Rock Lake & Blue Hole - Santa Rosa, NM - January 23-24 2010

I met up with some buddies to do a handful of dives last weekend. I've been contemplating new dives to do in Rock Lake for a while and my primary dive buddy and I had been shooting emails back and forth to come up with a dive plan. With the dive plan set, we met up to do our dives. We ended up modifying our dive plan a bit at the last minute so that we could accommodate another dive buddy. All in all, we only shaved off about 10 minutes of our dive plan, which ended up being a 96 minute run time.

When we got into the water, the air temperature was running about 35 degrees and the winds were blowing slightly out of the west. When we surfaced, the winds had picked up dramatically and were blowing about a constant 40+ mph. We really wanted to get back into the 55 degree water, as it was much warmer then the air temperatures, especially when factoring in the wind.

After our single dive at Rock Lake we packed it up and went to the Blue Hole, where we were much more protected by the wind and we had some pretty good dives playing with scooters, practicing some of our skills, and taking pictures. All in all, it was a good weekend of diving... Not that I've ever had a bad weekend of diving. :)

Here are some of the video's from the weekend. Pictures can be seen here.


Rock Lake - This is a very short video, compared to our run time during the dive. During this dive we decided to turn what we normally do over two dives, into a single dive. We visited the gypsum crystals at 100ft on the east wall and another set of gypsum crystals at 70ft on the southeast wall.



Blue Hole - This is just a fun video of us playing with the x-scooters in Blue Hole. Turns out, that's a good was to keep entertained in the Blue Hole. :)



Valve Drill - This is just me performing a valve drill.

New Mexico Springs and Points of Interest

The more that I dive in New Mexico, the more that I realize that a lot of the dive sites ae unique. This is a list of known springs and points of interest. I'll add detailed information on them as I can. The diving is remote. We can get air fills in Santa Rosa, but for nitrox and helium mixes we have to bring in our own supplies. Some of the diving is on public property, such as Blue Hole and Perch Lake, but most of it is on private property in cow pastures.


View New Mexico - Spring Exploration in a larger map

It's never just diving with a UTD instructor

Jason and I met up with George Watson and his Tech 1 student (Stephen) this past weekend, with the idea to dive and talk about UTD and the classes that he is able to teach. Little did we know that George had some other plans for us. His student was solo this weekend because his team mates bailed on him at the last minute, so George wanted my buddy and I to act as his team mates so that he could practice some of the skills.

The first dive was a shakedown dive with valve drills and OOG's. I wasn't performing my best since I it was my first time wearing double LP72's and I didn't quite have the trimmed out correctly. So I was yo-yoing a bit trying to find that happy medium. After a quick debrief, George must have felt confident that we weren't going to kill each other or him, so we did a really cool experience dive to look at some gypsum crystals growing out of a clay bank.

I must say that I've only dove on this site a few times, but have never really had an opportunity to explore. So this really turned out to be a real treat for me. Out of the local sites we have available, Rock Lake is truly unique. The geologic features of the spring has some similarities of some other local springs, but at the same time are dramatically different.

After a surface interval that included some land drills and George explaining how to *cough* manage some scenarios (that should have been a clue of what was to come), we were back in the water. My buddy was to blow an SMB to use as an upline, while Stephen, was to run the line south along the spring. We experienced fixable post failures, unfixable post failures, lost mask, and even an instance where we were buddy breathing because of the available working regs between us. We even experienced a couple failures that weren't due to George, such as line entanglement and light failures. Luckily, my battery died on my primary light during deco on one of our experience dives.

On our last dive on Friday, George gave us our first dose of crack, for free of course. It was my first time to pilot an x..... I must have one... Dammit, George!

I went into the weekend expecting some simple dives and chatting up George, but what we got was completely different. It's very cool to see how you handle failures when your head isn't in class mode. Over all, we could have handled some things differently, but no body died and I think that's a big plus. Two days, 11 dives, excellent weekend. I think my buddy and I will be starting our Tech 1 class with George in the early spring.

Our first dive on Saturday morning was one of the coolest dives that I've ever experienced. It was dark, except for our light sabers lighting up the wall. If you looked up, all you could see was a green silhouette of the surface. If you looked down, all you saw was a vast wall in front of you disappear into the abyss. And the gypsum crystals hiding in plain site stole the show for the weekend. That was a completely unexpected surprise. I loved it.

My favorite moment was when I had a left post failure, so my only breathable reg was on my primary reg, Stephen was maskless and I was guiding him up the line via touch contact, and Jason and George were having a pretty detailed underwater conversation, where George was telling Jason to go OOG and take Stephens primary regulator. Jason, being the nice guy that he is wanted to make sure that George really wanted him to do that. After a few moments, George reached down, took Stephen's primary, and gave it to Jason. I have to admit, I was chuckling a bit by that.

I have my chance to break away, but I may not take it.

I've spent a good portion of the year getting ready to break away from my normal day to day life to go beach bumming around the world. Finally, I have a possibility of going to work for a reputable live aboard and I may not take it. You see, I've also "unofficially" been offered a job locally that has been growing like wild fire, even through the recession, and has a laid back, friendly atmosphere. They are also offering me a good sum of money. So the question is Beach bum it for little money, with almost no expenses, and live the life style, OR white collar it locally with a thriving, friendly company with good pay? It's something that I've been trying to wrap my head around for a few days.

The Texas Clipper - July 18, 2009

A buddy and I made a long road trip down to South Padre for a four day weekend, last weekend. While we were there we dove on the Texas Clipper through American Diving.

It's a longish boat ride out to the clipper (18 miles off the coast / about an hour boat ride). We had a mild surge (2 ft surge) the entire way out there, so it wasn't too bad. We had the privilege of diving with four disabled vets (two of them recently back from Iraq). Great bunch of people.

Current's were mild, visibility was about 40 - 60 ft. Apparently there were shrimpers scraping the sea floor around the clipper shortly before we arrived at the site at around 8AM. We did two shortish dives. 85 fsw for 35 minutes. It's a long ways out for a couple of short dives. I would have been more pleased with three or even four dives to really get a feel for the ship. She's about 350 ft long and sits in about 120 of water. Either way, we had a good time.

Here's a short video from the dives. (My third over all attempt at underwater video... I'm slowly getting better...)

Five Years of Diving.

So, I was bored last night, was looking through some pictures, and realized that five years ago this month I became a certified diver. I threw a handful of pictures into Google's Picasa and this is what it came out with.

It's pretty cool to watch the progression from a poodle jacket wearing numpty, to my first dive in doubles, to a reasonably competent diver who actually is allowed to share my passion in a professional setting. I've met some wonderful people, been to some awe-inspiring locations, and have seen so much more than I would have ever imagined when I first started diving. This truly is a lifestyle. I can't wait to see where my diving is five, 10, and even 50 years from now.

March 2009 Dive and Jive

I met up with some buddies from Colorado and New Mexico to do a long weekend of diving and general goofing off. It was an excellent weekend of diving, food, and company. Throughout the weekend I did seven dives, which were all relaxing and exactly what I needed as I have spent the majority of my free time readying my house to sell lately. What a total relaxing weekend with good friends! Here is a video I made of the weekend.



This is my third attempt at shooting underwater video. My second attempt doesn't count since there really wasn't any usable video. My editing is getting a little better, although, I was too lazy to try to correct the color since I wasn't using a filter.

Here are some of the things that I learned from shooting this weekend:

1. If the water has a lot of particulate, then it's probably better to use manual focus. I noticed that my video would go out of focus for short periods of time when there was a sudden wash of particulate in front of the camera.

2. Don't assume that those water spots on the housing lens will go away once you're in the water. I didn't notice it all weekend, but my video shows a water spot on the lens from previous use. Note to self: take some Windex to the lens before the next dive.

3. When shooting with a wide angle, it's best to get closer to the smaller subjects, such as fish and crawdads.

4. I really should try to shoot some video with the red filter to see how much light it cuts out. It may turn out decent.