5th D

I went on over to my dive shop Saturday.
I'm part of a yahoo group that receives emails from a buddy list.
One of the emails was the owner promoting a sale, so i thought i'd head down on the last day, Saturday.

i get there and no one's in the store, not even the owner. so i check some shit out until the owner comes in. i tell him what i'm looking for and he plops it out on the glass counter: 2 scouts.
these are back-up lights for the primary light that i don't quite yet own.
they strap on to your chest straps that hold the BC to your body.

but then the owner and i start BSing. he shows me videos of some of his 250+ feet dives.
tells me of his 320 foot dive (his deepest), and other crazy stories about people stealing coordinates for wreck sites to sell to other losers.

i proceeded to ask him about other emails. a diver he knew died in florida while he was using a rebreather. these are devices that 'scrubs' the exhaled CO2 back into useable O2. i guess the problem was that the guy was using a closed-circut type that can sometimes get fucked up from the salt water. as mark, the owner said: electical wiring + salt water = death.
he says that he'd never use them and only condones their use when hauling a shit ton of gas isn't an option.
like when the founders of GUE went 40,000 feet into an underwater cave system in florida.
but i guess there's semi-closed circuts that aren't totally reliant on all that electrical mess.

the conversation moved to "The Life Aquatic".
Apparently when mark was first getting into diving, he worked at underwater sports. and during this time, Jaque Cousteau came up and did a documentary in the Puget Sound about octopuses. Mark got to dive with him; one of those god-like figures that's like a dream come true.

well. come to find out, mark learned that Jaque was really quite the asshole and treated his crew and son like shit. his son started to make a name for himself in Fiji, until his father promptly sued him for rights to their surname.
it was also said that his wife was the brains behind the outfit (as seems to be the case for many couples, i.e. the Leakey's of Australopithecine fame [Lucy, ring any bells?]). yet by the time Cousteau reached his 70's, he dumped that wife of his for some hotter, much younger girl.
go Frenchie!
coming back to Life Aquatic, mark said that whoever wrote the film did an excellent job of pegging cousteau and must have known the man intimately/first hand.

so not only did i get to hear all these interesting details, but i'm realizing that slowly i'm starting to integrate myself into the 5th dimension social scene.

it started with mark who i initially met and didn't think much of until i came back again, got some info, paid for a class, and my third time back he recognized me.
he introduced me to Cory, my dive buddy who's out from knee surgery.
Cory introduced me to Cam.
When taking my fundamentals class, i met Steve, who on our second day of diving brought along Laura.
she was the one who filmed our shoddy diving.
then during this conversation with mark about cousteau, etc, i met this other guy named Bones.

the only reason why i'm mentioning all this is because these four dove together to create this short edited film.
it's small, and of questionable quality, but you get the idea.
it gets better as it goes on.

the other major player in the 5th D diving scene is Walter.
he's the head of SCRET and dives, at least annually, with mark on all the major, deep-dive wrecks in Lake Washington and the Sound (200+ footers) as the camera man.
He seems rather friendly and gave me some pointers on contructing my BC.
He's probably a good person to know.

Anyway. i'm glad that i'm gradually getting put into this social arena.
it's also very comforting to hear everyone i meet offering to dive with me even though i'm still very unadapted to the water.
they always seem to have helpful info on gear as well.
i'm glad i found this place.
it almost makes me question whether i want to leave for school or just pursue more diving classes.