This is the tale of my most recent real dive …. My first T1 dive post class ….. Or so we thought ….
Well it started off innocently enough with P. asking, ‘Anyone interested in a T1 dive?’ With that my arm was starting to be twisted ….
A quick check on some gas fills, load the car, drive through a massive display of Zeus rearranging mountains with his flashy/bangy tools of his trade, and a boat ride …. we met up at Willis Point.
While we dropped off our Deco bottles, our keen observation has led us to believe that the float is no longer … floating, and that the first 6m or so looked pretty decent.
We geared up, hit the water, did our checks and dropped down into the spaaaa … upon our bubble check, we noticed some small bubbles out of a valve. Some attempts at reseating the regulator, and the bubbles almost went away.
The voice of reason came up ‘So, you noticed bubbles, and still went diving anyways?’, so we headed back to the vehicles to really fix the slight leak.
Take two. We drop down, no bubbles!
So we head down into the Abyss. It wasn’t pea soup yet, but very dark, very quick, and not the greatest visibility (2-3m). We hit our target depth and couldn’t see much ahead of us, or around us. So out comes the thumb …. 5 minutes into our planned 30 minute dive 🙁
We hit our gas switch, recalculate the deco to match our now 10 minute ‘bounce’ dive and started working our way up the foggy wall.
P’s Reel seemed to started to magically deploy itself, so we cleaned that up on the way ….
At 6m, we head butted Moon Jellies and sized up small crabs as they made themselves larger than life to defend their blade of kelp or rock as we floated by.
We found the chain that is still attached to the very sad looking red float. It’s not completely sunk, but just sitting 2m above the top of the wall (roughly -4m at high tide).
We have a quick chat about the dive at the surface as we swim back to shore.
Overall, we did our first T1 dive and came back. We didn’t get to our goal, which was to check out what is at 45m, but executed what we did fairly well. The good thing is we didn’t use much of our gas, so there is lots to try the dive out again when the time comes ……
One nice thing about the dive, is that I saw a purple star … I haven’t seen one in too long of a time. It was chilling out on a rock by the entrance in ~2m of water.