Minesweeper in Lake Washington

This was a recent discovery by people who frequent the shop I used to go to in Issaquah. The crazy part about this is the location. It is where I first got interested in snorkling around Lake Washington off of Sand Point. It's a little further offshore and deeper than I'd ever go, but still cool.

It's the Yard Class Mine Sweeper.

Cenote Dive

Here's an account of a Mexcio cenote dive done by Richard Brown.
I like the part about the hydrogen sulfide:

tuesday, day one. peo, danny and i did nahoch na chic. wow! heard the stories, now i believe them! very beautiful. i'm glad i went to disneyland, the name of one of the rooms....had 3 dives there ~80 mins each.

day two. peo and i strike it out together on gran cenote. we do four dives, including setting up a gap, then next dive pushing further. great day and mucho fun!

day three. i had danny and went to the room of tears and the basement of carwash. stunning rooms and ~ 80 mins run time. the next dive we did was the sump side, room of ancients. during our exit we recalculated gas and found another line. this tunnel was explored in 94. i don't think to many have been there since, as danny found an exploration spool and double ender. this tunnel was amazingly tight and very restricted. (a restriction is a passage where only one diver can pass.) following danny in i learned some pretty good tricks. being totally inverted and twisting through was very challenging and fun! we made the turn in a small opening that was full of hydrogen sulfide. you could taste it through your regs. it made our dive blue lights shine red, and made the room translucent red. very stunning.

day four. danny steps up the challange. each dive he tests you to see what you can handle. these 2 dives were at taj ma ha (aka. taj mahal) dive one was a stage dive. after several T's and jump's we dropped stages. eventually we made it to a cenote where we climbed out and slithered through the mud and loose rocks to the far end of it. we found the line and continued on until our goal, the end of the line in a yet another beautiful room. we thumbed it and returned to the cenote. crossing it again, it was so slick danny fell. there was almost no way i could make it to him quickly, bubbles flowing and his head under water. after getting him up he commented he could just hear it "GUE cave instructor drowns falling in cenote!" we found the silted out line and continued our return after bubble checking danny. total run time for this dive was 3 hours 45 mins.

for dive 2 we went to visit the "chinese garden." once in the cave, it takes a good part of a reel (not a spool) to get from the mainline to the jump. the jump line then goes through a long restriction that happened to be in the halocline. (the halocline is where a layer of saltwater is, usually ~42 feet. it mixes with freshwater and reduces viz. but is really cool) the "chinese garden" is a huge room. chopsticks and warriors adorn the room. massive events, building and destructive have occurred here. we continue through the room to a sidemount restriction, where we had planned to call the dive. at the end of the day, danny shakes my hand and told me i just completed the restriction workshop course :)

day five. peo and i are now in the company of steve. he arrived thursday night. we did the famous "jump" into calavaras, aka temple of doom. we ran two dives there. both tunnels were similar, but had pointed differences. this cave looks as if a deep snow had just fallen there.

taking time with danny was a great experience for two main reasons. one, i learned more about the formations and how they were made. i learned how to spot things, including fossils. two, i got some great advice on how to squeeze through very tight convoluted restrictions.

WKPP news

Below is a recent dive that is going down in Florida. Check out the time spent underwater:

On Saturday 12/15 the Woodville Karst Plain Project completed an underwater traverse from Turner Sink to Wakulla Springs. WKPP divers Jarrod Jablonski and Casey McKinlay began their record-setting cave dive at 1:20pm, arriving at the Wakulla basin at approximately 9pm.

Their seven mile journey through the Florida aquifer at depths of up to 300ft below the surface created a decompression obligation that requires Jablonski and McKinlay ascend very slowly through the night. They are expected to surface at 8-10am Sunday morning.

This weekend's dive was supported by forty WKPP team members and volunteers, who staged gear at strategic locations in the cave system and attended to decompressing divers throughout the approximately 30 hour operation.

- Todd Leonard, WKPP Project Coordinator

Cold out?

I've yet to figure out this phenomena, but every time I seem to comment on the chilled weather in Alaska I generally get this awkward pause followed by a look that insinuates, "Duh, it's Alaksa!".

However, I have been approached with the same observation by people who are themselves seemingly Alaskan. Maybe there's a general range of temperature where this observation is allowed and other warmer times when it is not. If so, I have yet to define it.

I'm pretty sure that if it were -40 degrees that I could get away with this conversation starter of commenting on the cold weather, yet I might be inclined to think that 20 degrees doesn't really qualify.

Can anyone expound on this thought?