Mine the Harvest

Syd and I went to Jupiter this weekend for a two day dive trip. This trip was coordinated by Macs Sports and consisted mostly of Tampa / Clearwater customers from their stores. Our group was 19 divers plus our dive master Travis, and the dive master provided by the dive operator. Jupiter Dive Center conducted the trip. (We had been with them once before last fall and had a good one day trip and were looking forward to this one.) We dove Saturday and Sunday, two dives each. These were boat dives in the Atlantic just outside Jupiter Inlet. The dives themselves were all Nitrox dives (34 – 36% O2 mixes) to depths of 65′ to 80′ and from about :35 to :45 minutes. The first day the seas were 5 feet or so, and leaving the inlet was somewhat adventurous, the waves swell pretty good coming in the narrow shallow inlet, so busting through them to get out was pretty fun with some good pitching and rolling – it was thrilling, and only lasted about :5 minutes. Once out of the inlet, the seas where manageable, but enough to cause a good 5 or so divers to get sea sick. Ah, the joys of diving.

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Syd and I finally made it in to take the last two written exams for our Deep and Navigation diving courses. We had completed the practical diving requierments several weeks back. These were the last two of the four classes needed to certify us as Advanced Open Water Divers! We should get our new cards in a few weeks.

The four classes (Deep Diving, Wreck, Nitrox and Navigation) allow us to do much more advanced dives, deeper wrecks, longer bottom time using mixes up to 50% 02, and the navigation comes in quite handy. We have already been using these skills on various dives already (like when we dove the Spiegel Grove) and are looking forward to more – such as diving the 880′ long Oriskany, an aircraft carrier they sunk off Tallihassie last year.

This fall we plan on taking our Rescue Diver course – that, along with the experience we already have, will qualify us as Master Divers, the highest recreational certification. After that it is all tech and commercial / professional level certifications.

We are looking at another trip to the Keys this fall, a four day weekend which will likely be the last Keys trip until next spring. There would certainly be another wreck dive or two involved.

Here is to some more great diving in our future!

Diving report:

Syd and I went for a shore dive today down Venice Beach – about half an hour south of St. Pete. We had heard of this dive before, but had not done it ourselves. Some friends from work dove it last weekend and found approx. a dozen or more shark teeth. So we decided to give it a go this weekend.

We drove down to Venice Beach which seemed to be a pretty nice area. The beach itself was quite nice, though the shops are resturants are about a mile or so inland, only the every present private condos encroaching as far as possible into the sea. The beach itself is public, and only moderately crowded, suprising considering the near ideallic day – in the 90s, slight breeze but very hot sun -and the water temp.? A soothing 89 F ! Wow. Visibility was exceptional for this site at 8 – 10′ – frequently it is 3 – 5′ per reports. We had no difficulty seeing and navigating. (Put those new nav skills to work having just done the navigation course the last few weeks.) We did use a dive real to tether ourselves together though so we didn’t have to worry about getting separated. Hardly a big deal in 20′ – but still, easier than having to find a lost buddy and surface. This also provided Syd the opportunity to experiment with ingeniously entangling the line in an exceedingly creative way. Excellent practice and now we can safely prevent it when we are in a cave dive in the Yucatan and 200′ back.

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Greetings Gentle Readers,

Well, I’ve debated the idea of a blog for some time and finally decided to test drive one and see how it fits. So I’ve installed WordPress (which was ridiculously easy) and plan to post to it for a while and see how it goes.

I have a definite tendency to view the recent explosion of blogging with a bit of a sneer, for it seems to me a rather egocentric endeavor – “I’ll write things on my blog for the whole world to see because my life is just THAT BLOODY INTERESTING and certainly everyone will practically pine away wanting to know what happens next!”

But my less cynical self thinks that perhaps there is some merit in it, as a vehicle for commentary or to keep friends and family apprised of what I am up to in life. Being in that I am somewhat lacking in regard staying in touch with everyone perhaps this might assist in that. Time and comments back I guess will be the measure by which I will see if this is an effective medium and is satiating my laziness. Ah, the idea of posting something once and having people read it – what bliss.

Well then – let’s see. I have been experimenting with a few new Linux projects and enjoying them. In addition to this blog I recently created a Wiki to use as a dumping ground for technical notes – primarily related to IT interestes – but likely to include more esoteric branches as well. I am pretty excited about my Wiki-Pete-ia, I considered it for a few years – it seemed a great method to help consolidate notes I inevitably develop from work projects, personal research and a convenient and searchable dumping ground that is a bit better organized than multiple notebooks and endless scraps of paper or emails to myself. I’ve only just started with a fen articles on Solaris and Linux – but I look forward to adding more. I very much like the idea of being able to access and edit it anywhere, and who knows there is always the prospect that my notes may benefit others as well and if so they can browse away. You can see my Wiki here.

So much for the intro – I look forward to my social blogging experiment.

Cheers,