snork 1

Snork 1: return of the Snork!

if you read manuel's blog, you know we went snorking.
but i gotta get in my 2 cents as well.
a recap that will look much like his, but still i gotta:

so we went on down to the ball-numbing waters of madison park.
we walked to the pier staring into the choppy water.
neither of us wanted to go.
manuel bit the bullet first.
jumping off but grabbing onto the edge of the pier just after his balls broke through the water.
...what's the point now? balls have re-ascended.
so he let go and dropped in, looking like a scared, wet dog making his way back to shore. a snokel-muffled scream came with every breath.
(sorry manuel, but it was funny as shit.)
i laughed.

fuck. i still had to go.
so i took the plunge. jumped straight in.
there came the duet. both of us were now screaming in unison about the frigid tension being put on our shrunken nutsacks.
the water remained a bone-chilling 62 degrees, but we eventually got slightly used to it.

once acclimated we headed north. there were a string of 3 houses on the waterfront before we got to the condos that extend out over the water.

last year manuel and i found this 4-foot piece of plastic(?), maybe siding, that was about 2-inches wide at one end and ended at the other to form a triangle.
we fucked around like we always did and liked to show off our "trophies" from down below. so last year, manuel stuck this piece-of-whatever into one of the pilings from an old pier, where the serrated end of it was maybe only half-a-foot out of the water, making our glorious find known to all.
as we were swimming by it this time around and reminiscing about out mischevious past, a woman in the middle out flings open her push-out windows as i'm hanging on the piling with our artwork.
she yells at me, "what is that?"
i shrug my shoulders.
"could you take that out? it's been bugging me for a while."
i pull it out with ease smirking about the fact that this bitch has been staring at that shit for a whole year on our behalf.
i hope her neighbors enjoyed the clothes iron that we put on their deck last year as much as she enjoyed our present to her.

moving on.
i got this dive watch. it's badass. tells temp, depth, time you've been out, time you've been down (if i had air on me), and how long you can stay down at the depth you're at. i'm sure there are even more functions than the ones i've discovered. oh, and when you're approaching the surface too quickly, it beeps at you to slow down.
that's what manuel kept hearing.
i figure however, that i'm not coming from depths much beyond 20 feet, so rather than dying from too much carbon dioxide and lack of oxygen, i'd rather return to the surface as quick as possible and ignore the all-knowing watches warning of the impending bends.
no problems yet.

visibility was pretty shitty. when we first jumped in last year, i remember finding the dumpster almost immediately. granted this time around i was more concerned about my balls, but i couldn't even see the bottom from the edge of the pier, we had to dive down at least a body length or more. so visibility was roughly 6-10 feet. pretty bad.
but we eventually did find the tipped-over dumpster. still nothing living inside it, which is actually somewhat frightening to discover. the only thing that had changed was the amount of grime that had accumulated on it. manuel and i differ, but i remember it being almost without growth last year.

out around the condos to the north, i picked up a lawn chair that scraped the fuck outta my thigh upon a near-death struggle to the surface. thank god manuel had my back or we'd either be chairless or travisless. either would have been awful.
at this point, remembering from last year, we decided that the area around the condos was too deep, so we just decided to tote this great find back to the pier we started out on.

as usual. our glorious find presented for all to see.
can i just say how much of a bitch that is to bring something so water-logged out of the water even with two people?
art is such a struggle...

after a breather, we hopped back into the lake. with wet bodies, it seemed colder on the pier than in the water, but i doubt that was the case, or possibly the temps were roughly the same.

with the north explored to our fullest desires, we headed south. through the swim area that's open during the summer.

here, i was swimming through the reeds as manuel searched for things dropped by fat kids as the cool their hippo-esque bodies over the summer.
no great finds. same old shit. beer bottles and cans. (ok maybe those weren't the product of fat kids, but i can see them there during the summer.)

back in the reeds, i feel uncomfortable. you're missing a good majority of visibility not because of the murkiness, but because of these plants. in this area they ranged from about 2 feet to maybe 5 or 6 feet. that's a lot of unknown below you.
looking down i saw what looked like a possible shell, a clam, as it was white. but it seemed a lot larger (3 inches wide) than the fingertip sized ones around the area.
so i dove deeper. that's when i realized it was moving!
attached to this 3-inch bulb was the body of a slender, snake/eel-like animal.
the body beyond the white was maybe 5 inches long and only about an inch thick. it was almost transparent but greenish. kinda jelly-like.
the front of it's body wiggled more for mobility rather than its back that just sort of dragged. the white end was more than just a bulb, it had a small projection on the end. like a single, thick hair about an inch long.
what the hell that could be for, i have no idea.
but it's eel-likeness scared the shit and air our of me so i had to make my way back to the surface. when i caught my breath and i returned below, it had dissappeared into the vastness of the weeds.

we ventured further south to another set of condos built out over the water.
among the pilons, we found a 40' measuring tape. what else can you do with this but unroll it to its furthest reaches around one of the pilons and tie it off?
so we did. took about three times passing each other with either end til we tied it off. yellow flakes from the corroded tape flying everywhere. i love my lake.

past the condos were more condos that were set at the waterfront. here manuel found a bunch of dinner plates that we promptly shattered to bits.
bottle wars with a twist. i'd hold one, he'd hold one, and we'd smash them together underwater until one of them broke. good times.
we found beer bottles around the same area and continued with true bottle wars.

the eerie part about this outing was the amount of dead fish.
the majority of them were only about an inch long, but there were others that were up to about 4 inches long.
but what the fuck?
last summer you'd see the occasional dead fish or fish parts, but here, there were whole schools!
with shitty visibility i counted in the dozens from just turning my head side to side.
what gives? was it a harsh winter? is that their normal life cycle like salmon? is the water polluted? is there a high mortality rate for fish that small at this time of year?
who the fuck knows?
all i know is that it was disturbing.

by this time we'd been in for an hour (it's awesome having an underwater watch). downstairs we resembled pre-pubescent boys and our body core temperatures were dramatically dropping. so we headed back.
but not before we found two of those huge gallon-sized wine bottles.

one last bottle war. manuel won. i held onto his trophy.
we made it back to wading level where manuel found a whole chicken egg.
he smashed it against the surviving wine bottle to reveal an inside void of the usual egg distinction: yolk and white. this water-logged egg only had a single color: orange. and the consistency was something like that of a cadbury egg: creamy, but thick. very weird.

with the only thing in my hands being that jug as we exited the lake (oh, and a golf ball in my pocket [its almost essential to find one of those every time]), i stuck the jug on the 10 foot tall lifeguard chair.
thus ending our journey.

we dried off. poor manuel had to put all these clothes on to shelter him from the wind on his motorcycle, we snapped a shot of our great find, and i invited manuel on over to my pool's hot tub for some life-giving warmth.
we stayed in there longer than i'd ever been in that thing.
it was much needed.

next time i want to get in on the eastside. maybe waverly park, although it may not be that exciting. i just want to see if i can find my dad's glasses that he lost when we "disposed" of grandpa.
juanita beach might be cool. but it seems like it might be a cove of nastiness.
maybe that's just cuz i live here. everywhere else is probably just as contaminated.
that hippie book i'm reading is getting me concerned about all the PCB's and hard metals that are being pumped into our waters everywhere.

damn. ignorance was bliss.