blog.erik.rainey.name

...on flickr.

Amber and I just go back from our cruise on Royal Caribbean's Voyager of the Sea. I was deeply impressed with the ship itself (so much so that we bought the "Building the MegaShips" DVD they had in the store on the ship about the ship). For the most part I defer to Amber's detailed post here about our trip except to add detail about my dive. Specifically my right ear would not clear, which is not really important other than to emphasis how close I was to being able to dive the first dive (which was going to be an 80ft max Wall dive on a edge of the island). Supposedly the bottom of the wall is at 3000ft, but really past 140ft, it's just a dark blue void, so it's not like you can see the bottom. Incidently, I was able to see from my vantange point at 7ft, 2 sea turtles (which were not close enough to photograph) and bunch of fish.

I got my certification for PADI Rescue Diving over the weekend. The lake conditions were terrible (visibility was less than 5 ft at the surface). The camp site that the dive instructors choose was literally covered in spiders so Amber had to stay in the car the whole time that we visited their site, which was only limited to an hour or two in the morning. The dive site had a few fisherman who, on Sunday, decided to call the park rangers on us. On the morning before we had accidentally swam under their line and got it tangled. Evidently they were still pissed the next day.

It's been a week or two since I got back from my dive trip to Key Largo, and I've been really bad, and have not posted anything, since my camera is pretty much dead, but I can refer to all my friend's pictures. I had a great time!

• Justin's Photo's
• Scott and Nicole's Photo's
• Walter's Photo's

Well I'm officially a PADI Advanced Open Water Diver now. Scott and I passed the course this weekend. We did our dives at a place called ClearSprings in Terrell Texas, which is a SCUBA park. We had to do 5 types of dives, Peak Performance Buoyancy, Navigation, Night, Deep and Search and Recovery.

For the peak performance dive, I wore my full wetsuit and 12lbs of weights, along with the rest of my gear. I managed to be able to control my depth based only on the amount of air in my lungs, which is really where you want to be. However, at greater depths I was having a hard time getting just enough air in BCD to account for compression of the wetsuit.

For the Navigation dive, we had to swim shapes underwater, counting kicks or time or air usage. I've had a recurring problem with the big toe nail on my left foot (it's not ingrown, but it's pushing hard on the skin in the area, which becomes inflammed as a result) that is exacerbated by the way my fins strap on (they basically compress that toe from the front, which is really painful). I had to fix my fins a couple of times during the nav dive, which threw off my count, which threw off my shape. I also was having a problem with my ears that day. I couldn't seem to equalize them easily. It was always a struggle to get them to clear, like I had something compacted in front of the eustation tube. It's actually suprising I was able to function given that I was constantly readjusting fin or my ear during all these dives on Saturday.

The last dive on Saturday was the Night Dive, which was a lot of fun, and very surreal. I can't really describe the experience, except that it was reminiscent of being in a video game like Doom 3, where your only source of light is your flashlight and without it you have no source of reference for anything. Things tend to suddenly appear, like fish (not zombies) or rocks. It was also odd to see fish actually sleeping on the bottom. They just sort of float or sit right at the bottom, ususally on some plant, asleep, but their mouths still open and close to allow water to circulate over their gills. I'm definitely looking forward to doing some Night Dives in the ocean.

On Sunday, we started the day with the Deep Dive. ClearSprings has a special "can" at the bottom of the lake for doing the this aspect of the Advanced checkout which is just barely deep enough (given the low level of the lake and the drought here). The downside of diving in a lake is that it is freakin' cold. Scott and I both had to wear 2 wetsuits and hoods in order to be somewhat comfortable. I had a shortie 3mm under a 2/3mm full wetsuit and a 3mm hood and normal gloves. My hands were really the only uncomfortably cold part of me, owning to the thinness of the gloves. Visibility in a lake is normally awful and at ~60ft, it's basically a night dive with heavy sediment. Once we started ascending, it actually started to get a little uncomfortably warm in the upper waters. And of course, the temp above water was over a hundred.

The last dive we did was the Search and Recovery dive, which we aced. Our instructor left a weight with yellow and orange fluorescent bottles attached to it which we had to find out amoung the "hydrilla". Which permeate the bottom of the shallow areas of the lake, thus making it very hard to see anything which has sunk to the bottom (hence the fluorescent bottles). Scott and I did what we call a "comb" pattern, following the shore, and shooting out like comb teeth and comming back to the shore. We found the object, clipped on the weight bag and proceeded to overfill the bag. Well I overfilled the bag. While I was floating above it. And while I was holding on to it. So, it shot to the surface and I decided that since it was fairly shallow, it wasn't a problem to hold on to it. Once Scott met me on the surface, we resunk the bag and tried filling it correctly, but not to raise it, but just to get it neutrally buoyant and swim it back underwater, which we did.

After we finished checking out, we decided to check out the sunken plane fuselage on the north end of the lake. It would have been a better idea to get out an walk over then dive down because it was a bit of a swim, probably 200 yards, of which I think we swam between 70-100 yards under water. The plane was fairly well preserved, but covered in lake scum. Bazaarly, it (and the sunken boat in another location in the lake) was filled with tiny fish who seem to congregate in the cockpit.

Now we just need to plan a trip out to an ocean dive somewhere.