Dive #68 - Rich Torkington's Dive Log

Schools of Sergeant Majors at our “hometown” dive site
Vidcap by Rich Torkington in Mexico 2001

Dive Journal: A great little vacation with some of our close friends, the Drays, the Denisuks, and the Keenes. Linda and I sneak off on Saturday afternoon to get in another tune-up dive at our “hometown” dive site at Miramar Trailer Park.

I bring the video camera along in hopes of breaking in a new LCD monitor back on the housing.

Nice comfortable dive, as usual. The boat ramp makes the entry very easy. We swim straight out, looking for the tire at the sand line to serve as our anchor point, but oddly we can not find it this time.

Our sightings include lots of the extremely friendly rock bass, several nice schools of sergeant majors, wrasses, triggerfish, Cortez damselfish, and a few others we don’t immediately identify. We also see a nice starfish and several brownish sea cucumbers with dark brown bumps all over.

On the way out, I spy a very pretty sea goddess crawling over a rock. I’m not sure which type it is, but it is white with yellowish edges lined in red-purple, with two white antennae and two twirly-gigs on its back. Very neat looking. We also spy an octopus hiding underneath the front edge of the boat ramp, who doesn’t really want to be disturbed at all.

My monitor did not work well – I am hoping that is due to my use of low quality batteries. The image was so dim as to be unusable. Another odd phenomenon is that the camera was inadvertantly switched to Night Shot, which bleached out all the colors and boosted the brightness, and made everything green and saturated. The resulting video was pretty poor quality, although I manage to salvage a few shots, including the one above. The top vidcaps came out much better.

Linda was impressed I could find the boat ramp cleanly by navigation alone. Maybe the PADI navigation training in San Carlos was worth the effort!

Note: With 12 lb, I felt a little bit underweighted. Both the wetsuit and video housing are buoyant, not to mention that mayeb I am getting older and fatter.