5 posts tagged “scuba”
This past weekend, Mike and I drove down to So Cal to do some awesome diving and teach a couple of classes as well. I was really excited since it was the first time I'll be using my Sea & Sea DX1200 underwater camera. The camera equipment cost so much that I was wondering if the the outcome of the photos will be worth it for the price I paid. On top of that, the talk about the bright orange fish called the Garibaldi (California's State Fish) littered the whole island got me excited for days on end. The fish is such a bright orange despite the fact that the first colour to disappear underwater is red. Even at 30 feet, the fish is still bright orange. Some of my friends and students commented that it looked like I Photoshopped the image. Nope, sorry to disappoint you all, but these pictures are unaltered. They are taken only with the camera and flash/strobe lighting.
Some of my photos are available for sale on Etsy.com under the username of deebunny77. They are only available on 5x7s at $10.00 a piece. Some are altered and some are not.
My feet ached.
My back ached.
It was all unreal.
But it was GREAT.
I'm back in Las Vegas yet again after two weeks of partying here like a rock star. This time, the trip is purely business.
The DEMA show is absolutely great. I've gotten a lot of freebies and equipment to try out (which I have to carry on since I didn't check a bag in). Tomorrow's the last day of the convention and I planned to take a few classes to enrich my knowledge and training. There were so many new things that I would have loved to purchase, but there isn't much room and of course, the money is also an issue. Miko and I, however, purchased an awesome massager. Like that has anything to do with SCUBA?
With the last trip to Vegas and this one, teaching Scuba in Monterey in November, and of course, going to San Diego in December. I'd be living out of the airport for the next two months. Busy..Busy..Busy. I guess that's the way to success or maybe insanity. We'll see if I ease up at the end of the year....maybe.
Standing in the perishing cold of waist deep water in Monterey, I can say that one of my many jobs has its ups and downs. I do like getting my scuba equipment less than half the price (a benefit to dive professionals). The pay of course, is not that great, considering giving up four full weekends in a month of confined water instruction and then going to the beach for the open water portion of the class. Regardless of the pay, I am not shallow and I do get the satisfaction of diving and helping students.
This past weekend, I can certainly say that the diving was good. I tried out my new Mares wetsuit, the Isotherm which was a wet/dry suit. Let me explain. It is like a drysuit, only you don't need special training to use it since it is also a wet suit. The outside portion of the suit gets completely wet and in the inside stays somewhat dry or a bit damp. It kept me pretty warm whilst I was assisting students in putting on their fins, helping them out of the water, and/or supervising them in the water.
The downfall or let's just say the death of me was a student doing a specialty dive. The other instructors and I ended up calling him "Timmy." This was a code name for a student who was a bit difficult. This is the story of how the code name came about.
It was two years ago when the two instructors that I'm working with was going through their IDC (Instructor Development Course) and one of the IDC instructors pretended to be Timmy, a twelve year-old kid diagnosed with ADD to simulate a worse case scenario student. Just combine the instructor's immaturity and the student simulation, there's a recipe for disaster. By the end of the course, all the instructors were practically ready to shove Timmy in the loos to give him a wedgie.
So, this past weekend, which was the exti dives for our students, we had a Timmy. This one particular student doesn't listen to instruction. This is what Timmy did the whole weekend of the dive.
His weight belt kept coming off and after informing me that he's going to sit out on the dive, I advised him not to enter the water as he doesn't have a dive buddy. He can get his weight belt sorted out and then join the group on the last dive. He got his weight belt sorted and despite my instruction, he still went in the water without a dive buddy.
He was instructed that if he was going to crawl out of the water, he must crawl out where the water doesn't hit him. Instead, he crawled out to where the water engulf half of his body and decided to take his fins off there.
He was instructed to pull the float a bit closer to the shore. Instead, he removed the float and dragged it back with him (which meant I had to go back out and re-anchor the float).
He was instructed to gear up and be ready to enter the water in thirty minutes. The rest of the students were all ready to enter the water and he was nowhere to be found. A few minutes of searching, he was found in his car napping, his gear unassembled. When he finally awoke, it took him thirty minutes to assemble his gear.
Alas, the class was over and he's now converted to PADI instead of NAUI. Oh, the joys of my job.
Really! My family decided to take a holiday to the Floriday Keys for a few days of scuba diving. It was really crazy when we arrived and rented a car in Miami to drive an hour and a half to the Keys. Florida started out with this sign. This makes me want to jump in the water....NOT!
I'd have to say that the diving was fantastic despite the fact that the waves and surge were ranging from 3-5 feet. There was no doubt that I've invented a new shade of green. Note to self: Stick to an american muffin and earl grey tea for breakfast rather than a buffet breakfast of sausage, eggs, and pancakes.
've never designed any knitted project, but I've designed other things. So, when the opportunity to design a scuba blanket came, I jumped on it. I hadn't realized that designing such a blanket would cause a lot of unwanted stress.
I imagined the pattern in my head and how I was going to do it. I had it all worked out. The blanket would be knitted diagonally in simple garter stitch. At some point, I'd have to swtich from the red yarn to the white, knit several rows and switch back to the red and finish the blanket off. I really wanted to see how the finished product would look and of course, to work out any bugs in the pattern.
It was easy at first, but after a while, one gets tired of increasing and I couldn't wait to switch to the white yarn, but I still had a long ways to go. When my frustration finally hit from the "never ending" blanket, I hurled it across the room and the "clink" sound could be heard as it hit the wall and tumbled to the ground.
I couldn't look at the blanket anymore after that. I tried creating other projects, but there it sat in my project bin, mocking me. I continued to ignore it for weeks.
It wasn't until one wonderful and lazy Sunday that I decided to finish it. I wasn't going to let this blanket win. I wasn't going to let it destroy me or mock me day in a day out as I sat and worked in my home office. I was going to knit this blanket a few rows a day until I finished it.
The plan worked. I finished the bloody thing and gave it to Mike as a Christmas present. I'm just going to say, he'd better appreciate it.
