Catalina Dive, September 29th

Whoo! I've been on the water a lot these past few days. At night I feel like I'm still swaying on the boat and I rock back and forth in my chair.
The snorkeling in the cove right here on the USC campus is really incredible. I've seen Bat Rays, Leopard sharks, Garibaldis, and lot's of other kinds of fish. The Bat Rays and Leopard Sharks were huge! Unfortunately, I don't have an underwater camera housing so you'll just have to take my word for it.
Here is some photos from our sub operation on September 29th:
Sunset 9/28

Sunrise 9/29

Ryan getting the shot.

Gearing up and heading out for the dive.

Antipodes by the caves.

Sunset 9/29

I've also gotten really good at handling an outboard motor. Here I am transporting people in the tender boat.

Catalina Island, USC campus

Jaques Costeau's Diving Bell

Awesome Logo

Sunset

Long Exposure

Bison Face-off

Mosey On

The Greatest T-shirt ever made.

Boooooring.

Slowly but surely DEATHped Mark 1 is coming together. I spent Saturday down at the Wizard's Lair working on DEATHped.

I brought Phil my fuel tank and he quickly set to work sandblasting it to prepare it for it's eventual deathly black appearance.


Naz was welding away on Hucker Steves pipe. Look at that crack!


I was busy boring away at my engine case so it would mate oh so perfectly with my monster gila kit.

I think it came out pretty nice. This case is my trusty polini matched case that I got from Seth many years ago. It's amazing that even though the polini cylinder is pretty dramatically different than the Gila, the port matching that I will have to do to match is pretty minimal. Neat!



In other news, I got a job about three months ago. An adult job. Currently I am the Marketing Coordinator for a company called OceanGate. We provide services to researchers that want to dive underwater to depths unavailable via scuba. In other words, we have a submarine and we take people deep. 936 ft. deep.
So right now I am at the USC research campus on Catalina Island. I'll be here on and off for the next month so I'm excited to visit the Latebirds at some point.
Here's the sub!

Here I am learning how to use an ROV in the Manhaus pool.

And here is a vista we saw as we 4x4'd to the campus yesterday.