Padi Advanced Diver: Navigation

As we watched the obligatory neon-colored 1990's PADI advanced diver video, MacGyver offered such choice comments as, "These days, that camera fits on my head... and does video footage."  Probably for the best that we were drinking heavily during this section of the book work.  As hokey and consumerist as PADI is, I have to admit we had a pretty good time on our first "advanced" dive where we focused on navigation.

Master Diver Gary took us to Crescent Bay which was a little less heavily trafficked as a shore dive than our usual training dive haunt on Shaw's cove.  He's a little on the surly-elitist side, so I was mostly envisioning trying to squeeze into the neon pink 7mm ultra-restrictive wetsuit he had rented me ineffectually before giving up and sitting in the car while MacGyver did the drills.  We stayed at about 19 feet for most of the dive, practicing 10 kick + 90 degree turns with natural navigation and compass assistance.  A bit tough to rotate the bezel on a compass when your fingers only extend about 50% of the way into the fingers of your gloves.  I thought our air consumption would be super inefficient because we're relatively new, and MD Gary made comments about this continuously while in his dive shop (not to be confused with dive store).  Yet we stayed down for almost an hour and hadn't even hit the yellow less than 1000 psi zone on our console when it was time to head back.

MacGyver was also pretty stoked to have seen a 10 lb+ sheepshead fish.  I was surprised that baby Garibaldi fish look so ultra blue compared to their adult version.  They still love invasive sea urchins that have been decimating the kelp though...  Thinking it might be cool to do a naturalist dive in an aquarium...