What a day from hell (I mean, for events not concerning the war, even). I didn’t get enough sleep last night because I was up doing something I thought was important. The strange thing is that I can no longer remember what was so important!

As I was preparing to enter the water at Turtle Pinnacle this morning, I realized that I had left my dive computer in Jim’s office. Since my pressure gauge resides on my dive computer, my options were to 1) not dive, or 2) be an extremely paranoid diver for an uncertain amount of time. :) I decided on option 2, but set a conservative time limit. The dive is relatively shallow, so I wasn’t concerned about getting bent.

All three of us got lost trying to find the pinnacle. The other boat that was anchored out there — the one that we were using as a reference point — had told us that they were anchored to the outer mooring, but it turned out that they were anchored to the Aggressor mooring, so we all swam right by the pinnacle and out to the drop-off instead (before realizing what had happened). As I was swimming out there, I discovered that I had left the lens cap on my 15mm lens. Unfortunately, the lens and lens cap are inside a sealed housing, so I had to surface back at the boat to fix my mistake. Before getting in the water, Jim picked up his Pelican case, and it flipped open, dumping all of his camera equipment into the boat. So many bad signs…

I decided I shouldn’t push my luck. I stayed in shallow water directly under the boat and learned how to blow bubble rings. I blew four or five perfect ones that stayed unbroken until the hit the surface, 30′ above me. Now I just have to work on my technique so I can blow perfect ones at will. :)

We decided, collectively, that we probably shouldn’t do another dive.

In the afternoon we went over to Seapics.com to say hello to Sue and Tamara. Douglas Seifert had all sorts of ideas about tricks to play on an absent Doug Perrine, who is in some unknown location in Australia right now, but I don’t know Doug that well and didn’t want to invoke his wrath. :) [see some photos]