The monkey made me do it

glub

Last weekend was absolutely gorgeous (and, of course, fraught with danger)! I took a 2-day trip to San Juan Island, which is a 2-hour drive and then a 1.5-hour ferry ride away from Seattle and feels like a completely different universe. I swear, we drove off the ferry and my blood pressure dropped twenty points. We had a campsite that was completely separate from the rest of the campground (San Juan County Campground, site #18 - highly recommended)(http://www.co.san-juan.wa.us/parks/SJCP%20map%20031805.pdf to see just how cool it is) and had its own private bay and majestic old tree hanging out over the water. Deer wandered by during the day and raccoons slunk around at night (they like chips, specifically barbeque flavored), and orcas swam by twice a day according to the rangers, though we didn't manage to see them this time since we spent so much of the day elsewhere.

Saturday afternoon my dive buddy and I (he's my age, not my type but cool and a certified Divemaster which means he's been diving forever) hopped on a charter boat and went out to a tiny little dot of rocks called O'Neil Island and promptly hopped back off again into the COLD cold cold (COOOLD) water. It was beautiful - bright purple sea urchins everywhere, ling cod 'hiding' (in their own minds, they were hidden) with their speckled basketball-sized heads peering out under rocks, and starfish with hundreds of arms that were up to 3 feet in diameter. There were two that were fighting over a bit of something that had pushed each other up at an angle with their arms intertwined like they were holding hands. We saw a school of big-eyed zombie fish (I haven't learned any proper I.D.s yet besides the basics, so you'll have to put up with my approximations for now) that were creepy beyond description. They hovered in the water about 2 feet away from each other, staring at nothing, and when you swam through the pack they didn't get out of the way (too zombie-fied?). So it was a strange big-eyed thwack fest swimming through a lifeless obstacle course and trying to push all the fish away before they hit your mask. Trust me, you don't want a zombie fish hitting your mask. ewwwwwww doesn't even begin to cover it.

My dive buddy is perfect for me, as I've discovered in the last few dives I've done with him, because he has an even more adventurous nature than I do. I have a thing about octopuses (octopi? octopu? I never know) that makes me want to sprint away as soon as I see anything moving under a rock (they have EIGHT ARMS, each of them deadly, I'm sure)(tentacles are creepy)(especially when there are lots of them)(side note: would a one-armed octopus not be creepy? Would it's uni-armed-ness push it into the realm of cute despite the remaining proliferation of suckers on that singluar tentacle?)(answer to side note: no. still bad.) and on the second boat dive we did, part of their introduction to the area (right by Warren Miller's house! I waved at his yacht.) was to describe the location of the resident 10-foot wide octopus so we could go say hi (!!!!!). I set my compass wrong, you know, accidentally. What we did find was a giant rock wall with all sorts of fun things on it, like sea cucumbers that were three feet long. Imagine a slug, then turn it purple and add orange and yellow spikes in lines down its back. Now blow it up to about 20 times normal slug size. They were THAT cool. There were also little white things that were later described as nudie-branches (hee hee hee), but I have to find out more about those. Nudie. hee. So the reason that my dive buddy is cool is that when we saw the rock wall, instead of turning sideways and exploring a horizontal section of it like everyone else did, he turned around, looked at me to see if everything was okay, and then dove straight down the wall until we hit the sea floor, and then hovered upside down for a while, admiring how the fish looked like they flipped over. We went down to 95 feet! I'm really only rated to go to 60. I didn't tell him that until afterwards, though. The water is so still down there - it gets dark and calm, and with the zombie fish floating around I was just waiting for the mutant sea creature to come out and eat us.

There is a condition that affects divers once they get near the 100' mark underwater called Nitrogen Narcosis. It makes you act loopy, make bad decisions, and some people have panic attacks and get anxious while others fall into a stupor. It's the diver's version of drunkenness, and it's one of the favorite thing to test for with instructors because the students are without fail entertaining as they try to tie a knot or fit a round peg into a round hole. I haven't taken the course yet for deep diving, so my only experienced with Narcosis has been real-life and accidental, and I've found that I'm just the same underwater as I am after a few martinis. I try to hug fish. I forget basic things, like if my mask feels tight then all I have to do is breathe out my nose a little (I spent 15 minutes trying to pull my mask out so air could get in, never realizing that I was A) underwater and B) under so much outside pressure that I had a better chance of pulling my ear off) and that inflating my vest makes me rise up higher. Whoops. I stayed in the deep, but this time when I got Narc'd I got the giggles and entertained myself by trying to breathe like Darth Vader through my air regulator. Fun discovery = Darth breathing uses up less air! It's a measure of diver-coolness to use less air during a dive than your partner, and for once I beat my buddy in that regard. I didn't tell him why.

posted by LadyJay @ 10:50 AM