The monkey made me do it

stingers and tentacles and pinchy pinchy claws

Okay, so not to be too "octopus-octopus-octopus" about things...

I really just wanted to be able to say that once in my life.

I spent all day Saturday underwater (well, it felt like it) up in Mukilteo and then another dive down on Alki Beach because I missed the first dive in Mukilteo because I forgot my fins. The truly sad thing about that situation is that I didn't realize that I'd forgotten my fins until AFTER suiting up with the thin suit, two layers of wetsuit, and boots. Luckily I hadn't put the hood on yet or my day would have been ruined (the neoprene hood is the destroyer of hair and earrings, and I have yet to wear it without getting large amounts of hair painfully caught in the velcro. Scuba will make me bald someday). I ran over to the Edmonds dive shop to rent some stylish foot-gear (they were turquoise!), and met up with the group for dive #2 but that meant that I had an extra tank of air and I cannot in good conscience return that to the shop full. Another diver who I'd just met that day was up for an adventure, and had been telling me about Cove 2 in Alki and how beautiful it was so I cajoled him into coming with me for an added dive.

The group I dive with is very eclectic (notice how I've almost completely given up on easing topic changes and haven't even come close to explaining my first sentence? Also, I'm relying more and more on parenthetical observations to try and fit thoughts into sentences so I don't have to compose full ones that make sense. My writing is going to crap. Soon all you'll be getting is "blalaaaalrrrggghh" every few weeks and even that will be in parentheses.). There is me and my usual dive buddy, who is fairly normal except that he lives alone on a boat and quotes "Dumb and Dumber" more than is healthy. This time there was a woman who had a son in college, who had 95 dives under her belt but still slammed into the sea floor and kicked up more sediment than the other 4 of us combined (she also got bit by a crab and kept trying to grab anenomes). There was a guy who hadn't dove in anything other than middle-eastern waters, and another guy who was attending UW and in a frat, and seemed determined to load up on the dives and get advanced certification as quickly as possible. This is the guy who came to Alki with me.

We didn't get into the water until after 4 in the afternoon, and it was cold and raining and our wetsuits were already damp and disgusting from the Mukilteo dive. Once we were in the water, though... it was gorgeous! The clearest I've ever seen locally, and there was all sorts of interesting wreckage down there. The light was somehow brighter underwater than up on the cloudy surface, and we startled clouds of shrimp and saw more crabs than I'd ever seen. We swam out to the wreck of the HoneyBear (I don't know what kind of boat it was, but there were very tall masts and lots of crates and such thrown around) and peeked under the hull to say hello to the resident GIANT OCTOPUS (He didn't tell me about this part beforehand. He made a kind of octopus-y hand gesture underwater but I though he was talking about jellyfish). We rested on our knees on the sandy bottom and he shined my dive light into a small crevice. I peeked in, expecting maybe a fish or a nice urchin (who doesn't love a nice urchin?), and came face-to-tentacle with an octopus with suckers over 3" in diameter. I am not sure what part I was inches away from, but after a couple seconds of frozen-ness on my part, it opened like a giant mouth and exposed a foot-long swath of bright white inner-octopus waviness (I'm guessing it was its gill or something). I jumped a mile and scampered backwards, kicking up sediment and breathing more bubbles than I had the entire dive previously. He tried to give me the light and let me view closer, but I graciously let him stick his face near the suckers and instead hovered a few feet away, looking at the hole side-eye in case the thing decided to attack and strangle all of us with its mile long tentacles of death.

After that I needed some release, and we had plenty of air left (it ended up being an almost hour-long dive!) so we played around, swooping over and under the masts, which were covered by a thick skin of white sea anenomes that hid tiny crabs and mini schools of fish. My new buddy crossed his arms over each other with his elbows pointing out, which is very close to the "I'm freezing and have to go to the surface" signal, which made me start to swim his direction (he was pretty far away). But then he turned and swam fast after a bunch of larger fish who had just passed us by and suddenly I saw that he was in fact playing a modified version of "shark" and trying to eat them with his elbows. Of course I realized this immediately after I was hanging upside down trying to high-five crabs (they rest with their claws down and a couple back legs hanging up in the water, so this isn't as hard as one might think) so it all worked out all right.

posted by LadyJay @ 12:57 PM