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Monday / photo — Comments Off
24
Jun 24

When the trees fell

It was a Sunday afternoon swim. And then there was a Sunday afternoon outside, reading in the shade. Then, the clouds darkened to the southwest. We went inside.

Took a shower, sat in my studio office space, where I am typing this right now.

Then the rains came. We’ve been soggy for a week. No big deal. Then there was one great big gust of wind. For that one moment, it felt like the siding and the windows were fighting to stay where they were, or deciding if they’d rather be somewhere else. And then it stopped, as wind does. And you immediately forget about it, as you do.

A few minutes later, my lovely bride says to me, from somewhere downstairs, “We’re going to have a problem when this is over.” So I went to see what that was about.

What that was about was a pine tree. We have three of them tucked up right next to the southeastern corner of the house for some reason. Just sitting there and growing, here on the inner coastal plain — where the heavy land and the green sands meet. We’d talked with someone about removing the three of them one day, for safety purposes.

Now we only have to remove two of them.

Meanwhile, on the northern corner of the house, a chunk of the Bradford pear tree was sheered off. The previous owners let this thing mature and grow too large and it is a weak tree and guess what we have to deal with now?

One of the black cherry trees in the backyard also has three or four big limbs high up in the canopy snapped off. Some of the trees on the other side of the yard lost some smaller limbs.

The first order of business, after the storm stopped, was checking on our neighbors. Everyone was OK. Joe the Younger, who lives next to us with his young family, had one sickly, stubby ancient tree take a big hit. The lady diagonal from us has some limbs in her back yard. Joe the Older and his wife, directly across from us, lost some stuff in the woods behind their house. Behind us, our neighbor just installed a new greenhouse, one with an automated window that opens and closes based on the temperature. He said it was askew.

So we got the worst of it. And we were lucky.

Joe The Older came outside and said he was going to go check on the farm and his horses, and then he’d be right over with the chainsaw. The farm isn’t far away, and he was back soon. He only has some leaves on the ground over there, he said. And then he cranked up his chainsaw like it was Christmas morning and we cut that pine tree out, and then cleared the garage door. Then we chopped a lot of that wood for the fire pit and started moving the branches around. I did about four more hours of that today.

The power was out for about six hours. I took my second shower of the night, letting the rain wash dirt and bits of wood and bark and sawdust off of me.

My heart hurts about the black cherry tree; the wallet will hurt about the debris removal. Everyone is OK.

adventures / Friday / photo / SCUBA — Comments Off
21
Jun 24

Diving Cozumel, part two

The weather was no better today. Ports were closed again, both on the mainland and over on Cozumel. Already we had decided against trying to go over there for more dives, even if it was an option. It was a bit of a hassle, and the visibility wasn’t that great. And this was about as good as it got from our balcony view.

So we’re going to be getting some money back from this trip. But we’re mask half-full people. While this was supposed to be a 24-dive trip, it became a vacation with four-dives tied into it.

And here are the photos from our second dive yesterday, the the second in the sea and fourth overall. My lovely bride wanted to a see a turtle that was at least this big.

(And she did. I have video. You’ll see it next week.)

I found a lobster out in the open in the daytime, a rare sight.

And, of course, the ever-present brown bowl sponge.

And another one.

And one more.

I let the current — more accurately, I wisely agreed to not fight the inevitable — float me over one outcrop, between two others and looked to my left to see these grunts hiding out from the water’s energy.

A few more reef fish.

I don’t believe I’ve ever noticed a conch quite like this.

And now I get photobombed at 50-plus feet.

I think she was trying to say, “You have enough photos of these things.”

Some sort of triggerfish. This one always stumps me.

But we all know what kind of ray this guy is. Rays are intriguing and weird and beautiful, all at once.

How many different kinds of fish can you name from this photo? I have four.

At our safety stop we took an anniversary photo. Fifteen years! Almost to the hour.

A few moments later, my dive buddy is at the surface.

And one of the saddest photos you can take on a dive. Here’s the bottom of the boat, and the end of our dive.

Tomorrow, we’ll head back home, and start planning our next trip — probably not to Mexico — which is already a long wait away.

adventures / photo / SCUBA / Thursday — Comments Off
20
Jun 24

Diving Cozumel

It’s raining a lot down here, and often times, it is raining hard. I woke up three times listening to a fast, soaking rain. And then I woke up again with my lovely bride’s hand tapping my leg.

“We have to wake up.”

There’s a sentence I never hear, so I was up and moving before I knew why.

We had to get up because we were running late. And we were actually going diving. This is how our anniversary began.

It continued like this. We got to the dive shop, conveniently located next to our resort, a bit late. They hustled us off to a shuttle right away. The driver took us down to the famed 5th Avenue, where we met today’s host, David, who was also our dive master yesterday.

This poor guy has to put up with us for two days in a row. We followed him to the ferry, and we crossed the 10-mile straight between the mainland and Cozumel. He guided us through some cenote caverns yesterday, and now this.

We arrived in Cozumel and David flagged down a cab. We rode 25 minutes down the coastline to another resort. We walked through the housing area, beyond the pools and he pointed out where lunch would not be held, and where we would, later, depart for our dive. Lunch had been moved from a nice modern building near the beach, back 200 yards to the main building as a weather consideration.

Over a bad lunch — one which made us happy we didn’t stay there, as we briefly considered — I wondered aloud how it was that the weather was risky enough to move the food, but we’re going diving in it. The weather, this afternoon, was merely hot, and humid. And this was how we sat around for an extra time for our boat to arrive so that we could go dive.

Eventually, though …

We slipped below the energetic surface of the sea. Of course one of the first things I saw was a giant brown bowl sponge.

And then some more of those.

This one was quite pointed.

All of the little reef fish were out on their afternoon reef fish business. The visibility was limited by the region’s weather. The good news for you, then, is that between the low-viz and the few dives, there aren’t that many photographs to scroll through.

Here’s an overhead view of a spotted trunkfish (Lactophrys bicaudalis). This is probably the worst photo of the set, so it’ll get better from here.

I had better luck with the sponges and coral this time. I guess because they weren’t moving. We were. The currents were strong, not impossible, but it was obvious why the ports have been closed and the diving canceled this week and last.

Here’s the blue chromis (Chromis cyanea) hanging out over his local sponges. Not all of them look healthy. Also, this water was incredibly warm.

And if you think the best shots might be of the brown sponge, you could be right.

Another smattering of reef fish, and a good demonstration of the murky visibility, and a reminder of how spoiled Caribbean divers can be.

Here’s a stoplight parrotfish (Sparisoma viride) that was passing by. This is a mature male, you can tell from his appearance. The parrotfish has two appearances, and they can change their sex. They’re called stoplights because of the yellow flash near the pectoral fin. You can almost see it here as he swims along. Also, I think this color scheme would make for a great sneaker.

I believe this is a permit fish (Trachinotus falcatus), which feed on crab and can be found from Massachusetts to Brazil. But that’s about all I know of them.

I know a bit more about this fish, which is easily the best fish in the sea.

We saw three barracuda on the first dive of the day.

And here’s another stoplight parrotfish, and this one is showing off that splash of yellow.

This is a blue tang (Acanthurus coeruleus), the common name of quite a few different reef fish. This one is an adult. The coloring is the clue. They range from a yellow juvenile, yellow tailed blue subadult to the blue adult phase.

And here’s one more shot of the best fish in sea (still no bubbles).

These are from our first dive this afternoon. I’ll share some photos from the second dive tomorrow. Maybe I’ll have a few videos for next week.

The downside was that after our second dive, and our boat ride back to the island, we changed into dry clothes, and then the bottom fell out of the sky again. We had to run in a deluge the 200 yards back up to the hotel. Another cab, another half-hour ferry ride in a squall the whole way, and then a shuttle back to our hotel. It took 10 hours to get in these two dives.

Also, our romantic anniversary dinner on the beach was canceled. Weather. No one told us. We had late night Italian, of sorts, instead.

adventures / memories / photo — Comments Off
20
Jun 24

The anniversary post

Count the big things. All those times she falls asleep in my arms. The knowing looks. Anticipating what story she’ll tell next. That smile. Those eyes. The flutter that comes with knowing our time apart has ended, even the brief ones. These are the things worth preserving.

You may count the setting of the sun as monumental astral mechanics, but I number the many days of sitting together and talking about absolutely nothing and the peaceful nights when we read next to one another, but calendars don’t matter to time, they really don’t. The number of times a day that the moments feel important are unquantifiable.

The less important, the jobs and moves and all of the other little gains in life are so much white noise — the distant hum.

These are the things things that matter.

The way she curls her whole body up when I make her laugh, and all of those times when she reaches out to hold my hand. The tally of histories and memories, great hugs and hot dates, the silliness and seriousness, the number of laughs and smiles and adventures, they all stretch beyond vision. There’s a lot of good fortune and a great many blessings in all of that, too.

If we must, the calendar says we’ve been married 5,479 days. Meaning today’s important number is 15. Fifteen years ago today my uncle stood in front of our family and friends and, as he said, tied us in a knot we wouldn’t soon be able to unravel. I’m grateful for all the important parts that make up everything between then and now, and the simple and grand thoughts of what still may come.

adventures / photo / SCUBA / Wednesday — Comments Off
19
Jun 24

Diving in the Cenotes

We had booked four dives a day in Playa del Carmen. Two in the morning, two in the afternoon. This allows for the necessary surface intervals — a safety consideration — and other important considerations like lunch. You could get in a few more dives each day if you pressed, but there are things like timing, fatigue and money to afford them all.

But because of the weather — a tropical storm formed up around here and moved off, and is still impacting the local conditions — our dive card is thinning out. We didn’t get any of our tanks yesterday. We moved to Plans B and C. Plan B was today.

We met a couple, who showed up late, and waited for a shuttle driver. That guy showed up, later, and someone loaded up our gear and put it on the van. The van drove and drove, we made small talk with our new friends from northern California and the driver steered in silence. He steered us to … another resort. We picked up another diver, a Canadian. And then we road on a good deal more, in the gray and in the rain.

Finally we came to a gravel road with a chain across it. Carved out of the woods, with old rusting cars and the leavings of other projects scattered here and there. A barefoot woman under an umbrella came out and moved the chain. We drove on. Finally, we came to a little clearing with three buildings. One made of stone, los banos, another of commercial lumber, the kitchen, and another painted up hut. That was the changing room.

People were clumped loosely together and we found two guys around a pickup truck who were in charge of the five of us. Gear, briefings about the dives and so on commenced.

The cenotes are natural pits, sinkholes. Limestone erodes and collapses, exposing deep reserviours of groundwater. The Yucatán Peninsula has thousands of them, most privately owned, and some open to diving, so here we are. You can find features like this in various places around the world, some of the more popular ones are large open-water pools, but most are sheltered sites, like the ones we dove today. Descend down some slippery stairs, it rained the entire time we were there, and then slip into the water.

This is cavern diving, rather than cave diving. It’s a distinction, our guide explained for those that didn’t know, that has to do with distance between access points. Cave diving requires a more special training. Cavern diving is accessible to open water divers. Open water, no ceilings. Cavern diving, some ceilings. Cave dives, no ceilings.

Around here, the aquifer system is such that the caverns provide deep enough access that the fresh water and salt water meet, a halocline, around 25 or 30 feet deep. It changes two things, the temperature of the water, and the visibility. Right in the halocline you get a blurry, swirling effect. It’s as if, for a few minutes, there are hundreds of floaters in your eyes. As if someone moved the antenna and the signal is going fuzzy. It’s like watching a video online in 1997. It’s the change in the salt in the water. But, otherwise, the key feature of cenotes are clear freshwater. Rain water filters slowly through the ground. There’s not a lot of silt and such in the water.

There’s just less to see. We saw rocks! And a few small fish. Somehow some trees had slid into place. The defining feature were stalagmites, which you could see right up close. These fragile limestone formations tell us the caves weren’t always filled with water. They’re drippings, after all.

We weren’t allowed to take our cameras. But the local guy has a photographer and he took this photo and the dive master grabbed it for us.

I’m looking down in the photo. Incidentally, that’s the first time I’ve worn a wetsuit for a dive since 2006, I think.

The Yucatán has few rivers or lakes, so the cenotes make up the drinking water and so, for the history of man, these have been places where settlements were formed. A few decades ago, in fact, researchers diving in some of these cenotes found the oldest evidence of human habitation. The best thing we found was my dive buddy’s mask. She dropped it getting ready for the second dive. The Maya apparently thought cenotes were portals to the next realm. (Some are protected by the UNESCO Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage.) That moment when you dip below the surface, you could see how the imagination would go that way. On our second dive, the water was brown-gravy murky at the entrance point. It only lasted about four feet or so — there’s no current, so if you stir up silt it just … hangs there — but those were a few interesting seconds of a dive.

For different reasons, we came up with the same idea about cenotes diving.

Glad I could do it; don’t need to do it again.

Back at our resort after our two dives, we decided to try the ocean. You’ve never seen a happier girl.

She’s a beach girl.

I like the floating part.

She loves the waves. And they were present and vigorous today.

To be sure, they make photo composition a bit of a challenge.

It is a permanent smile when she’s at the beach.

Here, she seems to be waving at Cozumel, which is just 10 miles over that way. You can see it, when the skies are clear. We could almost see it today. We’ll go over tomorrow.

We spent a long time, and 114 photos, trying to do this right, but it was somehow tricky. The angles, the waves, the sea spray, the timing, and so on and so forth. This one of the better ones.

This is, I think, my favorite one.

That was the 106th photo in the series.

Tomorrow we’ll dive in saltwater, if the weather finally cooperates.