Kelvin Grove 09/01/2011

The big plan was to dive Kelvin Grove with a bunch of people. Anita and Teri had two people driving up from Seattle, and it was going to be a picnic day, too. But, weather forced the Seattle pair to not come, so it was just four of us, not six. A good thing too, because parking was limited at Kelvin, and today there were two other groups of divers there already. We barely all fit!

We showed up later in the afternoon because the two folks from Seattle wanted to do a dive and then a dusk dive. With them unable to come, it was too short notice to schedule things earlier, but it worked out OK.

We arrived around 1pm and started the dive at 2. I don’t recall much from the dive unfortunately. I left it too long to do this write up. I seem to recall everyone saying similar things, that there really wasn’t much of note. We went to the right. Current wasn’t present and we did a pretty standard depth profile. Poor Teri had a hole in her glove so her hand was frozen. I had brought my stage bottle along for practice, and must remember to pay attention to my fins on descents along sloping bottoms. Teri let me know that I was stirring up a lot of sand on the way down. I was not far enough away from the slope.

After the first dive, we had our picnic. The day was fabulous. I do remember that much. The sun was on the beach and it was quite warm. Teri and Anita brought some great soup and cheese and other nice things. It was a great meal.

They didn’t stick around for a second dive, but Jason and I were still game to see how things would change at dusk. We did a similar dive, but stayed a bit shallower. We found a pretty big octopus under a rock which was the high-light of the dive. I used my stage on this dive, and at the end deployed my SMB and sent the empty stage to the surface as a bit of practice. Unlike the previous time when Alan Johnson and I had done this, the stage was empty enough to actually go to the surface!

Getting out of the water, it was still somewhat light out. It got dark pretty fast, so I was glad to have my headlamp. We got geared down and everything was wrapped up by about 6pm. A good day of diving.