Bill’s Reals Blog - Scuba, Travel & Gadgets

So, I’m in Akumal, Mexico for a short cave diving trip. I’m shooting still pictures this time around, so I brought along my laptop, which is something I usually never do.

American Airlines screwed the pooch on this one, they canceled my flight and then lied to me about another flight that I knew was available. I ended up just getting onto a Aero Mexicana flight, that criss-crossed Mexico but brought me to Akumal after 15 hours of traveling. So Day 1 was travel hell.
I did two dives at Taj Mahal Cenote, which is just north of Akumal. These were warm up dives for the rest of the trip but were most excellent.

More dives tomorrow, this time with camera in tow.

What is awesome is my room has DSL for $5 a day, which allows to me call American and bitch at them.

The WKPP performed another amazing dive this weekend. The WKPP is exploring a network of caves in Northern Florida and are attempting to connect one large cave system to another.

The goal of the dive was to connect the systems and update the map as to the specific locations of the cave conduits. The map data is then used by the State of Florida as part of their land use and land acquisition process to protect the water sources feeding Wakulla Springs. 23,810ft from Wakulla Springs exceeded our 20,000ft May, 2006 push into Wakulla’s Q-Tunnel and firmly establishes a new cave penetration record for the WKPP.

The dive:
Bottom Time – 580 minutes at 270ft
Decompression – 15.5 hours
Total Run Time – 25.5 hours
Exploration – 7,640ft added
Total Distance from Wakulla Springs – 23,810ft

http://www.wctv.tv/home/headlines/7405066.html
http://www.wctv.tv/home/headlines/7424196.html

Dive Details
Where: La Jolla Cove
Time: 630am
Bottom Time: approx 45mins
Avg Depth: 25 feet
Temp: 60ish
Gas Mixture: EAN 32%
Scooter: Oh Yeah!

Roger and I did a dawn patrol dive before work today. The La Jolla Cove was flat calm, like a lake and looked clear. We entered and motored out to Buoy A in search of Giant Sea Bass and Soupfin sharks. We successfully located the former but were unable to find the later.

We saw at least 5 GSBs, including a group of about 4 medium sized ones near the buoy. We then went looking for soupfins but only found a number of bat rays.

The viz is pretty bad in the cove, very milky but clears up as you get out towards the buoy. Oh yeah, we dove this in wet suits and were very warm above the 30 ft thermocline, below that it starts to get noticeable cold.

Great way to celebrate the summer solstice!

I just watched Sicko, the new movie by Michael Moore. Say what you want about him, he makes some good points. Why in this country, where we spend $TRILLIONS on war, do we not have universal health care for our citizens?

My position is that the richer a country is, the better we should be taking care of our citizens. I mean it’s not like we don’t already have a moral obligation to our fellow human beings, but we also have a potential health crisis on our hands. If uninsured person has TB or something more contagious, we would want to treat them. The movie, And the Band Played On, deals with this subject in length set in the early days of AIDS in America.

I have health coverage. However, I have a number of friends who don’t have jobs that provide health care and they don’t have safety net. When they get sick, they just suck it up and hope it goes away.

Anyway, in the movie, the scenes where they go to Cuba didn’t have an impact on me, it’s was they scenes they did in Canada, UK and France where they have universal health care. The film made me want to move to Europe, at least to see if this story is accurate.

Sure, they have higher taxes but how high would we need to make them to fund universal health care? Would it really be that high to fund something like this?

This site, Uncyclopedia, is an awesome parody of the ever-popular Internet encyclopedia, Wikipedia.

Wikipedia even has a page describing it:

Uncyclopedia, the content-free encyclopedia, is a satirical parody of Wikipedia. The site was launched on January 5, 2005 by Jonathan Huang and an unnamed counterpart. The Uncyclopedia logo is a hollowed potato, a spoof of Wikipedia’s globe logo

It’s hours of enjoyment and humor.

The LA Times published an article that I was interviewed for a couple of months ago. On the printed copy, it’s a picture of your’s truly.

So, I switched to using a Mac. I’ve been evaluating a number of OS lately, for my personal use, and decided on an Apple Powerbook G4 as my primary home computer. I picked Apple on the strength of OS X, which is awesome.

Trade shows are like the county fair, in regards to random products being sold. I ran across a lady selling bead jewlery, another booth was selling beef jerky (it was really dry), there was a guy painting an underwater mural and finally ran into a porn star.

Yeah, you didn’t read that wrong, Lori Pleasure, was attending and wearing next to nothing. From what I can read on her website, she does this attention grabbing stunt whenever she can. She has a Myspace page as well, but then again doesn’t everyone?

The Scuba Show was great, I’ll come back next year and hopefully it will be bigger and better.

Check out the photo album for more photos on the event.

I was walking around and I noticed a very cute booth babe standing at one of the booths on the end. I stopped by to see what they had and it was what I can only describe as the world’s biggest snorkel. The company Kapitol Reef Aquatics, makes the Kadence technology snorkel.
Designed by a doctor, I’m told that this snorkel is bone dry after a full immersion and will always give you a fresh breath; no rebreathing you exhalations on this puppy.

It work because it’s has an inner collapsible airway and a outer rigid airway with one way valves. Basically, one airway is for breathing in and one for breathing out. When not in use, the airway used for breathing a fresh breath of air is sealed and doesn’t allow either air or water in.

I’m told that this reduces exertion because you are always getting a fresh breath of air.

The unit is pretty large to accommodate the twin airway design. The reviews of this device by the major dive rags, Sport Diver and Scuba Diving, have rated this as an “Editor’s Choice”, with one calling this a snorkel, “a respirator device for snorkelers”. The sell for approx $89.

I walking down the aisle and I saw a bunch of people standing around, so of course I stopped to see what was going on. The booth was showing a demo of a software product called DiveNav which is a scuba diving simulation “game” dubbed vDive. It was unique in the aspect that they mapped areas and you were virtually diving the topography of the area. In the demo, they were showing Casino Point on Catalina Island.

They were doing a survey and by participating in the survey you got a little holographic dive map of Casino Point. This represents the ONLY piece of swag that I picked up at this show.

Anyway, the product looks like a first person action shoot, Gears of War, Halo, and you see the world through your dive mask. You have gauges, can run out of air and you navigate underwater while swimming around. I found it boring and was struggling to see the market for it, alas this is what happens when you work in marketing. I realize that I’m not there target market but still I have an opinion.

The survey seemed like they had built a product and now where trying to figure out the market for it. That’s not a good sign in the software business where you can be obsolete in months. All the best to them, I hope they do well but I’m just more of a get-out-there-and-do-it kind of guy now and would rather go on a real dive.