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