Well today is the one year anniversary since Curtis/Dashrynn/Sharkbait took me out for my first dive out of open water. (I miss you Curtis!) The sense of excitement and wonder that I felt then has not diminished. Being able to write these reports and take pictures to illustrate them has turned out to be very personally rewarding. Your comments are always so much fun to read, and the diary of my dives is a great way to recall those memories.
Today, I went diving and made a new friend in anndornfeld(Ann). She sent me a PM suggesting we do a dive this weekend, and she even agreed to come up to Whidbey and try out Driftwood! Fantastic! I was very excited, but really felt the pressure, since I haven't been fully responsible for sharing a favored dive site with someone else before (I didn't want to totally come across as a flake and the dive as suck). Meeting up just past eleven, we exchanged greetings, compared notes, and prepped gear. I had mentioned that I could not be held responsible for anything the current might do at Driftwood, even observed to Ann that twice, I had shared a current-free dive here with Karl, and once I even dove it when the current ran
backwards. I further mentioned that here was where Curtis and I saw (and chased with his scooter) a beautiful dogfish shark one day. There is one bonus about Driftwood: if the vis sucks on top, it's gonna suck all the way to the bottom, and if it's great up top, it's great all the way down. Today, it sucked. We entered at low tide, and I began heading down the slope. We easily found our first pile of tires, and I began to shine the awesome light that H2Odoctor made for me around looking for something to look at. No dice on the first tire pile.
I checked a few spots where I've seen wolf eels in the past, but found nothing. I did see a colony of slime worms, and pointed them out to my guest, but slime worms, after all, are Slimey Worms...just not exciting. We saw a Cockerel's dorid on the side of a tire and I was beginning to wonder whether anything would show up and make the dive worthwhile. I moved to another tire pile, and carefully checked the breadcrumb sponge to see if there were nudis on it (no) and while there, saw some beautiful tube worms.
There was no current at all this dive. We were free to move about as we pleased. I was amazed at the timing, but certainly not complaining about it. Looking up from the tube worms, I glanced left at my buddy, right at some rockfish, and checked ahead of me. I found myself staring into the eyes of a dogfish shark who was staring at me. Awesome! I brought up the camera and the shark was gone.
I signaled my buddy and made the shark sign. She kind of looked at me, then looked around, saw no shark, and went back to whatever she was photographing. I swear the shark was there. Oh well. I continued on and was amused by this shot setup. I'm not sure whether to award kudos for excellent camouflage or take points away for forgetting a major detail.
When I looked up from taking that shot, I found myself staring into the eyes of a dogfish shark who was staring at me. As soon as he saw me see him, he was gone. YOU BASTARD! :angry: My buddy was cruising slowly along taking photos, and she didn't believe me about the shark the first time, so I opened all the f-stops and apertures and stuff and settled down to wait for that shark. A herd of black rockfish came streaming at and past me. Like, a herd, running from a predator, say, a shark. Alll righty, c'mere shark, I got you this time. The rockfish streamed past, and past, a few stragglers, no shark. Ugh. Whatever. I put my camera back on macro, reset all the buttons, and went looking for something to photograph. Next time I looked up, I found myself staring into the eyes of a damn dogfish shark who refused to hold still for pictures. Yep, three times he came to check us out, and three times he was gone as soon as he was seen.
I still hadn't found any octopus or wolf eels for Ann, so I made a little more effort and checked out a tire. Yay! there was a little orange head sticking out, and as soon as she got close, the head vanished. Sigh. Three tires on, I found another curious head, and quickly waved her over. This one not only didn't tuck back in as we approached, look what he did! I felt almost bad for him though, he was obviously confused, circling around his tire instead of running awaaaayy. After a brief encounter he was able to slip back into his tire. Way to produce the good stuff, Driftwood!
A large clump of seaweed turned out to be covering one of the toilets, and Ann shined her light at me. I'm thinking that if something that looked like this ever showed up in
my toilet, I'd faint.
Coming to the end of the dive, we headed up, noticing that the current had begun to pick up, in a serious way. And it was running backwards. On the surface interval I observed that my previous mention of weird currents included backwards currents and no currents, and my previous mention of weird animals included sharks and wolf eels. And all of those happened. I looked at the water, and shouted LUMPSUCKER! LUMPSUCKER! and back in we went. Having only done one dive on the backward current, I was less familiar with the area, but we did get swept into a large bottle field. There were several old-looking bottles, but most of them were broken. I paused when I noticed suckers inside one clear bottle.
The sun had come out while we were up top, and I'd had high hopes for a brighter dive, but the vis deteriorated to make up for the brightness. While staying close together, and kind of just going along for a rather boring ride, I glanced down and realized we were being followed by a foot-long squid. *boggle* Quickly I grabbed Ann and we swung around to check this out. My squid sank to the bottom and turned into an octopus colored a bright reddish purple. The octopus was checking us out intently. He crawled under a kelp leaf, then right back out, moving towards us, extending his tentacle, and never losing that bright, bright color. I was stunned. Then I heard noise to my right, and a bunch of divers carrying some sort of pvc thing came blundering past. The awesome octopus was obliterated in a massive cloud of silt. Thanks, fellas. Escaping from the cloud, Ann and I continued our (boring but for a couple ratfish) dive. When we surfaced, she got to enjoy the long walk back to the beach. After talking a while while packing our stuff, Ann went home to the accompaniment of singing birds and sunshine. I'm glad she came out to visit!
The student was ready.
it's nice to have low expectations, sometimes - lcf
I said keep going, not start whining -airsix
