Last week I finally took my camera on a dive up here in Seattle. You can find my photos here.
If I’m going to do any serious photography, I’ll need better lights and more practice. But it was fun to get some photos of the sorts of things you see on a typical Seattle dive.
My wife and I will be heading to Playa del Carmen and Cozumel for about two weeks at the end of February.
Our plan is to spend the first half of the time in Playa, and to go from there to see the major archeological sites: Chichen Itza, Tulum, maybe others. This would be the “adventure” part of the vacation. We’ll probably want to go Scuba diving in the Cenotes when we’re there. We’re definitely looking for other things to do during this half of the vacation.
The second half, we’ll spend in Cozumel. I’ll be diving a lot. Laura may dive, or may spend lots of time sitting around on the beach with a cocktail in her hand. We’re considering an all-inclusive, in part to just relax more, and to have a “vacation from our vacation” while still on vacation.
We’re looking for things to do, places to see, and meals to eat for the first half of the vacation; and we’re looking for recommendations on where to stay for the second half.
18 dives, 5 hours 33 minutes bottom time.
No real dive trips, though I did manage one (poor) dive in Australia. So 17 cold-water dives, one moderate-water dive. And 17 shore dives, one boat dive.
However, the last six weeks have seen very little diving as I’ve been waiting for the stars to align (or many peoples’ schedules) in order to complete my drysuit course.
Today I did my second drysuit checkout dive, so hopefully I’ll be in the water with more frequency. I’ll certainly be able to get in and out more quickly, and with more comfort.
My only resolution for 2010: more diving.
Last week I returned from Hawaii, and into a whole lot of catch-up at work. I also had to clean up the blog site: although I’d upgraded to WordPress 2.5 already (2.5.1 now), before I’d done so, some nasty stuff had been inserted into one of my blog posts, getting my site branded as an attack site.
Now, that was probably the correct action to take, inasmuch as my site was an attack site during that period of time. But would have been too much to ask to send me mail identifying the problem — or, at least, when I submitted a review request on the site to identify the problem in advance, to avoid a back-and-forth where I fix one problem only to have another one identified before my site status can be returned?
Also, I discovered that my metablog had become stuck, due probably to a prior disk-full condition, and wasn’t posting all of my stuff. Further, del.icio.us changed the RSS feed address, and either I missed it or they didn’t bother to tell me, so that wasn’t showing up, either.
Now that it’s fixed, you can see that I’ve been identifying all of the Mac dive log software. I’ve become interested in getting an air-integrated computer (with hose and console, probably, rather than wireless, due to the substantial cost difference) and tracking my air consumption at depth. I figure that Laura wants to get Nitrox-certified, and as long as I’ll need a new dive computer for that (yes, I will, that’s how old my dive computer is), I might as well track air consumption too and upload log data.
Unfortunately, the list of air-integrated dive consoles that play well with Macs is fairly limited. Suunto and Uwatec would be my only choices. I like what I’ve read about Suunto (though it sounds like the original Cobra, otherwise my best choice, is perhaps overly conservative), but know next to nothing about the Uwatec Smart COM. Reviews and opinions welcome.
Jon Lasser 