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. . .