There will be no December meeting. Our next regular meeting will be in January.
Wow, another year come and gone, I just wrote 2001 for the first time. It's scary! I hope to see all club members at the upcoming Christmas Party. We will have minimal business and maximum enjoyment. For any that may not make it to the party please accept my best wishes for a happy and safe holiday season. Until then, Happy Diving. – Mark Clausen
Saturday Dec 2, 9:00am – Meet at La Jolla Cove to dive Boomers. Breakfast to follow the dive. Back up sites will be Hospital Point or Marine Room.
We'll plan our next lobster dive at the meeting.
Saturday, December 9 — 5:00pm at Shaun McMahon's. Details will be sent out on a separate flyer.
We don't have any club dives scheduled at the moment. Let Mark know if you're interested in diving the USS Hogan.
The Lois Ann offers club members a discount on many open boat trips. Due to heavy demand, they may not be able to offer the discount on all their trips. For more information, call 800/201-4381 or check the Lois Ann schedule on the next page or at http://www.loisann.com.
The Bahamas -
When: January 20-27, 2001
Where: Island Resort and Golf Club, Freeport, Grand Bahama Island
Cost: Lodging: we currently have 4, 2-bedroom condos. Based on quad occupancy, lodging is $140.00 per person for the week. The condos are completely equipped with full kitchens, pool on site, hourly bus service to Xanadu Beach, walking distance to Princess Casino, golf, shopping and public transit. Each room has a queen bed and 2 twins, as well as a convertible couch if you really want to pack them in.
Diving: diving runs approximately 25.00 per single tank dive, shark dive is $85.00, wreck dive(2 tank) $75.00. We have enough divers for our own boat. Those who've signed up for the trip need to finalize their diving arrangements with the dive operator. Contact Mark Clausen if you have questions.
Airfare: currently we have a quote for $481.00 but they are changing constantly. We are flying via Fort Lauderdale instead of Miami. Even at that price, with standard 2 tank diving on 5 days, the total cost comes to roughly $960.00.
Chris Rink found a couple of interesting Bahamas web sites. Check out http://www.bahamasdiving.com and http://www.caribbeanmag.com
The Christmas party will be at Shaun McMahon's, Saturday, December 9, at 5:00pm. We'll send out details out in a separate flyer.
Congratulations to Paul Lee on winning second place in the props category in the underwater pumpkin carving contest.
Changes are afoot on the Lois Ann. Lois and Larry are retiring. They sold the boat to Randy and Cheri Rice. Randy has been the divemaster for 6 years now so we know the boat will be in good hands. Lois' cookie recipe was part of the sale so our favorite apres dive snack will still be available.
Everyone in OES wishes a very happy retirement to Lois and Larry. We'll miss you every time we go out.
The frost on my lawn is warning me that winter is setting in. We have a huge problem with contaminated runoff from storm drains so be sure to check the beach report before getting in the water.
As we proceed with our incorporation project, we need 3 or 4 members to act as our initial board of directors. This would entail signing the incorporation papers and approving our initial by-laws. We also need a couple more people to be the officers. If you are interested in helping on any of this effort, please contact Mark, or myself.
I should have taken that job on Geidi Prime. I've been sentenced to a 3 week stay in Cleveland starting December 4. If you need anything, please use e-mail and be patient. Replies may be slow in coming.
For Sale: I'm cleaning the dive closet. 1 pair of Wenoka Reeflex fins with battens and extraction tool, size small - $25; 1 pair of Reef Marine Quasar fins, a plastic version of Scubapro Jet fins, size small, $15; Aquashot II camera housing, $20; Little kid's mask and snorkel, free to a good home. 2 hoods, one large, one medium, $5/ea. Contact Dave Ambrose for more information.
OES members can receive discounts on regular OE classes. Members receive $30 off the regular OE price for specialty classes.
Subscriptions to Rodale's Scuba Diving Magazine are available through the club for only $10. See Mark Clausen for details.
Club T-shirts are still available for $13.00.
Now for something completely different: Are you completely crackers over cephalopods? Check out the Octopus page at http://www.tonmo.com/
This fellow has an online news magazine about octopi and their brethren. Be especially sure to read the article about the Taningia danae, which was captured off the coast of Spain. This is a fascinating creature. It uses a pair of photophores on two of its arms to attract prey and ward off predators.
Also ran across an interesting article on people who dive the Andrea Doria. Don't expect a lot of technical details, but the personality profiles make for good reading.
Last month, I made a peripheral reference to unsolicited commercial e-mail, colloquially known as Spam. For various reasons, I seem to get a lot of it. I used to go through and locate the proper source, but this was time consuming. I've found an automated tool which does all the grunt work for me. It's found at www.spamcop.net. Go visit them if you're tired of getting dozens of e-mail selling everything from credit repair to pornography.
The SDCD is in trouble. Unless they get some new volunteers now, they are going to disband. I would hate to see that as the SDCD does a lot to help divers in this community. They maintain buoys on the Yukon, and Ruby E. They also sponsor the PCUPC photo contest.
This is an opportunity to make a real difference for diving in San Diego. If you can possibly help the SDCD, please attend their next (and possibly last) meeting. It will be December 14, 2000 at 7PM in the Coral Room, Marina Village Conference Center, 1936 Quivira Way, Mission Bay.
If anyone is planning to attend this meeting, please let me (Dave Ambrose) know. I have a few ideas, but will be out of town.
[Editor's Note: The events in the following story probably violate every agency's training standards. We don't recommend that you ever try any of this during your open water training. ]
Quarry Cove, Santa Catalina Island, CA
Something is hunting the flying fish, for we see them leaping in the moonlight around the boat as it's anchored in the cove. Barracuda, perhaps. One fish hits the side of the boat and falls, stunned, into the tender. Retrieved, it proves to be a slate-blue indian-club of an animal, with lacy insect "wings" like a dragonfly, when unfolded. We throw it back into the sea, probably not doing it any favors.
We're here to do a night dive for our open water certification, and I'm not at all certain I'm ready for one. Our instructor, however, seems to think differently. He's a young Californian, a long drink of water who is utterly relaxed in the ocean, since he's convinced for mythic reasons that he's immune from Neptune's dangers. And, I have to admit, so he indeed seems to be. I sometimes think he's more of a tourist in the dive shop, watching the customers, than he is looking at things on the ocean floor.
He has a SoCal "valley" accent, with the "uptalk" knack of turning statements into questions, like a Canadian. "Just stay near me?" he suggests, "and you'll be fine?" Very reassuring. "You guys are safe in the water, so relax?"
I certainly try to relax, but I'm already starting to tense up under the thick rental wetsuit, and I'm overheating. I don't feel very safe in the water, even though I've been swimming in pools all my life. This ocean stuff is different. A week previously I've spent the day barfing into the chop after water inhalation through a snorkel, and learning not to hold onto anchor lines in waves. My dive buddy has been severely seasick, and she has also done time feeding the fish personally, after stomach bubble expansion in an ascent. Ah, romantic scuba in California: they teach you how to vomit THROUGH your regulator.
Now it's night, and we're looking at the dark kelp beds surrounding the boat, which are showing faint but clear lights from the gas pods, winking on and off like fireflies. "Hey! Kelp are phosphorescent!" I exclaim with surprise. I hadn't known that.
Wrong. My dive buddy has it figured better. We are actually seeing lights from divers already in the water. We can't see these beams themselves, trapped as they are by the surface refraction, but when they strike kelp beds from below, a few random pods in any bed are situated exactly correctly to lens the beam to the eye. The effect, with an invisible source, is a ghostly light for a second or two from random pods, and a twinkle from each kelp bed. Soon enough, we'll be contributing to it.
I finally strap my own lights on, and it takes nearly all the determination I have to step out into the water and swim out to the buoy, where I can see the faint strobe flashes of the other divers. This is not my comfort zone. We may be the worst newbies on the dive. My dive buddy is game to go, but that means nothing. I know her: she's crazy and has a long history of biting more off the rib-roast of life than she can possibly chew. So I'm stuck.
As we blow our air to descend, I have a moment of revenge: I can see her eyes, staring at me, and wide, as the black water comes up. Too late, my dear, you're in for it now. And so it begins. We're actually helped in the descent by the need to keep from shining our lights in other diver's eyes.
Thinking about that, and not screwing the dive up for other people, keeps us from thinking about what else we are doing, and how we can die. Which is good, because what we're doing is basically crazy.
Looking below me, I can see groups of three or four divers, going down the line and keeping their lights trained carefully outward, a radial pinwheel pattern. Vertigo. I let the line slide through my left hand as I descend and the weight of the water overhead begins to be oppressive. And my grip is death.
The plan is to follow our instructor, who has a canister light, along the rock quarry face, once we get to the bottom of the line, which is at about 40 fsw. I know when I've reached that end, because I sit, whump, on the bottom, in the shadows. Eventually, I manage to juggle my light and get over onto my knees. Obviously I can't swim, but perhaps I can crawl a bit.
Wait. I'll bet if I add some gas to my BC, I can actually get off the bottom...
I think I see my dive bud, but I can't be sure. Going down the line I see faces near me in the light like partygoers around a lit birthday cake, but now that we're off along the bottom, I can't tell for certain who anybody is. The gloom is total. Here and there I can see spots of color where somebody spotlights something, and I can spotlight little patches myself. Outside these pools, however there are only rims of gray and the great black. Beams crisscross like searchlights advertising over a city. There are grinding and bubbling noises that seem to come from everywhere around me, and a ticking like rocks being tapped together. I can't tell where it is coming from, either. My own breathing is stentorian.
Gradually, I try to take in what I'm seeing. We're down along a fairly steep face of tumbled stone granite blocks, most of them larger than a man. This is the kind of effect they try for in cute hotel waterfalls, with stones a foot wide. Here, the scale is massive. To the right, the semi-wall falls off into deeper depths. Ahead, there is a kelp forest in the cove, with columns of nested kelp several feet in diameter, rising from bottom four or five stories, towards the surface far above. Everywhere, I can see along my light beam, but not much farther out, and not far even in the right direction.
I nearly get neutral, but don't quite make it. Just as I'm preparing to swim, I am caught by a gentle current, and go over again on my back, with my BC underneath me. The effect is a little like slipping on a banana peel. At some point I've valved off air instead of adding it, and soon I find myself headed for the depths, back first, clearing my ears madly. Abyss! By the time I get myself righted, I've lost a fin and cannot find it again in the rocks and the dark and the deep. Doing a funny kick I finally manage to claw myself up the rock face to the nearest light, which turns out to be my dive buddy. Everybody else has long since left, and without my fin, I'm not going to follow.
Which is okay with my dive bud, since she's interested in the marine life, and has never been one to patiently sight see with anybody. So we set out in the general direction we think the group went, trying to make sense of what we see.
The animal life down here is active, like deer caught in the headlights of a car (my metaphor for night-diving with lights; except you also have to add a siren if you're on open circuit scuba). During the daytime, for example, sea urchins mostly just sit-- inert lumps of life like hibernating porcupines. At Catalina in the daytime kelp beds, I have been able to distinguish at least two types of urchins: big black ones and small purple ones. The black ones come about grapefruit size, and the colored ones are the size of baseballs, on down to golf ball size. The purples vary in shade, but all of them are the shocking artificial purples of Mylar party toys, and look like nothing that ought to be alive. And it's hard to tell in daytime that they *are* alive. At night, however, things are different. I find that sea urchins, now in black and grey, fairly vibrate at night. In the corner of one's vision this rattling along causes one to imagines that one can actually see them move over the rocks, like hedgehogs waddling along a hedge. This is mostly an illusion, but there is enough rustling motion that I can see now that the creatures are indeed alive and moving.
It's not pretty, and it's very strange. Near me, I see a set of particularly long black urchin spines poking out alarmingly from a crevice between two large rocks, probing and bristling. Okay, let me look, here. I grab at some of them, careful not to puncture myself, and feel the soccer-ball-sized animal actually draw back under my hand, hunker down, and wedge itself actively into the space. Yikes, it's not a just a completely dumb ball of spines, but feels like an aware animal. There's more to these Helen Keller critters than first appears. Hmmm.
Nothing down here really likes to be bothered by a diver, of course. A small octopus, the first I've ever seen in the wild, slithers out of my light like a bag of lead shot slipping off the edge of a table. In a crevice between blocks of rock I see a California spiny lobster, looking out warily. I grab for his antennae to get a better look at him, but then he's gone, too. The next crevice holds a big moray eel. This place is a zoo. The dog-sized eel head pokes out with a walleyed glassy stare, like that of a stuffed trophy. I know he's alive only because I can see him gill-breathe like the Creature From the Black Lagoon. The previous lobster, even without benefit of a face, has managed to look far more apprehensive than this eel. I leave the moray alone.
At some point in the kelp forest, I do what I've wanted to do for some minutes: I lag behind my buddy a bit, and turn off my light. For a minute, I see only the phosphorescence overhead, which is either moonlight on the water, or else the water itself. The bottom is absolutely black, and so is the kelp, which rises like cathedral columns. The effect is like being in a redwood forest on a dark night, except that I'm floating through this one. For a moment I experience a bit of pure joy. I'm at the bottom of the ocean, and it's night, and it's black. And damn, it's neat.
Eventually, we get down to "quitting value," of 1000 PSI and have to stop rubbernecking. We have no idea where we are. So we start for the top, and immediately lose all reference. We're not good at this. At some point, as I'm trying to fool with my new computer, I realize that my ears are equalizing. Uh, oh. Now, which BC button do I want...? In just a a few seconds, there seem to be bubbles everywhere, my head is fizzing, and the water all around is filled with the sound of frying bacon. Then, there is some faint light and I hit the surface. Looking around with ears popping, I see my buddy in the moonlight. "Ugh," she observes nasally, "I think we went up too fast." We can see the boat, and so we inflate our BCs. In a few minutes, a bullet-shaped hooded head breaks the surface near us -- the instructor.
"I've been watching you guys-- are you okay?" he says.
We tell him we are.
"I noticed you have some problems with your buoyancy?" he says.
"How about we work on that?"
So we swim back, and that's it. In the end, nobody drowns or has a gas embolism. Hooray. Not that we totally deserve it. And the next day we get certified, in the same kelp forest, in the daylight. After thirty minutes of being very nicely neutrally buoyant. -- Steve Harris
[Gleaned from rec.scuba, reprinted with the author's permission.]
Renewal rates are $20 single; $30 for a family. Send your renewal to Mark Clausen; 1862 Willow Way; Vista, CA 92083.
Surf and diving conditions: 619/221-8824
Club events: Mark Clausen at 760/727-6181 or e-mail at mark@oceanexplorers.org.
Newsletter Editor - Dave Ambrose at 858/679-7817 or e-mail stargazer1@cox.net.
SDCD Hotline 619/687-1492
Ocean Enterprises 858/565-6054
| Date | Time | Destination | # Tanks |
| 24-Nov | 8am-2pm | Wreck Alley/Kelp beds |
3 |
| 26-Nov | 7-11am | Yukon |
2 |
| 26-Nov | 11am-4pm | Yukon/Kelp beds |
2 |
| 2-Dec | 8am-2pm | Wreck Alley/Kelp beds |
3 |
| 3-Dec | 7am-5pm | Coronado Islands |
4 |
| 9-Dec | 7am-5pm | Coronado Islands |
4 |
| 10-Dec | 8am-2pm | Wreck Alley/Kelp beds |
3 |
| 16-Dec | 8am-2pm | Wreck Alley/Kelp beds |
3 |
| 17-Dec | 7am-5pm | Coronado Islands |
4 |
| 23-Dec | 7am-5pm | Coronado Islands |
4 |
| 24-Dec | 8am-2pm | Wreck Alley/Kelp beds |
3 |
| 26-Dec | 8am-2pm | Wreck Alley/Kelp beds |
3 |
| 28-Dec | 8am-2pm | Wreck Alley/Kelp beds |
3 |
| 30-Dec | 7am-5pm | Coronado Islands |
4 |
| 31-Dec | 8am-2pm | Wreck Alley/Kelp beds |
3 |