- You walk into the dive shop and recognize the names on every tank tag
- The dive shop employees all know your name
- You've wondered how many other people have pony bottles under their desks and regs in their filing cabinents
- You've had to explain to someone that yes, people dive around here and yes, there is plenty of stuff to see
- You've carried scuba tanks on a city bus/train or had to leave your tanks on the sidewalk so you could hail a cab
- Your choice of apartment is dependent upon availability of storage space for your gear
- You've lost a very expensive piece of equipment somewhere in the ocean
Thursday, November 21, 2013
You know you're a local NYC diver when...
You know you're a local NYC diver when...
Monday, November 11, 2013
Lessons from Dutch, 11/9/13
The most intimidating part of starting, or restarting, a blog is the fear that you will run out of ideas for it, or run out of the will to write in it. I miss the days of LiveJournal where I wrote as much as I wanted to do, daily, about any old thing, with no pressure. Well why can't this blog be the same? Within reason, of course. I'm going to try to keep to the topic of diving, animals, and the environment.
I went diving at Dutch Springs on Saturday, for the usual practice, but also to try out my dry suit, which was freshly back from DUI after a full retrofit of silicone zip seals and cargo pockets. The suit came with the neck seal cut a little and the wrist seals completely uncut. I had to trim the neck seal down to the lowest point it was cut, and was worried when my finger slipped into the seal easily. But my dive buddies told me that silicone doesn't feel as tight, so I hoped for the best. And it didn't leak at all. The problem, I discovered, is getting the neck seal off my head. The smallest part of the seal is big enough for my neck, but not as big as the middle (face) part of my head. Silicone stretches, but not very easily. The first time I tried it on, after a small panic attack, I needed my boyfriend's help to get it off. At Dutch, I also needed help -- including a mortifying instance of me insisting on doing it myself, only to get it stuck in the middle of my face and have a full on sobbing panic attack in front of several people (including the lifeguard) who then came to my rescue. After that experience, I wanted to destroy that seal with my bare hands. However, as these things cost upwards of $100, I feel like I should practice a bit more before giving up and going back to the latex seal. I'm wondering if pulling the sides and then turning my head 90 degrees and lifting will work. But I will wait to do this until I'm with someone I trust, because my expectation is that I will have a claustrophobic panic attack again. I don't plan to be diving in it again until New Year's Eve.
The other thing I learned: I still have a lot of work to do when it comes to underwater navigation. It sounds so simple. Take a compass heading, follow it, making sure it stays between the lines, and get to where you need to be. But it's not. Compasses are shifty, unstable things. Probably didn't help that I was also wearing my compass on my left wrist, instead of my right, where I usually do. But I failed to navigate us from the Silver Comet wreck to the school bus. It's hard to keep your eyes on your compass, monitor your depth, and keep looking ahead for your destination to appear out of the murk. Next time I do it, I will make sure my buddy is swimming alongside me and not behind me, so they can worry about our depth and looking for the wreck. Apparently one of my buddies did see the school bus, but I was too far ahead for her to alert me.
The next thing I learned is that throwing a surface marker buoy in midwater is not easy. Especially when you're already feeling lost and disoriented and you know you've got less than half a tank of gas. Upon giving up on finding the school bus, I decided to end the dive. I signalled to my buddy and started to take out my SMB and spool. I felt too stressed floating in midwater trying to hook the spool up to the SMB, so I sunk down a few feet to rest on the sandy, sloping bottom, where at once I started to kick up a cloud of vis-limiting sand. My spool, which I had in my new cargo pocket, started to unravel immediately. Line wants nothing more than to become a tangled mess as soon as it touches water. I had already unfurled the SMB and now, with 6 feet of flapping orange plastic in one hand and a tangled mess of line in the other, I thought, f* this, I'm not doing it. I might have been wise to drop both items in order to feel like less of a mess, especially in a place like Dutch where there's actually a chance of retrieving them, but I thought I could handle it. I'm still not super comfortable with my buoyancy in my dry suit though, and am often afraid of a runaway ascent. My buddy and I went up to 15 ft, and then I realized I was continuing to go up. I hit 9 feet and started to panic. I made it back down, grabbing my buddy's hand, managed to complete the 3-minute deco stop, and then ascended.
My buddy claims I was in better control than I realized and was just panicking, but I think I may have still been a little underweighted. But I also need to find a better way of storing my spool. Or ditch the spool for a wreck reel and just use that. I should really have a reel anyway, so I can practice navigating wrecks with it.
I went diving at Dutch Springs on Saturday, for the usual practice, but also to try out my dry suit, which was freshly back from DUI after a full retrofit of silicone zip seals and cargo pockets. The suit came with the neck seal cut a little and the wrist seals completely uncut. I had to trim the neck seal down to the lowest point it was cut, and was worried when my finger slipped into the seal easily. But my dive buddies told me that silicone doesn't feel as tight, so I hoped for the best. And it didn't leak at all. The problem, I discovered, is getting the neck seal off my head. The smallest part of the seal is big enough for my neck, but not as big as the middle (face) part of my head. Silicone stretches, but not very easily. The first time I tried it on, after a small panic attack, I needed my boyfriend's help to get it off. At Dutch, I also needed help -- including a mortifying instance of me insisting on doing it myself, only to get it stuck in the middle of my face and have a full on sobbing panic attack in front of several people (including the lifeguard) who then came to my rescue. After that experience, I wanted to destroy that seal with my bare hands. However, as these things cost upwards of $100, I feel like I should practice a bit more before giving up and going back to the latex seal. I'm wondering if pulling the sides and then turning my head 90 degrees and lifting will work. But I will wait to do this until I'm with someone I trust, because my expectation is that I will have a claustrophobic panic attack again. I don't plan to be diving in it again until New Year's Eve.
The other thing I learned: I still have a lot of work to do when it comes to underwater navigation. It sounds so simple. Take a compass heading, follow it, making sure it stays between the lines, and get to where you need to be. But it's not. Compasses are shifty, unstable things. Probably didn't help that I was also wearing my compass on my left wrist, instead of my right, where I usually do. But I failed to navigate us from the Silver Comet wreck to the school bus. It's hard to keep your eyes on your compass, monitor your depth, and keep looking ahead for your destination to appear out of the murk. Next time I do it, I will make sure my buddy is swimming alongside me and not behind me, so they can worry about our depth and looking for the wreck. Apparently one of my buddies did see the school bus, but I was too far ahead for her to alert me.
The next thing I learned is that throwing a surface marker buoy in midwater is not easy. Especially when you're already feeling lost and disoriented and you know you've got less than half a tank of gas. Upon giving up on finding the school bus, I decided to end the dive. I signalled to my buddy and started to take out my SMB and spool. I felt too stressed floating in midwater trying to hook the spool up to the SMB, so I sunk down a few feet to rest on the sandy, sloping bottom, where at once I started to kick up a cloud of vis-limiting sand. My spool, which I had in my new cargo pocket, started to unravel immediately. Line wants nothing more than to become a tangled mess as soon as it touches water. I had already unfurled the SMB and now, with 6 feet of flapping orange plastic in one hand and a tangled mess of line in the other, I thought, f* this, I'm not doing it. I might have been wise to drop both items in order to feel like less of a mess, especially in a place like Dutch where there's actually a chance of retrieving them, but I thought I could handle it. I'm still not super comfortable with my buoyancy in my dry suit though, and am often afraid of a runaway ascent. My buddy and I went up to 15 ft, and then I realized I was continuing to go up. I hit 9 feet and started to panic. I made it back down, grabbing my buddy's hand, managed to complete the 3-minute deco stop, and then ascended.
My buddy claims I was in better control than I realized and was just panicking, but I think I may have still been a little underweighted. But I also need to find a better way of storing my spool. Or ditch the spool for a wreck reel and just use that. I should really have a reel anyway, so I can practice navigating wrecks with it.
Resuscitation
It was brought to my attention this weekend that despite its very short (active) life, my blog has had a positive impact on the world. I had forgotten completely that Liz, a friend who volunteers at the NY Aquarium, first found me through a simple Internet search that led her to my little blog. I later met her at a NYC Sea Gypsies meeting, and thought that was where she came from, and forgot all about the blog thing till this weekend when Liz and I spent the day diving at Dutch Springs together. I gotta say, after 2+ years of my own dedicated volunteer service, the single greatest thing I ever did for the aquarium was helping Liz get there. She is amazingly dedicated and was especially so in the months after Hurricane Sandy totaled the place. She's been a dive team leader/mentor and now educator. She plans to become an open-water instructor and I think she'll be absolutely awesome at it.
So I think it makes sense that I don't abandon this blog. There's always the feeling of, no one's reading this, and I have to be careful of what I say lest I upset someone (which also happened after one of my posts) but I think the benefit of leading people to discover more about diving and volunteering is worth the occasional wrath of cranky boat captains. Still not sure if I'm going to really promote it, or even cross-post on Facebook or LJ -- first let's see if I can actually keep something up.
So I think it makes sense that I don't abandon this blog. There's always the feeling of, no one's reading this, and I have to be careful of what I say lest I upset someone (which also happened after one of my posts) but I think the benefit of leading people to discover more about diving and volunteering is worth the occasional wrath of cranky boat captains. Still not sure if I'm going to really promote it, or even cross-post on Facebook or LJ -- first let's see if I can actually keep something up.
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