Saturday, March 24, 2007
"Oceanblue, 1-2-2!"
Beneath the Sea, America's largest consumer dive show, kicked off last night. And nestled in Booth #122, amongst big names like DAN, PADI, Scubapro, Scuba Diving Magazine and many more, you'll find Oceanblue Divers! Come out to the show and stop by the booth. You can drop off a card to win a prize, grab some literature about our upcoming events (including the kickoff of the local diving season), and even get a little treat! And don't miss your chance to buy a brand-new Oceanblue Divers T-shirt. For guys, there's the standard T-shirt... for gals, we've got two choices, a babydoll style and a more standard T-shirt style.
Come on out to Beneath the Sea, check out all the goodies, and be sure to stop by Booth #122!
Come on out to Beneath the Sea, check out all the goodies, and be sure to stop by Booth #122!
Wednesday, March 21, 2007
Roll Me Over a Log
I'm not the sort of guy who logs 700 dives a year. Would I like to be? Does Mike Tyson bite people in the face? The reason I say that up front is to demonstrate that my oversight as reported below is not due to overwhelming workload. I suppose, if anything, it's just sheer laziness.
You see, when I first started diving back in the dear, dim past of five years ago, I logged every single dive as diligently as though I were recording cancer research. I marked every ounce of weight I carried, every bit of gear I clipped onto myself, what the temperature of the water was, who my buddy was, what was the entry and exit style, what was the visibility, was there current, how much current, and on and on.
The notes section was where I really reveled. Being the long-winded sort, I'd kept the notes as something of a diary. Who was on the boat? What was for lunch? Even after swimming in the quarry nestled in the hills of North Virginia, I would spend all evening logging everything I could remember of the day. How many bass had been floating on the "Space-Station" buoyancy obstacle. Whether that old Mares weight pocket had been fished off the bottom under platform three.
You get the idea.
Then I got me one of them fancypants dive computers with an upload cable. Not only would this thing give me a pretty, little graph of my dive profile (OK, not so pretty... for a very long time, including off days now, my dive profiles looked more like the snarl of a Sand-Tiger who just got hit in the face by a bat... distressingly far from the elegant, curved lines of perfect buoyancy), but this computer would also graph my gas consumption and give me precise water temperatures. In fact, if I ever remembered which button to press (I didn't), it could bookmark exact moments when groovy things happened during the dive.
It did not, however, record everything. I still had to go home, download all that data, and manually enter my precious and increasingly garrulous notes. Unrestricted by the four justified lines of an "analog" log, I found that I could record even MORE about the day's diving. Whether there had been any bugs that landed on me during surface interval. If there were any clouds that looked like Rhinoceroses. Pretty much anything that popped into my head would be logged.
Finding logging so time-consuming and being so shagged out by diving all day, with the task of gear rinsing still ahead of or only just behind me, I started putting it off until tomorrow. Or the next day. Or sometime.
By the time "sometime" came, I couldn't remember a damn thing about the dives. I find some entries that say things like, "This might have been that day when I found a snorkel, but I don't know."
Then there was nothing at all.
Dives upon dives with no notes. Just a graph and some water temperatures. Only occasionally, a green diamond on the profile would add some character to the page when, by sheer accident, I had pressed whichever button it is that bookmarks.
The other day, I was asked to make copies of my last 25 dives. I was so excited to relive them. I wanted to trace my finger along each and every profile and remember what made that one dive yet another special reason to adore this sport. Nothing. Nothing but a skeleton of a logbook and disappointment in my own negligence.
Sure, for some of them, I could strain to remember what body of water I was probably in. By the dates. By whether I was going deep or not. There wasn't that feeling of fond remembrance, though. Only an OOA memory trying to kick its way back to the surface.
I flipped through the pages sadly, like I'd lost time. Like all those dives didn't really happen.
Now, a less sentimental fella will point out that another valuable piece of information that the computer lacks is how much weight I was wearing on any given dive. That, naturally, was why I was forced to guess at what I needed to wear when I was in Florida a few weeks ago. Had my log had that information, I could've just referenced it and splashed.
That less sentimental man might also point out that the recording of what gear I had carried and how it affected my buoyancy and trim cannot be recorded automatically by a computer either. Or how this or that thermal protection affected my comfort in the water over the course of a dive of this or that duration in water of this or that temperature. Or how much a strong current affected my gas consumption.
Yes, a less sentimental man might point out that the dive log is a pretty awesome tool for recording information that might be useful for future dives, whether you're wet 10 times a year or 100.
But I am a sentimental man and I'm going to get back to logging my dives. I miss the firsthand account of what the clouds were like that day and how good the pasta tasted after spending an afternoon surrounded by stingrays the size of Star Destroyers.
I suppose I could record how much weight I was wearing, too.
You see, when I first started diving back in the dear, dim past of five years ago, I logged every single dive as diligently as though I were recording cancer research. I marked every ounce of weight I carried, every bit of gear I clipped onto myself, what the temperature of the water was, who my buddy was, what was the entry and exit style, what was the visibility, was there current, how much current, and on and on.
The notes section was where I really reveled. Being the long-winded sort, I'd kept the notes as something of a diary. Who was on the boat? What was for lunch? Even after swimming in the quarry nestled in the hills of North Virginia, I would spend all evening logging everything I could remember of the day. How many bass had been floating on the "Space-Station" buoyancy obstacle. Whether that old Mares weight pocket had been fished off the bottom under platform three.
You get the idea.
Then I got me one of them fancypants dive computers with an upload cable. Not only would this thing give me a pretty, little graph of my dive profile (OK, not so pretty... for a very long time, including off days now, my dive profiles looked more like the snarl of a Sand-Tiger who just got hit in the face by a bat... distressingly far from the elegant, curved lines of perfect buoyancy), but this computer would also graph my gas consumption and give me precise water temperatures. In fact, if I ever remembered which button to press (I didn't), it could bookmark exact moments when groovy things happened during the dive.
It did not, however, record everything. I still had to go home, download all that data, and manually enter my precious and increasingly garrulous notes. Unrestricted by the four justified lines of an "analog" log, I found that I could record even MORE about the day's diving. Whether there had been any bugs that landed on me during surface interval. If there were any clouds that looked like Rhinoceroses. Pretty much anything that popped into my head would be logged.
Finding logging so time-consuming and being so shagged out by diving all day, with the task of gear rinsing still ahead of or only just behind me, I started putting it off until tomorrow. Or the next day. Or sometime.
By the time "sometime" came, I couldn't remember a damn thing about the dives. I find some entries that say things like, "This might have been that day when I found a snorkel, but I don't know."
Then there was nothing at all.
Dives upon dives with no notes. Just a graph and some water temperatures. Only occasionally, a green diamond on the profile would add some character to the page when, by sheer accident, I had pressed whichever button it is that bookmarks.
The other day, I was asked to make copies of my last 25 dives. I was so excited to relive them. I wanted to trace my finger along each and every profile and remember what made that one dive yet another special reason to adore this sport. Nothing. Nothing but a skeleton of a logbook and disappointment in my own negligence.
Sure, for some of them, I could strain to remember what body of water I was probably in. By the dates. By whether I was going deep or not. There wasn't that feeling of fond remembrance, though. Only an OOA memory trying to kick its way back to the surface.
I flipped through the pages sadly, like I'd lost time. Like all those dives didn't really happen.
Now, a less sentimental fella will point out that another valuable piece of information that the computer lacks is how much weight I was wearing on any given dive. That, naturally, was why I was forced to guess at what I needed to wear when I was in Florida a few weeks ago. Had my log had that information, I could've just referenced it and splashed.
That less sentimental man might also point out that the recording of what gear I had carried and how it affected my buoyancy and trim cannot be recorded automatically by a computer either. Or how this or that thermal protection affected my comfort in the water over the course of a dive of this or that duration in water of this or that temperature. Or how much a strong current affected my gas consumption.
Yes, a less sentimental man might point out that the dive log is a pretty awesome tool for recording information that might be useful for future dives, whether you're wet 10 times a year or 100.
But I am a sentimental man and I'm going to get back to logging my dives. I miss the firsthand account of what the clouds were like that day and how good the pasta tasted after spending an afternoon surrounded by stingrays the size of Star Destroyers.
I suppose I could record how much weight I was wearing, too.
Roger That
It's with pleasure that I introduce our latest dive evangelist and blog contributor, Roger Williams. We first caught wind of Roger on the Oceanblue Divers message board, where he posted his whimsically entertaining "Confessions of a Dive Bum." We're happy that he's agreed to add his voice to "The Dive Evangelist" blog, and we know you will be too.
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