It’s been almost three months to the day since my last scuba dive on the wreck of the Oriskany off the coast of Pensacola, Florida. Cobbled together my gear for a dip into Austin’s Lake Travis this past weekend. My rusty skills and the salt water damage done to my equipment was further burdened by my lack of a complete set of contact lenses. Mike Gibson and I spent nearly three hours driving around Austin looking for an optometrist with my prescription in stock to no avail. I ended up hitting the water wearing only one lens! It worked surprisingly well.
Ultimately it probably didn’t matter as the visibility in Lake Travis is close to zero. It took three tries before Mike and I cornered a good, long dive. Didn’t make it much deeper than 90 feet but it was a great refresher course for me. Sunday at Mansfield Dam drew two aborted dives thanks to even worse visibility that had me and Gibson losing each other underwater in a record three minutes. Yeah it was that bad. It’s not really that much fun to me to dive in zero feet of visibility. All I could see were the silt and algae particles floating in front my mask. Still, the weekend’s weather was awesome and it was great to get out of Big D for a while at least.
Oh yeah, I found a honey of a bargain over at Scuba World in Austin. I finally bought my own steel tank. It’s a 112 cubic foot steel Faber with an H valve, newly hydroed for…$150! A really great deal even though the tank weighs a ton! I’m ready for my advanced classes…
I like how you get into your “things.” Like, comics, scuba diving and crappy Radiohead imports. It’s refreshing. I am trying to get out of the habit of watching crappy mindless TV by…not having one.
Another satisfied customer! Who says no one reads this blog???
erich scholz is the best blogger in american blog history. i’ve been reading his blog for only a day and it has LITERALLY changed.my.life. erich is the next best thing to chris crocker, ‘cept in BLOGland.
satisfied,
manifest