testing to see if i can figure out how to upload pix.

last time i tried this i celebrated prematurely.

but if it does actually work, thats a picture of a mound at takalik abaj: an archaeological site discovered in Guatemala that has been excavated since 1888 and onward.

got up the gaul to fuck with my template.
thought it was about time to update since there's now some new players on the scene. . .

but back to snorkeling.
. . . things i forgot to mention that were of mild interest:

first thing was finding a watering can. ya know. . . to water plants. for some reason one was about 30 feet down. the thing was rather small. i guess thats just how things are on a boat. smaller than the usual item, yet still functional. anyway. the opening to this plastic, yellow jug was about an inch smaller than the diameter of a coke can. maybe two-and-a-half fingers wide.
i brought the water can to the surface, and drained out all the water as i usually do. but this time i heard a scratching sound. i really didnt think anything of it. i attributed it to sand or small gravel.
but then i looked in. it was a crayfish (what i've wrongly been calling a prawn. i guess the difference is that a prawn looks like a mini-shrimp, and a crayfish looks like a mini-lobster, i.e. tails curled under vs. tails flat, respectively. however, i could be wrong). anyway, it was a fairly small one, maybe about 3 inches long. the claws were maybe barely over an inch. but the thing was, that the girth of this guy was larger than the hole to the can. there was no way to get that guy out of there barring ripping him out. so i guess the prawn found himself a permanent home. now, i'm not exactly too sure what prawns eat, but if they can live off the gunk that accumulates over time in the jug, then maybe his situation isnt that bad. yeah, it might be boring to pass the time, but at least he's safe from whatever's out there that may eat prawns. i guess getting some booty is somewhat out of the question too, however.



encounter #2 envolves a tin can. the thing was half opened by one of those old-school can openers. the ones that leave the serrated edges. . . that half that was opened was bent back and what was sitting on that surface was probably the most exciting (and intimidating) creature i found. it was about 2 inches long. brown with yellow spots. it was flat and tear-shaped. guess what it is yet?

a leech. here's a pretty damn close (if not exact) example of it.
before today I didn't even know those little buggers were in our waters. apparently thats now something new that i have to be aware of when going through forests of seaweed. so the thing was firmly plastered to the tin lid, however, i didnt bother to poke it, as i wasn't sure how well the thing could navigate through a liquid medium. i was more intent on keeping it at a safe distance. sticking to a tin can where i can hold the other side is just fine by me.
but when i crested the surface, the thing got pissed. the thinner end of the teardrop jumped up and started flailing around like Ray Charles. that small tip must be the head. it was really hard to tell while it was stagnant underwater. so with the fear of it flopping onto me, i took it back to where it was most calm, and moved on from there.

and you already heard the story about the old bottles. . .

hm. i need to blog about this shit immediately after the fact or i feel less prone to write about it.
but anyway, here are the continued adventures of me and manuel:

after our trip to madison park last week we decided to see what was south of there.
we arrived at this small sand beach smothered by swanky, gated homes. apparently just up the road manuel says is where that bitch courtney love lives. there's a similar tiny park with a large oak is where people decide to leave their rememberances of kurt cobain.

anyway. it was a cloudy day, but we still ventured forth, even though our balls may have had a different stance on the situation. but once they sucked up damn near to our intestines, they were, for the time being, appeased.

the first thing we came to was a small dock. there was this old black man sitting out there with a fishing pole. now, even though he had the pole, i wouldn't exactly call what he was doing "fishing". manuel and i were looking around to avoid his line so we didn't get hooked. but after a while of searching, we realized that the man didn't have a line in the water. he didnt even have any fishing line on his pole! he was just sitting out there enjoying the cloudy weather.

so after that was no longer a safety issue, we dove around the dock, cuz thats usually where the most random shit accumulates. and accumulate it did. i found a fishing pole (with line attached) that i gave to the old dude. i know nothing about poles, but it looked fairly decent and didnt seem like it had been sitting down there that long. the man was thankful and readily accepted it. that may seem like a perfectly reasonable thing to accept as a gift, but the next thing i found in the water was two keys on a keyring. now either this crazy dude keeps dropping shit like his pole and keys into the water, or he's a little loopy. cuz he really wanted those keys. i obliged and threw them up to him. what would i want with them?

more diving brought more shit.
i found a fillet knife which was in very good condition. i later used it as a machete on the seaweed. it worked perfectly as the seaweed didn't bend under the contact of the blade but was sliced like the two pieces had never been connected. i also found a flashlight that, when brought to the surface, worked when i turned it on and pointed it at manuel. this was in spite of the water that filled up around the bulb, and the transparent case revealing that at least one D battery was fully submerged when the flashlight was held vertically.
manuel's dives produced some nice-ass sunglasses that were in perfectly working order and had also probably not been underwater too long. he wore them on the ride home.

on our deeper dives we found two good finds. one was a BMX bike. or maybe just a kid's bike. i couldn't tell. manuel and i just threw it up on the dock. it was in good condition other than the fact that the chains were somewhat rusted. the second treasure was one of those REI chairs. you know the ones that collapse into a cylindrical shape. the feet come together like a tripod, and the seat collapses in on itself. that didnt seem to be down there that long, so we also threw it up onto the dock. three hours later, when we returned, it seemed that crazy black dude had run away with the bike and the chair. we told him he could, so its no big deal. the knife and the glasses we hid in the structural beams of the dock, so only people in the water and under the pier could reach them.

as usual, the garbage of choice thrown into the water was bottles. manuel and i had our bottle wars, where each of us holds a bottle and we smash them together like swords until one of them breaks. i stupidly used a bottle that didnt have a neck and i got pierced next to my nail on my middle finger. cuts in water take a shitload of time to clot up. luckily we weren't the the amazon or tropical waters. you could see the flow of blood like you do in cartoons. just imagining it finding some predator's nose. . .

once we exhausted ourselves at that dock, we went further south to a moorage with maybe 50 - 100 boats. its hard to tell when you're swimming at the base of all these boats.
there was a little log jam when we first got there and we explored below that. it was pretty fucking deep. 50 feet or so. i wish i had an altimeter, or whatever the ones are called that are used underwater. down there was a bunch of tires, which seems to be the next most popular trash item in the water. but among the tires was what looked to be an old school scuba tank.
i brought it up about half way, and luckily manuel dove down to help me the rest of the way. we threw it up onto the logs only to find that the top was totally corroded and brown grossness was spewing out the holes that the rust had made.

i forgot to mention our encounter between the dock and the moorage. we came across the largest animal we've seen so far (maybe with exception to that fatty blueish fish up at magnuson). we found turtles!
they were mostly black with a bit of yellow outline here and there. they had a black stripe on their neck. they weren't sea turtles, they didn't have fins, and their claws were fucking amazing. the biggest one was about a half inch long. the turtles themselves, when holed up into their shells (which was the way we got to examine them the best) were about 9 inches long.
the turtles could actually move fairly quick when the wanted to. the first one we ran into at the dock i touched his back and he split. into the seaweed.
the second one which was about half way between the dock and the moorage, i steve irwin'd his ass. getting just above him within arm's length, i jutted my hand down and grabbed the shell by either side. at first my only reasoning for doing this was to keep away from possible bites, but i later figured out that this was also the best way to keep away from getting scratched. neither manuel or i got scratched by the fucker, but he had potential. we checked him out for a bit. i held him at the surface and he just stayed puckered up in his shell. manuel pulled him completely out and he got pissed, trying to paddle at the air. we eventually got tired of him and let him go off back into his seaweed hideout. crikey, whata beaut!

down at the boatyard there was, of course, more shit to find. again, bottles were prevalent, also cans this time. manuel found an olympia beer can. that shit aint around no mo' and to boot, it was the pull tab kind. old school. i found heidelberg beer, i guess german beer. there were the other usual: miller, bud, bud lite, coke, pepsi. but they were all old school designs. we found shasta too (is that still around?) and some safeway brand that i'd never heard of. many root beer flavors too. hires, i guess is one of them.

there were random household stuff in the water too. i found an old crystal-looking bowl, a garden hose sprayer, unopened window washer, another unopened bottle which oozed out a light brown slime. i found a jurassic park toy raptor, and about 4 plastic buckets.

as expected there was boat paraphenalia. cones that keep your boat from banging against the dock, other metal pieces that had the label saying that they were for boats, but i had no idea what for.
there was also random pvc piping which along with a large rusted table umbrella, manuel and i created our masterpiece. there was a pilon in what could be considered the boat "lobby". kinda the neutral area where no boat really goes. on the pilon there was a metal ring about 4 or 5 feet from the surface of the water. we stuck one pvc piece which was about 4 feet long into that hole, and it got caught because it had the attachment for the attaching of another pipe. so that worked out well. on the other end, we attached another pipe, also about 4 feet long, but this had an attachment piece taht was L-shaped, so now we had pipe going down from the ring nearly vertical and into the water, and the second piece running nearly parallel to the surface, but mostly underneath.
to complete our masterpiece, it took a bit of struggling (we suffered for our art). that outdoor umbrella was a bitch and highly akward to get out of the water, but eventually we succeeded and stuck it in the L-shaped attachment on the opposite end of the piece attached to the pipe that was attached to the pilon. so in the end, it was: the pilon, with a pipe sticking down into the water, a piece running out and parallel to the water's surface, and then the umbrella which appeared to be sticking out of nowhere because of the submerged horizontal piece.
we'll let the moorage owners chew on that for a bit.
. . . along with the odd collection of old bottles and cans that we left for them on the piers.

our other greatest feat there was bringing an anchor to the surface. no, it wasn't at all tethered to a boat. it was underneath the dock. maybe the rope/chain snapped years ago. all i have to say about this, is that theres a definite reason that they make anchors out of metal. manuel and i were both dangling off the pier by one arm and holding a piece of the anchor in the other. eventually manuel found one of those two-pronged metal tethers to hold on to (my nautical jargon is sadly limited) and after a few minutes of struggling, we'd pushed it onto the deck for whoever wants to lay claim to it.

eventually we ventured past the boat area and more into what is a restaurant on the waterfront. i forget the name, but it was somebody's generic-named grill: billie's grill, jefferey's grill, something like that.
this was where we hit it rich. the motherload. texas tea. or not.
just glass bottles. but old bottles. and some of them are pretty cool looking. and again. shit i'd never heard of. i mean come on, nestbitt's? there were also old school pepsi, coke, and squirt designs. and again, that hires root beer. my favorite find, however, is this big chief bottle. it most closely looks like the second one from the left on the top row, but isn't exact. some website said that they go from $25 to up to $400, however when mike and i looked online they were only going for about a buck a piece. i guess its all about who you can get to buy it. but i'm going to hold onto mine either way. although it needs a bit of a clean up.

that was about the extent of our three-hour tour. i found 8 more golf balls to add to my collection, bringing the total to an even 30. i found stu yet another toy. a kind of modified frisbee that is probably easier on the dog's mouth.

so. i guess we'll see what happens next sunday. word on the street has it that kato may be joining us next time. anyone's welcome to come. manuel was lucky enough to snatch up my only extra set of shit. so, if you want to come, all you need is a mask, snorkel, and a set of fins.

and let's hope the weather holds out for a few more weeks. . .

is it good to do something bad in the name of your boss's business?
what i did really didn't hurt anyone, but if my bosses found out it might make them reconsider how the place is closed up every night.

what i did was break into my work building so i could appease the angry, aged masses that were brewing just outside the door. apparently old people enjoy their set routines, and want to swing their crotchedy, arthritic, vericosed forelimbs at whoever may be responsible when these daily schedules don't come to fruition.

why did i do this, you ask? well, 6 am may be early as fuck, but our place is supposed to open at five thirty, so when this rolled around, i knew i had to do something.

since i had no key, nor a phone (who would i have called anyway? the only number i have is for the front desk, and nobody being there was the whole problem), so i initially set out to find a way to the back of the building to see if the owners were home (they live behind the pool on 35th). both sides of the building had a crazy amount of overgrowth which was no surprise. clutter seems to be their style. but getting down to each side of the building ended with a fence that may have been scaleable, but it was just starting to rain and i wasn't feeling up to it, so i went back to my car and drove around to 35th. went to the owner's front door and knocked. nothing. a light was on, but no one seemed to be moving around. for some reason they have two front doors, so i tried the other. also nothing. i had heard that they were on vacation for a week. which is awesome when i'm working cuz that means i don't have to watch my back, but kinda sucked in this situation.

so i walked passed their house, through a couple gates and down to the back door/fire escape. these are two glass double doors that swing out. its only kept locked by a chain with a lock. the owners like it this way cuz they can then open the doors a few inches and reach in to get to the lock. its a lot easier than going around the block, like i figured out this morning.

so this opening that is created when you pull the doors back is only about 5 - 6 inches. not wide enough for my fat noggin. but i didn't stop there. i looked up and noticed that with the two doors out there was a small triangle made at the top of the doors, formed by the two doors and the top door jam. i didnt know if i was small enough to fit through that triangle, but i thought i'd give it a try.

i pulled over a lawn chair, got up on it, and stepped up onto the pull-bars on the door. i quickly realized that this would not be a very good idea, since any movement would swing the doors closed and pinch the shit out of my fingers. so i jumped back down.

looking around for things to prop open the door, i immediately saw a broken slate rock sitting next to the door (i already mentioned how they like clutter? broken shit? no prob. leave it where it lies.). this slate is about a foot squared, but broken in three pieces, which turned out to be a good thing. i initially tried to prop the door with one piece, but the doors kept sliding back in. i tried two pieces, but they weren't wide enough. so i grabbed the third piece and had to figure out the right angle to place these two so the third piece would hedge in-between them and keep them stable. this may sound like an easy feat, but i'm working with these two blocks, then the third, all while trying to hold each door open so there's no slack at all in the chain keeping them together.

eventually. i got it. i pulled the chair back over, climbed up on the door and realized i couldnt even fit a leg through the few inches that the doors gave me, so all of my body would have to go through that little triangle. luckily for me, the roof wasnt that far out of reach. additionally, it had an easy to grab lip, so i could keep my ass from falling. so i climbed up to where i was standing on the top of the doors, then i had to figure out how to get both of my legs through this triangle, with one side flush against the wall. it wasnt easy, but with a lot of upper body strength, i lowered both legs into the triangle at the same time. i squoze my ass through and kind of had to bend my back backward so i didnt have to hit my face against the wall when jumping down on the other side.

i made it!
broke in. but for the sake of the company.
and no beat-downs by old grammy's flabby triceps.

thankfully, at the front door, only one door is locked with a key. the other main door is locked by the same chain method but uses a carabiner instead of a lock. so i busted those open and let the geriatrics flood in. they all thanked me profusely and asked how i got in. when i told them through the back door, they then asked if it was unlocked.
i kinda looked at them and went, "uhhhh. . . . no. . ."
to which they realized that i had broken in and asked no further questions, just being thankful that i was able to let them go on with their routine that would no doubt have them eating dinner by noon and sleeping by 4 pm.

then came more fun. i know my duties, but i dont know the front desk person's duties (heh. duties). so i frantically looked for the breakers, which luckily i kinda knew where they were since about a week ago there was nobody in the pool for about an hour, so i snooped around the place finding all the random junk that had piled up over the years in random hidden rooms.

got the lights on. got the computers on so people could swipe their cards in. then i had to turn on all the shit that i usually do and take off the tarps that cover the pool. which is a bitch. especially by yourself.

i slapped up the "no lifeguard" sign, which i guess is illegal according to the health department, and sat in the front desk area frantically trying to call the guy who was supposed to be there. apparently you cant dial area code 425 from the phones at work, so that basically sucked. the guy called around 7 and i just told him to get in when he could.

he felt really bad and offered to buy me something from jack in the crack. i eventually accepted. free food. and for having something to do rather than just sitting and looking at fat or wrinkly old people.

so all in all an exciting day, but 530 is still too damn early for fun like that.
even though it was good times, i hope i dont have to do it again tomorrow when i show up one more time at 530.

for those of you who are actually interested in my little adventures, i guess i'll write about my latest one.
went with manuel to the usual place.
did the usual routine, although this time we went out past the dog park area only to find that it looked like the area beyond there had been dredged. lots of tiny fish in large schools, but other than that, nothing.
swam through a shitload of seaweed around the dogpark, which isnt my favorite thing to do, then we went back to where those two big wheels are.

for some reason, i decided i wanted to go deeper, maybe cuz i'd seen it all.
so i attempted to clear my ears and was actually successful time and time again.
so eventually i'd go out further into the lake and dive to where i couldnt see the bottom from the surface. i dove for maybe 15 feet and still couldnt see the bottom. i continued. finally i saw this yellow line. it continued as far left and right as the murky water allowed me to see. i still couldnt see the bottom. i got closer to the line and saw some definition it in. it was actually a rope. from this distance i could also see the lakebed. it was only a few inches (6) below the rope.
coincidentally directly under me was what allowed me to understand what the rope was actually there for.
there was this black shiny cage. and in this cage was a 5-inch prawn gripping the top of the cage and trying to get out.
now. everyone i tell this to asks two questions.
1) did you take out the prawn?
no. i kinda realized i was maybe 50 feet down in the water and thought oxygen might be a better commodity than a single prawn.
2) is that even legal, prawn trapping?
hell if i know. look it up your damn self.

so that was the major excitement of the trip, other than actually being able to go down that far.
and being down that far theres a definite temperature change in the water. it goes from tolerable and changes maybe around 20 to 30 feet to butt-ass cold. its hard to stay down there that long even if i did have more breath.

found a bunch more crap around the two major dump sites when i could go out further. i even found a BBQ lid. you know the kind: the generic, black circular ones.

check out the rest of manuel's pix here under "under pressure". the quality aint his fault. shots were taken through a plastic bag.
i took some shots of my own with a double-bagged disposable camera.
got one more shot to waste then its off to fred meyers to see what water-soaked film turns out to look like. i took it down with me to 40/50 feet. so i think the seal of the bag couldnt hang. pussy.

went out snorkeling again. this time the lake was a lot less murky than the other times i've gone. possibly its just because it was earlier (10 am) vs all the other times that ive gone at noon. maybe not, but a possibility.

and since the water was a lot more clear, i found myself being decieved by the depths that i was diving to. before it would get darker at a given depth, but today light was penetrating further so when i was coming up for some of that living-giving oxygen, on a few occasions, it didnt come soon enough. well at least as quickly as i wanted it to, but i was never in any real trouble.

seeing further was really good for checking out fish. there were a lot of those usual foot-long ones with the bright yellow ventral fins. theyre the curious ones. usually i dive down from above them to chase them until i need another breath, but today one came upon me as i was looking at stuff on the lake floor. he was about two feet above me headed straight for me. i held my ground not making any sudden movements. he lazily flipped his tail fin forward. when he got close enough, about 3 feet, i slowly made my way toward him. reached out, and actually touched his slimy tail. first time actually touching a wild fish. well. other than ones on or previously on a hook. that guy was, yeah, about a foot long.

however, i think i saw the record breaker today, length- and girthwise, that is. this fucker was huge. i believe it to be something like a catfish, but like any smart fish that could grow to be this big, he kept his distance. this fat bastard had to be at least 3 feet in length. i'm telling you. this is something huggable, something you could actually wrestle with. i tried to pursue it, but it darted off away from shore into the blue-green abyss.

there was this other fish. only about 3 inches long, but it was boxy. about as wide as it was tall (stomach to back). it wouldn't use its tail fin, only its lateral fins (side fins, would be arms, whatever you want to call them). you could see the little spurt with every pull of the fin. it was moving so slow. i came up behind it, my mask a couple inches from its tail. it kept its inchworm pace. after about 15 seconds of drifting behind it, i stuck my finger out to it and it darted ahead about two feet, then went back to its snail pace. i let him be and moved on looking at more junk on the lakebed (why is it lakebed but seafloor?).

as for miscellaneous junk that i found. i found an old ford hubcap. 4 old movie reels, you know the kind? they usually come in a pair and have the tape visibly wrapped around them. i found 4 of those, but only one wasn't totally corroded. found a spark plug. more ceramic shit, bottles, etc. the usual.
however, in the last week somebody must have been practicing their golf shot cuz i found 19 golf balls, i'll tell ya, my pockets were full. 17 of them were the same yellow-colored ball. 2 others were white with 2 red stripes. there were 3 more yellow ones that i saw, but they were too deep for me to go with the one breath that i had, then when i dove down to find them again, i must have drifted away from them and couldnt find them.

i almost ran into the large tree that i posted about before. i was watching the lakebed and it popped up in my field of vision with about 5 feet to go. this thing sticks out like a sore thumb. amazing, especially with the clear water how i almost crashed into it.

came upon the mysterious metal wheels again. this time with the clearer water and less of a want to return home, i surveyed the scene. seems that they are both each a large spool. theyre about 5-6 feet in diameter and about 3 feet tall. they must have been used for the line on ship anchors. thats all i can come up with. aside from the bed frame resting next to them, and the couple of oxidized oil drums, there was something that looked like a safe. but i'm sure it was gutted of anything valuable before entering its watery tomb. everything seems to be discarded as trash.

speaking of tombs. i ventured further north than i ever had before. there was this bed of seaweed that almost looked like branchless fir trees, and just beyond this was the fucking doggie toy graveyard. any style you could imagine was here. chew toys, frisbees, sea-urchin looking rubber toys, kongs, small plastic footballs, even a deflated basketball. i found one toy that is a football shaped ball with various holes in it. inside is a tennis ball that has about 2 - 5 inches to roll around in the football depending on its location. dont know how the ball got in there. i snagged that one and brought it home.
as far as other tennis balls go. those are the hardest to detect because of their greenish composition. at first i estimated the toy collect down there to be maybe about 50 in this given area, but as i dove down deeper i had to bump it up to about 100 from all the camoflagued tennis balls. i wasnt aware of my location in regards to the shore, but as i popped my head up i saw half a dozen people hucking tennis balls into the water with their dogs quick in persuit. however, unbeknownst to me, i was out further than any of those people could throw. which is odd, because the other sites that i've been talking about is easily the throwing distance of a 7 year-old. i kinda skirted around the seaweed to get there. the dog park area must be more shallow than around the rest of sand point.

thats about all i have to report today. i'm hoping to bring keith along with me tomorrow. show him the awesomeness and disparaging deeds that are hiding in our very own lake washington. i wonder if theres piles of crap laying around anywhere else in the lake. . . i'm sure the navy probably got away with the most damage though. as for the rest of washington. i don't think i could get myself to dive around west seattle with all those yummy PCBs and whatnot. the sound is probably a bit more chilly than the lake as well.

i guess, by chance, i found myself a decent swimming hole.