and finally, the below.

Finally went diving today. I guess it's been close to 2 months since I've been underwater, since the last time I dove the aquarium, and I don't even know when that was. It occurs to me I could look back at my August entries and find out, if I really need to know. But, I'm splitting hairs, and it really doesn't matter all that much.

My dive buds today were 2 fellow MDT students, others who, coincidentally, also skated the edge of passing the swim eval, and ended up in non-diving MDT classes, and open swim three days a week this semester. Our site was Thousand Steps, off the Mesa. As you might imagine, the Mesa (–noun: a land formation, less extensive than a plateau, having steep walls and a relatively flat top and common in arid and semiarid parts of the southwestern U.S. and Mexico) is an elevated portion of the city, populated by some very beautiful, and other quite average, homes, situated on streets sloping, and twisting. Three sides of the Mesa lead down to other parts of the town, the last abuts the ocean, high up, on cliffs. The thousand steps (actually only 140, as verified today by Dave) lead down to the beach, which at high tide is scant. The bed of kelp we explored lies just off shore.

For the past few years, the bulk of my diving has been at the aquarium. My last day at work there, I calculated my cumulative bottom time at 2,500 minutes, or something like 41 hours I'd spent underwater there alone. Bottom time at the aquarium doesn't really constitute a dive, which, by definition must be to a certain depth, with minimum requirements for the amount of air consumed, and perhaps other idiosyncracies put forth by unnamed worldwide dive organizations. The tanks at the aquarium, at their deepest, are 14 feet. There's no current, or tide, or surge to consider when diving at the aquarium; visibility never drops below 35 feet; salinity is constant; gear is supplied, on-site and neatly configured.

It's slightly different in the ocean.

To attend the MDT program, I needed some new gear. What I used in Thailand is still in great condition, but is for use in much warmer waters. I needed a thicker wetsuit and a new BCD (buoyancy compensation device, or the vest that keeps a diver afloat at the surface and allows her to attain neutral buoyancy @ depth), at the minimum. Scuba can instill a voracious appetite in a diver, and there are always more contraptions and contrivances promising to make future dives better, creating ample opportunity for the diver to succumb, but mostly I stuck to the basics. I did add in a few non-essentials to make life a bit easier (of greatest and most beloved note, a nylon dive skin, which shaves about 15 minutes off shimmying into a wetsuit. I'll never, never be without this item, ever, ever again.).

Diving at the aquarium, being as easy and routine as it was, required no real thought. I arrived, shimmed limbs and torso into the wetsuit, threw on the other, pre-assembled gear, and hopped into the tank. Considering my ocean dive today, the first in this new gear, had me running to old dive manuals, calculating weight requirements, and mentally assessing the state of a regulator unused since last February.

The dive itself was amazing. I can still get nervous before a dive, mostly when I haven't been in the water for a while, when in new locations, or when conditions are more adverse than I'm familiar or comfortable with. The weather was lovely today, but the waves were a bit high, and breaking close to shore. At the surface, we swam out to the kelp bed, and descended. There was just a touch of the old panic in me, as the visibility looked to be shit, and the water was cold, but we descended and once at the bottom, the panic was gone, and I was happy to be underwater. The gear performed marvelously, and needs a few adjustments, but overall appears to have been a very solid investment. Being so close to shore, the surge was slightly nauseating at times, but also fun to ride back and forth. At one point, when I'd stopped to look around for my fellow divers, I looked off the reef and saw someone familiar, jettisoning itself off and away, a shovelnose guitarfish, similar to inhabitants of Shark Cove at the aquarium.