Diving Before Work At Shaw's Cove Laguna Beach

January 25th, 2019
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I've recently jumped into diving with the intent of maintaining all of my other various outdoor hobbies. As I'm sure you can guess that is a bit difficult since I already struggle to find open weekends and now I have yet another awesome way to spend them. But hey, there are worse problems to have!

This weekend would see Kristen and I hopefully diving some deep wrecks down in San Diego with Sea Stallion and finishing up our Advanced Open Water certifications. We also had tentative plans to head over to Catalina and Casino Point on Sunday if conditions looked good and when the opportunity came up to do a kickoff dive of sorts Friday morning before work we both jumped at the chance.

A Cold Damn Dive From Cabinsite Point In Lake Mojave

January 13th, 2019
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Yesterday had been fun but Kristen and I both felt we'd gotten our fill of dives at Kingman Wash and Willow Beach. Fortunately Bruce at Sin City Scuba had recommended we contact Jerry Portwood at Dive Shack USA in Laughlin about diving in Lake Mojave.

Similar to yesterday Dive Shack USA wasn't open on Sunday but Jerry was graciously willing to come in whenever we needed to rent us tanks and event went above and beyond to work with us around some cell coverage issues on Saturday.

Diving Lake Mead At Kingman Wash & Willow Beach

January 12th, 2019
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This weekend was supposed to be a triumphant (-ish) return to diving in Southern California after the New Years trips. The plan was to join Sea Stallion on the Cee Ray dive boat to Catalina Saturday and then do shore dives around town on Sunday. And then conditions went to crap.

The Cee Ray was canceled due to swell and surf conditions ruled out anything on the shore. Going out to Catalina and diving Casino Point also looked like it wasn't an option.

And so we started to look further afield. Kristen had run into really bad weather during her Thailand trip and only been able to do a single dive so not wanting that trend to continue I said I'd drive wherever we needed to if we could find diving options.

And that's how we ended up talking to Bruce Hall at Sin City Scuba...

Paddling the Turner River in the Florida Everglades!

January 1st, 2019
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After yesterday's amazing experience on the Vandenberg our ear related complications had forced us to cancel our last day of diving in Florida.

We'd driven through the Everglades but not done anything *in* the Everglades and so we started looking at paddling options since the boat tours all struck us as a bit too touristy for our tastes. We found a writeup of the Turner River complete with spectacular pictures like the one above which led us to talking to the Ivy House in Everglade City about the possibility of renting boats and doing some sort of longer point A to point B paddle. (After all, I wanted something I could write up on my website...)

By the time we talked to them the guy who handled their rentals was gone for the day but they assured us that if we showed up first thing the next morning they'd take care of us and get us paddling. So we took a leap of faith and set out hours before dawn from Key Largo where we'd camped the night before.