Carillon Part Deux

Manuel and I headed back to Carillon Point to get more movies of things we'd missed when we left the camera behind on its maiden voyage. This was back when I wasn't used to carrying it around all the time.

If you want to check out the pictures, they're on flickr, but today I'm going to be linking to a crapload of movies.
Some are good, some aren't so good, but there's quality hiding somewhere amongst all of them.
Oh, and just so you know, Manuel took most of these. I'll chime in when I should get the credit.

So in the beginning, we were just taking movies along the bottom.
On that third one, make sure you have the speakers up for the last second. It cracks my shit up.

Later on we came upon the submerged pier about 50 feet out.
This is where it seems like they just lopped off all the pilings and let the pier settle to the bottom.
That last movie there was mine. I think the camera was getting a bit fogged up at that point.
Or, I didn't get close enough to get a good enough view.
Either way, I know in those first four movies, Manuel got near the entirety of the length of the pier. It was probably something like 100 feet.

Here's, literally, a split second of me ascending.

Next we have a couple of surface movies. We'll for the most part they are.
Again, make sure your volume's up.

This movie I took. It's of the original positioning of the old dock.
You can see a lot of the piling stumps and the fallen pilings strewn around.

The next two movies are us playing around in the odd remains around the sunken pier.
Things like sinks and cables.

This next movie was a short one of me trying to take a picture of a lobster. If I had been in the right state of mind, I would have continued filming. But I wanted a photo, so at the end of the five seconds when the shot goes off the lobster, you hear me frantically cranking the camera to the right mode to get a picture before my breath runs out.

This final movie I'm showing mostly to make a point.
It's directed at whoever that anonymous commentor was a while ago who mentioned the manitees getting run over by boats.
Now if you have the volume up even slightly, you can hear the whine of a boat's engine.
After surfacing, I noticed that this thing was at least 500 yards away.

Now my guess is that either the manitees can't hear the "low frequency" squeal of the boat as suggested by that person, or my hypothesis that the manitees aren't probably properly equipped as I am to surface and check out the scenery for possible collisions with boats.
So when they hear the scream of a boat engine, my guess is all they can do is hope that they don't come up for air right as the boat goes by, or that they're in deep enough water for the boat to glide past them.

Either way, my ass aint gunna get hit by no boat.


As for the rest of the adventure, Manuel and I both tried new things.

Manuel tried to use pop bottles as a way to manage another breath underwater.
While the internet said that this was fully plausible and told how to manufacture such poor-man's scuba, when applied, the experiment unfortunately turned out to be a bust.
Manuel said that the two-liters were crumpling under the pressure of even 10 feet or so.
So even though our submerged pier was relatively shallow, only about 20 feet, those bottles wouldn't really do any good.
He also said it was way to hard to pull them underwater that deep.
Damn. Such the valiant effort!

As for my new toy, since the water was about 65 degrees today, I thought I'd finally give half of my wet suit a try. It was the legs and chest part. The other piece is mostly for your arms as well as coupling with the other half to doubly protect your core and nether regions.

With my arms free, and my legs covered, I had enough warmth to last me for hours.
I had to ask Manuel when he got cold, so I guess that's indicitive of some effective wet suit action.

There were problems, however.
Pushing myself to the bottom required a lot more effort.
Air bubbles get trapped in the suit and keep you more bouyant.
That's the whole idea of the suit: to create that small barrier between you and the colder water.

After a while I got used to it, but I think the energy used to get down there, along with the time it took to get down there, obviously greatly decreased my submerged time.
On the other hand, with increased bouyancy, when it came time to surface, I shot up like a rocket!
The first time I did come up after a dive down, I think I literally shot up out to my waist like a dolphin. What power a little bit of compressed air has. . .

Over a it was a good dive. It was probably the best one since the last time we went there.
But now that I do have this underwater camera, I think we need to revisit all these past sites.
Like when I went back to Sand Point, there was some good stuff there.
This camera opens up a whole eye for me and everyone out there willing to see what I do.
And I'm sure as we progress, we'll take more and more movies.
Good times.