Birthday Dives! 3/31/2012, Dives 165 and 166

Well, it's the weekend that we were celebrating my birthday, and what a birthday it's been! We dove Alki Junkyard first and followed by a dive on the sunken section of the I-90 bridge. I really meant to bring the GoPro, but I forgot it...

Dive 165
Total Bottom Time:  58 minutes
Max Depth: 63'
Temperature:  46*F

We suited up at the Junkyard as the wind was kicking, and quickly hiked over to the water to do a head to toe gear check before the dive. After which we swam out through some small waves, dropped down and away we went. After getting to the depth of the line we headed east-ish. First we came across the small wolfie in 45 or so feet of water and then continued on along the line ever so slowly till the end of the line where there is a tire reef of sorts. I poked around and didn't see anything fantastic so I started to turn around to head deeper and reconvene with the line when I felt a tug on my fin! Oh no! (my thought, oh shit OOA! wait he just got 100's no way...) My dive buddy signaled some kind of sprawly tentacle sign and I headed back to investigate what he found. There was an octo arm or 2 just chilling outside the den where the telltale signs of crab body parts indicated the den. After poking around on the reef for awhile longer attempting to find a better view of the octo we turned back around and headed back down the line to the other far end of Junkyard. We didn't see the dead seal that was midway on the line on the last dive a couple weeks ago, but we did brushed past the wolfie again. We then headed a little further along the line until the end where I found a little octo buried away in a tube with all of his crab dinners lining the tube. After poking around at the end of the line we started to feel the tide go from slack gradually increasing speed and we turned the dive. In the shallows we found some dungeness crabs to play with before popping to the surface and ending the dive.

Pre-dive, I had shortened the crotch strap on my BP/W and lengthened the shoulder straps to try and help keep the tanks from making me head heavy hopefully reducing my happy feet during drills... I really like the change in balance and I felt a lot more stable in the water so far. The other change was using some HOG XXL fins. They were so much better than the OMS Slipstreams I was using. The Slipstreams are nice but a little too neutrally buoyant with my current gear configuration, while the HOG fins have a lot more negative buoyancy characteristics and are a little easier to keep my fin tips down while trying to sit still.

The Bridge dive!

Dive 166
Total Bottom Time:  41 minutes
Max Depth:  78'
Temperature:  45*F
Surface Interval: 2 hrs and 26 mins


Dive 2 of the day we headed out to Lake Washington for a gear rinsing dive, some eerie water and of course a fun dive! I went over the site layout, conservative gas plan and environmental hazards of the I90 dive site and some of the nuances so that Tyler wasn't taken off guard by the feeling of semi-trucks driving above you... We performed another head to toe gear check, we went over the gas plan again and the dive profile again and then dropped down. After we reached the bottom of the piling we performed an S-Drill to make sure Tyler was comfortable doing reg exchanges with my long hose setup, which he did very well with! He always has a very calm demeanor underwater, which is very comforting knowing that your dive buddy is likely to remain chill under pressure. After the S-Drill we then were on the way following the cave line to the sunken section of the bridge. It has been awhile since I dove here, and honestly I always think it's a further swim from the start point. We worked our was across the shallow end of the wreck and down the left side (oriented from shore). The eerie water and vertigo inducing viz kind of throws you off and makes you check your surroundings a little more than normal. Making sure we weren't inadvertently drifting under the wreckage without tying off a line, and that everyone was calm and dandy with the percussion of the big trucks driving over as we worked our way down to the end of the wreck in 80' of water. Half way down the side we came up and over across the deck before circling around and coming up the other side of the wreck after hitting the bottom of the wreck. I was goofing around and bumped my tanks on part of the wreckage as I was trying to squeeze under some wreckage. I could of made it easily if I dropped another inch or 2 but we were approaching our very conservative turn pressure. So we actually made it to the top of the wreck at our turn pressure that was supposed to be from 80'. Since I was leading the dive, decided that we would head back anyhow, since it was a good first orientation of the dive site. We slowly worked our way back to shore poking through the golf balls, hub caps, construction cones, speed limit signs and other junk on the bottom of Lake Washington.

Some of us really like to dive on structures, there is something about the structure and mystery that I like. I just really like wrecks/debri dives, whether there is a lot of life or not. I guess you can say the mystery behind it and just investigating it is part of the fun. The environmental conditions of this dive site are a little interesting and eerie if you are not used to diving in the lake, so this dive isn't for everyone.

Dive Monkey's 100th Dive! 3/24/2011

Yesterday was Dive Monkey's 100th dive! I've been diving with him for the majority of his last 70 to 80 dives and it's been pretty awesome to watch how much he has improved over that time. His trim has improved 10 fold! His frog kick and turning kicks are fairly tuned now.

So last night we geared up at Cove 2 for his 100th dive and swam out to the buoy. While swimming out and scanning the surface of the water I saw a seal head pop up in the distance. Awesome, I've never dove with a seal that was a slight bit of a stalker before... and that set the precedence of the dive. We dropped down at the buoy, got to the bottom, did a buoyancy check and we were on our way to the I-beams. Viz was great! and then all of a sudden there was these eerie clouds of silt forming to the our right and left as we were being closed in on by something in the dark... Then the seal blasted in front of us, and continued to silt up our viz for the rest of the dive. After we took a 300-ish degree heading from the I-beams we hit up the little boat and started working our way through the log piles. About the second set of log piles we were treated to watching the seal attack and eat some fish as he used my HID light to hunt. We were noticing the lack of life out and Dive Monkey pointed out that all the fish were hiding under and between the logs from the seal. They were near motion less and looked dead, until you point a 35 watt HID in their face, then they tended to scoot away... We worked our way slowly up the boundary line and zig-zaged around until we were at our 10 foot stop with the prescribed PSI. Hung out for a second and surfaced. Overall the dive was awesome!

Max Depth: 105'
Dive Time: 48 minutes

Here is short video of the dive, it's not filmed with a professional camera or anything. Just a GoPro Hero HD in a Eye of Mine housing and a Light Monkey 35 watt HID with the beam adjusted to the most dispersed setting. With it set to spot all you see is a bright dot with a little bit of a halo... Enjoy the dive!

Lights for comparison
Princeton Tech Shockwave LED (400 lumens)
Light Monkey 35 Watt HID (3000 lumens)

Quotes from the post dive, "Diving with your dive light is like diving in HD." - Dive Monkey

Light Monkey 35 Watt HID Canister Light - Gear Highlight

I've been needing a brighter dive light for awhile now since my present light is completely inadequate for signaling in the dark waters of the Puget Sound. So my present primary light is being retired to backup status. I'd do a side by side comparison of the new and old dive lights underwater, but I have a feeling you won't even be able to see the old one with the camera I use underwater. I'll see what I can do though when I dive this weekend. The Light Monkey 35 Watt HID is 25 times brighter than my current fixed beam 125 lumen UK SL3 light. With this new light having a 3000 lumen HID output and focusable beam. I should have no problems seeing under most conditions.

The other reason for buying the light is some of the training I plan on entering into this summer requires a remote canister light for operating reels and such, and I don't have time at the moment to finish assembling my other canister light. I'll do that when I'm out of school so that I have a backup can light for my dive buddies and when this light goes in for service. In my search for which canister light to purchase I found a very competitive price coupled with excellent and personalized customer service from Scott at Sound Aquatics in Kenmore. After the customer service I just received, and learning more about the diving out of Sound Aquatics, I would feel very confident to purchase from Scott again. The other bonus of this particular light is that I was needing to use 3lbs of lead to be neutral in the water at 10' with 500psi in the tanks and the light is negative 3lbs in the water. There goes the rest of the weight belt.

Manufacturers Specs:

Focusable Lighthead

Different design than other HID's with the main ballast in the canister with the ignitor in a small housing at the head

Switch is recessed into the lid for additional protection

Powered by a 20 Amp Li-Po Battery Providing 330 Mins.(5.5 hours) of Burntime

35 Watt HID with 3000 Lumen Output @ 6000 Kelvin

New Dry Lid is completely sealed providing protection from water intrusion due to a cut cord or switch boot

Battery Canister is completely sealed preventing water intrusion due to improperly latched lid or forgotten o-ring

Dry Weight 7 lbs.(3.2kg) 3 lbs(1.36 kg) Negitive

Recharge Time from Complete Discharge 12 hours

Universal Input Charger. US Input Cord Provided, UK and European Input Cord Available

Canister and Head Machined from Solid Rod Delrin

11.5"(291mm) Length, 3.5"(88mm) Diameter

The huge canister and goodman handle light head.
The "hear no evil, see no evil" monkey logo that Light Monkey uses. It's pretty big, but unlike most large HID can lights the ballast is in the can and not on the light head. So there is less bulkiness on the actual light head comparatively to other models.

Diving Edmonds Underwater Park 1/9/2010

An awesome day diving at EUP. The current was a little funky, since we were late on the low tide window. We had a couple Cabazon fish charge us, and Eric tried dropping a golf ball on me... This trip Eric wore the camera, so I'm actually in it instead of behind the camera. Definitely a good day!

Scuba Diving Alki Beach Cove 2 12/11/2010

Eric and I escaped to Alki to test out my new Eye of Mine housing for the GoPro HD Helmet Camera. Overall it worked, but the deep dark Puget Sound and the little light sensor only works so well at 105' and 10' of horizontal visibility. Overall without any video lighting I think the setup will work for sharing my adventures with my family and friends.

Scuba Diving Alki Beach Cove 2 from Jared Cook on Vimeo.

Lobster Shop Wall (Deadman's Wall) and Les Davis 6-4-2010

Sonia had been mentioning for sometime now about taking me out to the Lobster Shop Wall. Today the tides were at a low exchange, and Sonia's tide predictions were right on the money so we didn't have any current at all. The dive started out with having such poor visibility in the first 15 to 20 feet of the water column that I was wondering if it was even worth heading down to a 100' + to not even be able to see anything. As we dipped below the mucky upper layer (which I couldn't even see to my fins...)the vis started to open up and continued to get better as we approached the wall. I've read about how in places this wall just drops off into a dark abyss well beyond 220'... Even knowing that as we approached the wall between 90' to 100' I couldn't help the initial eerie feeling as I looked down into certain blackness... Sonia motioned to me to keep an eye on my gauges since we could easily exceed the recreational dive limits here and along the wall we went. I kept directly behind her, and just below her so that I could also see what she was finding along the wall. Sonia has a knack for finding all the cool life along the way. With visibility probably reaching around 30'+ I was extremely stoked that my light had more of a limiting factor than anything else. As the no deco time wore down on the computers we headed up and over the wall to start slowly working our way up the steep embankment to the surface. Sonia and I each found a bottle along to the way to keep. We had lunch at a little cafe just a short drive from the waterfront.

Our dive profile for the Lobster Shop Wall.

Dive 2 was an exploration at Les Davis. We headed out to the tire reef (the boundary for scuba diving), which in places is more like random tire piles just a little further apart than what you can actually see... We meandered around the north end of the tire piles for awhile and Sonia found a bottle with an octo in it. It was fairly small, but was in for a ride... On the way in the current started to pull against us... When we got back to the car, Sonia decided on a nap instead of a 3rd dive so we called it a day.

Dive profile for the dive at Les Davis.

Tacoma Scuba Squad BBQ and Diving at Redondo Beach Along With Harper's Ferry Mini Golf Wreck Diving 5/30/2010

Operation Homework Evasion was a success... 9am this morning I met up with Sonia and the Squad from Tacoma Scuba for a couple dives and a BBQ. The first dive Sonia and I went down to the bottle field in about 80 feet of water. Somehow we found out that we had a third wheel that we had never met tagging along... Nothing like getting followed and buddied up with someone that you've never debriefed on how the dive was going down, equipment carried and emergency procedures... Dive one was a little short at about 31 minutes, with a max depth of 83 feet, but we found some bones and Sonia found a couple bottles.

Dive profile for the 1st dive at Redondo.


Wally was at the wheel cooking away some excellent grub, and there were conversations galore. I forgot that I had my camera in the car, so no above water pics... After the first dive I decided that I needed to move my pressure gauge mount so that it could be seen more easily and I needed to move the waist belt buckle further to the right away from the crotch strap. Otherwise the hours of tedious fitting and forming the harness to fit it just right seemed to have paid off. I'm a poor college student, so I also made my own necklace for my octo, and it worked quite well. I modeled it after Bassman's necklace, and it does the job for now. I have bigger items to save for at the moment...

Dive 2 Sonia and I headed back out to the bottle field to try to find some more bottles, and the couple longer bones that came out of my pockets while bottle hunting. Viz was so-so and varied between 10 to 20 feet. The dive length was 47 minutes and a max depth of 84 feet. I found a couple worthless, but interesting to me bottles, and Sonia found a bunch of cooler bottles. After the dive I went and refilled my tanks, and then headed to meet up with Victor for a Dive at Harper's Ferry in Port Orchard. His 7th dive and first one in a long while.

Dive profile for the 2nd dive at Redondo.


Dive 3 at Harper's Ferry had a even crappier northwest visibility (around 10 feet maybe...) We dropped down at the end of the dock and followed the line due north to the main wreck. We poked around for awhile, turned around and headed back to the dock. Where the lady at the Espresso stand floated me a free coffee since they didn't take credit (I asked before ordering and she told me not to worry about it, it's on the house.). They'll have my business any time I'm out there! The dive was a max of 30 feet and about a 38 minute long dive (at about this point Victor had loss feeling in his hands, he was diving a wet suit...)

Dive Profile for the wreck at Harper's Ferry.

The Roo with the Harper's Ferry fishing pier in the background.
The Roo loaded with Victor's and my gear.
Looking over the dive site.

The front of the new to me and newly assembled backplate rig.
A pic of the back of the backplate rig with the single tank adapter and doubles wing. At almost 60% off of retail price, I found the discontinued wing on sale awhile back while trying to find a 7/8" manifold, and the fact I don't use the wing for buoyancy with singles (i use the dry suit), and I plan on doubling my 100's... It was a great purchase and works awesome for surface flotation! The only problem with the wing is that it has the 12" hose, which means it is supposed to be for a double redundancy or back up wing, but at the price my poor college student budget couldn't pass it up... So I need to buy the longer 16" corrugated hose... The Dive Rite Deluxe harness, crotch strap and tank cam buckles I got from Tacoma Scuba, along with the light and most things that I don't buy used. There's an awesome group of guys that work there and I strongly recommend Tacoma Scuba. The backplate and single tank adapter is a hammerhead without the handles and weighs just under 12lbs. Hopefully the next purchase on pay day is a longer hose for my primary regulator... Then I need to find a set of used doubles regulators, and buy a set of bands for the 100's...

The Ranger and Redondo ~3/24/2010

This dive was before the NWDC meeting, but I can't remember the exact date. Sonia and I headed up to Port Townsend to find the wreck of the Ranger. Which is a very shallow 70 to 80 foot long wooden vessel that sank in the harbor. The goal was also to dive the Comet wreck as well, but we decided to save it for another day and go join a group at Redondo for the 2nd and third dive instead.

Finding the Ranger, like any new dive site can be a little interesting. We were following directions from the Northwest Wreck Dives book, which were fairly good, except it would of been easier to find using the gps coordinates. There was one non-submerged piling and we started our search in a northerly direction from the exposed piling. While staying around 20 feet out from the submerged pilings near where the bottom slopes off steeply, we were able to see a row anemones highlighting the hull of the ship. We moved over the white line of anemones and descended to the ship. As the tide went out the visibility continued to drop. This wooden boat appears to be fairly fragile, so be careful if you decide to venture out to find it. There is one forward section that can be swam through, and a small amount of life. There is not a lot to write home about, but if it was dove at high tide it would be worth the trip. As the tide kept going out the vis definitely continued to diminish... After the dive we decided to post pone the other 2 dives in the area and shoot over to Redondo to dive with Kyle and Kelly.

Dive profile of the Ranger dive. The dive computer display on the picture is at the point of minimal no decompression time remaining.

Me next to the Ranger.

Sonia on the Ranger

A random crab.





At redondo, we joined up with Kyle and Kelly for 2 night dives. We saw a bunch of baby octos and had an excellent 2 more dives.

Both of Redondo's dive profiles are below. The dive computer display on the picture is at the point of minimal no decompression time remaining.
Dive 1

Dive 2

The many mini octos and stubby squid that we saw on the Redondo dives.
Stubby squid.

stubby squid

stubby squid

Octo
All photos courtesy of Sonia Brugger.

Birthday Weekend Madness 4/10-11/2010

Well, I'm not much of a birthday person since mine usually end up with a lot of people bailing and never telling me, but this year was different. I actually had the best birthday that I can recall!

Saturday started out bright and early in the morning at Redondo Beach in Des Moines/Federal Way. The surf was pretty rough for the entry and exit, and it only got worst on each consecutive dive. The plan was 3 dives at Redondo followed by dinner with friends and family, followed by a movie.

Dive one, Sonia guided us to all the small boats and we saw several Giant Pacific Octos. The dive was about an 80' max depth

The second dive we found what was left of the VW bug, the buoyancy course and the dome/ swing set with the hanging barbies... An average of depth of 45 FSW.

The third dive we went down to the bottle field past the small statue where Sonia found some hopefully animal bones... Max depth of around 90 FSW

Than there was dinner and a movie. On Sunday Sonia, Kyle and I did 2 - 1 hour long dives at Les Davis in Tacoma. I don't have any dive graphs this time because my computer cracked out and started constantly beeping at me... So it is on its way to Texas to get fixed by Cochran...

Dive Map
http://theperfectdive.com/media/maps/12.pdf

One of the dives at redondo.

Mike pretending to drive the VW in about 45 FSW.



Sonia and I sitting on the swing set

Some of the arm bones that Sonia found at the bottle field.

Northwest Dive Club Gathering Cove 2 Alki Beach 3/28/2010

The NWDC had a small BBQ and dive trip at Cove 2 of Alki Beach in Seattle, WA. Met some really great people and dove with a couple different people, Sonia, Kyle and Roger as well. Sonia got some really great pictures of several Giant Pacific Octopus and there was a considerable amount of life. The first dive we dove down the NDZ buoy line to the logs around 93 feet and saw a lot of really interesting things to include the awesome picture that Sonia got of the GPO with it's eggs. Sonia and I turned around and slowly worked back up the line to the beach. The second dive we dropped down at the little white and red pop can buoy and worked our way down to the I-beams following the guy with the rebreather (I didn't catch his name). We then worked across the log piles at approximately a 300 degree heading and when we reached the NDZ buoy line we worked our way to the beach. The group than stopped for a deco stop, I guess the Uemis computers gathered some deco time while we were down below. With my Cochran I never hit deco, so I was wondering why we were still there after a 5 minute safety stop... Then I was caught off guard by getting regs handed off to me cause I was down to 400 to 450 psi, but I was at a loss of why we were still there... Took the air from Kyle, than from the rebreather guy who had a 40% slung AL80 cause we were still sitting there. Come to find out their computers put them into 10 minutes of deco time. The first dive they went about 10 feet deeper and were there for a little while longer so they had more N2 tissue loading, so that does come into play on the Deco time. The second factor is the Cochran doesn't average tissue loading in it's algorithm, it calculates everything as exact as possible, part of the reason my first computer was a Cochran Commander, and the replacement was Cochran EMC-16.

I finally got my PC software working for the dive computer that allows me to modify stuff in the computer and access dive events and the profiles. So even if there isn't any pictures I'll have something to post. These graphs are depth vs time (blue line) and Temperature vs depth and time (green line).

Dive 1


Dive 2



All pictures were taken by Sonia Brugger.


a GPO and it's eggs.

Scuba Diving, What I've been up to recently

Lately I've been swamped with college course work, and haven't had the opportunity to get out snowboarding and hiking. I have though picked the sport of scuba diving back up. I haven't been in almost 4 years after being stationed in Arizona, partially due to the fact that all my gear was stolen. After 2 years of slowly shopping craigslist and recollecting my gear... I've finally started diving again. The nice thing about diving is that I'm surrounded by shore diving spots where I live. So all it takes is a couple hours of my time and I can run to a local dive spot and hop into the cool Puget Sound waters and enjoy the weightless feeling along with the exploration of the underwater world. All in a matter of hours, and it doesn't take up my whole day, so it leaves me with plenty of time to study. So by no means have I not been busy exploring, but I haven't had the time to make blog entries. Here's an overview of some of the more recent dives.

first dives in over 4 years.
Les Davis, Tacoma, WA
Off of Ruston Way in Tacoma there are several dive sites, this particular one is fairly benign to current but subjected to the mud outflows of the Puyallup River. Luckily the 6 or 7 dives I've got to do here have had fairly decent visibility of 20 to 40+ feet. Features here are alarge tractor tire, a small rubble pile in ~25 feet of water and a large rubble pile in 30 to 80 feet of water. The rubble pile consists of debris from the old narrows bridge.

Edmonds Underwater Park
What can I say, nothing but exploration. The crew up in Edmonds that maintains this wreak has everything from rubble, to old hwy 520 bridge pontoons, to tug boats, to small ships... All I can say is the 2 short dives we did here were not enough. Hence why we are going there for 3 dives on the weekend of my birthday.






Harper's Ferry, Port Orchard, WA
has 2 wrecks that are easy to navigate to with a guide line from the end of the Harper's Ferry Fishing Pier. One larger 40+ foot wreck and a small 10 to 15 foot little boat. It was an excellent dive with excellent 30+ feet of visibility.

and more Les Davis, Tacoma, WA

I'll try to keep up the blog updates at a consistent rate, but I'm diving a lot and swamped with school work. Hopefully by march when I start getting some more hiking in I'll get more time to post the blogs. Other blogs to watch out for is a DIY canister dive light. I'm working on building a remote canister dive light that will be putting out 500 to 600 lumen, and be powered by a remote canister attached to my bc, while the light will be attached to a goodman handle on my hand. Also a scuba gear list post.

All underwater pictures taken by Sonia Brugger.