I have now so many photos of diving that I have to split them into multiple parts. I also have a ton of stories from this day. But at least I can type faster and better than I can photo edit.

I’ve done a ton of editing on these photos to try to put some colour in them, where there was previously only one colour — blue. I think they look really cool, but they don’t necessarily look the way the world looks at 107 feet, regardless of whether your viewing apparatus is a several hundred million year old sphere of goo, or a comparatively recent compressed plate of electronics.

I spent all night editing that first photo, and then copied the editing profile to the rest. And then facepalmed when a yellow fish entered the photo, because the yellow fish turned blue. Damn him.

I woke again at 5am, and McDonalds was actually open. It was an easy drive to the dive shop, since I’ve done it a few times now. They had my dive watch hanging behind the counter, and the dive master Jake was good enough to both believe me when I said it was mine (no one who knew for sure was there to corroborate my story!) and replace the battery in it (it hadn’t worked on my first day) and help me figure out how to set it to Nitrox mode.

Nitrox is a mixture of air in your tank that, in this case, contains 32% oxygen, instead of the regular mix of 21% oxygen. This sounds super good – more oxygen is more better, right? Except that oxygen is super corrosive and can really mess you up, particularly when it’s compressed into a tiny tank and then brought down 100 feet, increasing it’s pressure by about 4 times. I dive Nitrox because I feel better when I do so, but I had to take a course to be allowed to do so.

I don’t think I’d written – I had lost the hand pump for my camera housing last week. The housing uses a vacuum to keep the water safely away from my expensive camera, which requires the pump to create the vacuum. I bought this housing because of this feature, because I’ve lost to many electronics to water on vacations and I refuse to learn the obvious lesson. 😛 Replacing the pump is $40, and a bunch of time – ie, I wouldn’t be using it on this trip. The dive guys had looked all over for it, and I had looked all over for it at home and I drove down this morning hoping it would be somewhere they hadn’t looked.

The story ends happily — I showed Jake a photo of it, and he recommended I show Noah, the boat captain. While I was doing so, Lauren, the dive guide held up her hand and said “You mean this?” and I yelled in excitement — “THAT!” This morning was coming up aces!

With all of my garbage (and some paperwork) dealt with, I started talking with my fellow divers. Last week it had been a boat full of loners – 5 people who were there by themselves, which is easy to talk with. Sometimes you get boats with 2 couples and myself, and that’s harder — the couples tend to talk with themselves and then I’m just alone. This morning I was joined by a family of 4! A mom, dad, and their two kids – I think they were about 16 and 19. They were a blast to hang out with! And an inspiration for my little family — they told me that the dad had encouraged the family to get into a variety of adventure activities, and so now they all skied and dove together. I’ve got a lot of years, but I hope Ava will dive with me. 😀

We had a good boat trip to the first dive site – the Corsair! I had been wanting to see this wreck last week, but because the conditions were so rough we had to skip it. Today it was still a little rough, but not so much we had to go somewhere else. It’s a WWII plane that ran out of fuel and had to be abandoned, and today is one of the most popular dive sites in Oahu.

I think my photos speak for the dive itself – it was amazing. The coral dives you tend to follow the dive master in a path around a landscape that would be impossible to memorize without doing it a lot. But the wreck is sitting in an area of sand with nothing else around, and you just circle it and circle it and circle it until you run out of time. On the one hand, you see less. On the other hand, what you see is amazing! I love seeing the gubbins behind the propeller and the schools of fish just chilling out in the plane casing.

We did two safety stops on the way up. Because of build-up of nitrogen in your blood, dive safety requires that you go up slowly to allow your body to off-gas the nitrogen. It’s also good form when you go deep (100 feet is pretty deep — 120 is my certification limit) to have a little stop at half-way up to pause for 3 minutes, followed by the required stop at 15 feet for 3 minutes.

We all got back on the boat and began chattering about how amazing the dive was! We had an hour to wait before the next dive, again to allow our bodies time to recover from the dive, so snacks and water were passed out. This is where the trouble began. Myself and the mother started to feel very sick. The rest of my story is unfortunate, but also funny-after-the-fact, and I’ll leave it for the next post.

I’ve got some videos for this dive that I’m going to post separately, as I want to finish photo editing!