23 December 2014

AK and I dive the Little Coral Knoll

AK and her parents are back from their cruise and she's going to join me diving this morning.  They got to the apartment a few minutes late. I had guessed at the gear she would need and she tried it on, but she only tried on one fin and turns out we had  three 5-6 fins and only one 6 1/2 - 7 1/2 fin. Of course, that one larger fin was the only one she tried on.

We loaded up her gear and drove to the park, geared up at the truck and walked to the beach. We walked out into the water, but AK had trouble putting on her second fin. I tried to move her out into deeper water and get her to descend, but she resisted and wanted to stand in shallow water.  While we're having this discussion, the current is moving us North. So we move back in and stand in shallow water while the waves break over us and she struggles with her fin. I suggest we just go back to the beach, but she just gets more determined. She gets both fins off and discovers that one is smaller than the other. So she puts the small one on first and then the larger and we're off, but we have lost position in the water and need to swim South to get to the swim buoy. We do.

We descend, but I see that we have drifted near to the smaller rock, so we go there and get back on track.  Swim to the knee-high coral and across the sand sea then to the counter-weight and to the knoll. Visibility is getting poorer. Not a lot of life on the knoll and not much sunlight this morning. Looked pretty dull. We go East to the tiny knoll and the comfortable coral, but not a lot of life there, either, and between the lack of sunlight and sand in the water the visibility was terrible. We went back to the knoll and then off to the Porthole Rocks, but no eels there today. No turtles, either. We went back to the knoll and she was down to half a tank so we went back to the smaller rock, up to the Big Rock and West to the beach.

Water temperature was 75 degrees; Dive Time was 73 minutes; consumption rate at an average depth of 17 feet was 27.27 psi/minute; SAC rate was 18.00 psi/minute; and RMV was 0.46 ft3/minute.

No comments:

Post a Comment