuit as I’m sure you know is to keep a thin layer of water next to your skin and have it heated by your body so you don’t freeze yourself. This requires a good fitting suit to keep the thin layer there. Of course, when renting a suit you’re not going to get a great fit, and sometimes that thin layer turns into large rivers of freezing cold water flowing around your neck, ankles, and anyplace else it can get.
Oh, and traffic was a bitch 🙂