Periscope Down

Ok, so I haven’t posted anything in a while. Part of the reason is because I made a little promise not to post anything saddening, angering or even remotely political. Since these comprise the majority, happy and noteworthy events are somewhat scarce. Nevertheless, I finally have something interesting to post about. As some may have heard, Nikki and I have become recently scuba certified. We did our first post-cert dive in Monterey Bay California over the past week while on “vacation” in San Francisco. The water was quite chilly (my console read 47 F) but it was still pretty neat. We got a bunch of Abalone shells, saw some fish, and even a couple of big crabs (I’ll include some pictures as soon as we get them developed). We’ve also planned a dive this coming Friday (July 2nd) out at strawberry reservoir and another at deer creek (air permitting). They should be pretty neat too. I always wondered if it would be worth it to be dive certified in Utah, because it seemed the only time you’d get to do anything very interesting is when you were on vacation somewhere tropical. To the contrary, I was rather surprised to find a thriving dive community here in Utah, with many places catering directly to divers (Sea Base for instance). Also, there are a number of volcanic spring fed water bodies around that make for great winter diving (or so I am told/have read). I have found I really enjoy it (which is just what I need, another Hobby I will hardly have time to do), so I might as well dig in while it’s still fun and try to keep life worth living. I am in the process of procuring some of the basic equipment, and planning out for some more of the advanced stuff. Based on rental prices, it only takes 6 dives per year for 5 years to break even on purchasing your own equipment (and this includes everything but the tanks, which you really don’t want to own anyway). However, those are based on local prices at the dive shop where we have a member’s discount. If I were to base it off of what we spent in Monterey, it’d be closer to 7 dives… total. One kinda odd thing is that this fall and winter when we’ll have a bunch of our own equipment and want to go diving, Nikki will likely be pregnant… and unable to dive with me. This means I’ll either have to find another buddy to dive with (not very easy considering my hermit like sense of social interaction) or just not dive. And who knows what next year will be like with TWO kids, Nikki in Grad school, etc. So it sounds like this summer is my chance to have some fun, while I still can.