it’s been a good week, and now i’m getting ready to get out of here for a three day trip out to san clemente island. monday and tuesday were rockin at the dive shop. each of those days we did what would have been a good week’s business back in january, and monday afternoon i took a visiting tourist up to la jolla for a couple of dives. i can’t go into the details here (professional courtesy), but suffice to say we didn’t dive. the second rule of diving is that anyone can abort a dive at any time without any pressure (the first rule is keep breathing), so when he wasn’t comfortable with the surf he called it and i followed his lead.


my dilemma at that point was that i still had two steel 100 cubic foot tanks with 3500 pounds in them, and it struck me as kind of criminal to take them back full. so i called eric, and we met at 5:15 tuesday morning to dive. the waves were up a bit, as was the surge (i could feel it at 80 feet). the visibility wasn’t all that great either (15 feet at most), but the octopus were out (i got to play with two babies of the two-spot octopus variety), we got eyeball to eyeball with a large (3 feet maybe) halibut that thought we couldn’t see him, it was warmer (52 degrees at 82 feet), and i heard dolphins at depth for only the second time in my life. all in all it was nirvana. as we were cruising along watching the march of the sea hares it struck me that this is where i feel most alive, floating in space, where my focus is total and uninterrupted. the only disappointment for me was that i saw no navanax inermis (striped sea slugs), and no flabellina iodinea (spanish shawls).


tuesday night a bunch of us went to the padres / cardinals game. we celebrated scuba sue’s birthday, and i got to hang out with a lot of people that i respect and consider really good friends. mani was there, as were my roommate juli, michael, eric and his new friend michelle, scuba sue of course, her son donnie, and anne marie and steve from the shop. it was kind of a bookends kind of day. at one point michael and i were talking about the poseidon cyklon reg i bought at a yard sale sunday, and he convinced me to try it out as my main reg. don’t know what i’m going to do with the aqualung micra and sequest century cold water regs. i normally keep one backup reg but i’m not sure that i want to keep two.


wednesday was pretty slow, so i ran over to dive california and dropped off the new regulator. i probably shouldn’t admit this, but i hadn’t realized that it was both a yoke and a DIN regulator. i got it with the first and second stage and a console. according to michael it’s a newer model too, and he’s getting me a cyklon octo to complete the setup.


other than that i spent most of wednesday dealing with a crabby vendor that seems to think we need them to be successful (heads up for him - we don’t). by 9 oclock we had de-listed all their products, and they’ll play hell getting us to relist it. today it heated up again - a guy and his wife came in and bought a dry suit, and we had another bangin day. this being thursday, it was game night, so veronica and scott were over, eric dropped by, and neighbor steve came over for awhile. we played something called the ultimate survival game tonight. we played boys against girls, and won going away. the stories were pretty good too - lot’s of poison oak stories, camping stories, kidney stone stories, et cetera. good times.


now i’m doing the last of my laundry and getting ready to head out tomorrow night. checking noaa and a few other sites to see what the weather is going to be like, and getting packed. tomorrow i’ve got to get up early and get my dive gear together, and then i’m good to go. i have to meet the boat tomorrow night at 7:30, and should be back in san diego around 9 monday night. should be fun.


have a great weekend all - peace, out.