It was 4pm when I left the office for the first boat dive of the season, with the added bonus of Francois and Marie-Odile joining me from from Montreal. I wasn’t sure what to expect, with G20 and all the police and safety zones, but it turned out that most people had left the city, so I had the fastest drive ever.
Doug had picked up our guests at the Island airport and dropped them off at the ferry to the island marina, where we met amongst all the police officers.
The short ferry ride to the island is a nice reminder for the body to shed the busy city/work life and get ready to dive.
The boat is in the water and there is very little prep to get ready to go out. We emptied some water from the covers, loaded the bags and started the engines and were ready to go. Sorry about the thumb in the video below, which is caused by me being a new iPhone owner.
[YouTube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rp_r61z1Kc]
I am trying an application from my new iPhone called Motion GPS, so I can show you where we dove. It will also show the top speed of 37.7 mph for now top tuned dive boat.
Google Maps Link
At the dive location we had 58.7 meters and 22 degrees at the surface, which is nice and warm if you are wearing a wet-suit. The reason I say this is because I for the first (and last) time had forgotten the top part of my suit at home. I decided to try diving anyway and thought about Eric Fattah who had told me that they had tested diving in the winter without a suit to get the dive reflex to kick in faster. I was ok in the surface, but when I started pulling down and hit the thermocline at 7 meters I really had to try to calm down and tell myself that it was “just” cold. A few more pulls and my bald head started pounding and I felt out of breath. I had to turn and raced for the surface at 14m, which would be my deepest dive of the day. My hats of to Eric and the vancouvers boys, who must have bigger ….. than me. I think I will try a no suit dive again some day, because it always frustrats me when I can’t override my emotions and tell my brain that I will be ok.
Francois and Marie-Odile had several dives, but had never dove in waves before, so they joined me in the boat after about 30 minutes, so they wouldn’t get seasick. One of the ways to avoid motion issues when there are waves is to bring a snorkel and just lie in the surface breathing and just slowly go up and down with the waves.
We had a very nice boat ride back, because the wind had died down and the waves were almost gone.
We had a beer at the bar which always make any dive better and I am convinced it improves my breath holds.
The last image was taken on the ferry back to Toronto which sums up, why these dive trips are so nice.
I want to thank Francois and Marie-Odile for flying down from Montreal to join us here in Toronto and for going straight from the plane to the boat, you made a great night even better.
