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adventures / Cozumel / photo / SCUBA / Wednesday — Comments Off
10
Jan 24

Dry again

More high winds today. Another day of canceled dives. Another day slaving away under the shaded part of a quiet little beach. It’s not a bad consolation prize, reading and listening to the waves. But that’s four more dives lost to weather.

I appreciate the safety concerns — I am, after all, the most annoying safety first diver in the world — but the winds and choppy sees have now cost us 40 percent of our scheduled dives.

We’re here, though, enjoying the quiet of a not-at-capacity all inclusive resort. They put up good sunsets.

Yesterday it was obvious that the dive boats were having a difficult time getting to the dive shop. It occurred to me that the most dangerous moments in that’s boat life are probably centered around getting to, and leaving, the pier on days when there’s a lot of energy in the water. Today was better, but only by a bit. There were still white caps off the reefs and so the harbormaster said no.

Tomorrow we’ll go diving, if I have to wade into the water the old fashioned way. Can’t have boat problems if you don’t use a boat!

I love the brown bowl sponge (Cribrochalina vasculum). They’re just so intriguing from a distance. Are any critters inside? How big is this going to look? What is even the point of this thing? It’s always a mystery, every time.

Those few moments between seeing one in the distance and getting above it can be full of wonder. This is the same sponge.

And each one of them deserves to be explored, if only for a moment. But there are so many to peer into, and the currents on drift dives, like these, dictate many of the terms. So the mystery will always be there.

Sometimes there are fish hiding inside the sponge, just waiting. Maybe I’ll see some myself. Four more dives are on the schedule.

Tomorrow, we’ll see more fish. I’m certain of it.

adventures / Cozumel / photo / SCUBA / Tuesday — Comments Off
9
Jan 24

No dives today — sad diver face

Day three in Mexico, day two of diving. Except today’s diving was canceled by high winds. We lost four dives. That hurts. So we sat under the shady palm trees of the beach. Later, I went back to the room to take a nap. For some reason I woke up this morning, early. The room doesn’t make sense, so I had no idea what time it was. After a time I went to the bathroom, and checked my phone on the way.

It was 4:30. I could still get almost three hours of sleep.

I could not go back to sleep. So I was tired.

With no diving to be had, I enjoyed a late afternoon nap.

Rallied just in time to see the sunset, though.

And that ain’t bad.

A few more shots from yesterday’s dives, since I have worked through about half of the raw photos of the day. (Seriously, we’ll be at this for weeks. It’ll be great.)

There’s my mom, diving since the G.H.W. Bush administration.

Me too, come to think of it.

Sometimes people ask you, what’s the secret to taking a good photo of a person underwater. (No one asks me that, but let’s assume they did.) I can tell you definitiely: the secret to taking a good photo of a person underwater is to go diving with someone who doesn’t breathe.

Rule number one of diving is this: Keep breathing. But that’d mean you’d have to start. As far as I know, she only ever breathes when she runs. That is an undoctored photo. There are five little bubbles. Behind her, the tank is leaking as much air as she is exhaling.

When a tank and regulator rig let’s a little air slip through an aging o-ring like that it isn’t a concern at all. And you see it a lot, especially on this tourist-rental set ups. When a person runs through air as slowly as the tank, it’s impressive.

We drifted over this conch shell yesterday. Whatever is inside is going somewhere.

You wonder where it’s headed, and how long it has been on the move.

You wonder how long it has taken, and what the critter inside will find when it gets there.

More diving tomorrow, hopefully.

adventures / Cozumel / Monday / photo / SCUBA — Comments Off
8
Jan 24

Making the international signal for ‘Go down’

I don’t know what the weather is like where you are, but it is in the 80s here. Here being the key term. We are in Mexico this week, diving the Palancar Reef off the island of Cozumel. We flew down yesterday. One stop in Atlanta, an easy trip right to the island. Rented a car, picked up a few things at the big grocery store and then drove to the place where we are staying.

We slept in this morning, which was great since, despite it being an easy flight, yesterday was a long day. But, this afternoon, we got on a boat.

We slipped below the waves and went down to the sandy bottom. Look who I found!

So the three of us are underwater this week, my wife, my mother and me. Well, some other people, too, but they don’t really figure much into the tale. Here’s my other dive buddy, now.

That’s a píntano, or a sergeant major fish, in the photo with her, but we’ll get to that. But, first, enjoy this yellowtail snapper (Ocyurus chrysurus). It’s a member of an abundant species usually found around reefs. The biggest one ever caught was 11 pounds, it is a commercially important species, both farmed and is fished. In places like Cuba and Brazil it is overfished. The species is at some srisk of overfishing in Mexico, as well.

The yellowtail snapper was first formally described in 1791 by the German naturalist Marcus Elieser Bloch. He said it was local to the “Brazilian seas.” Bloch was an important ichthyologist of the 18th century. A medical doctor by training, Bloch got interested in fish in his 60s when he found fish Carl Linnaeus didn’t identify. He started a collection of specimens from around the world, wrote a 12-volume collection on the subject and is, today, credited with the description of at least 267 new species and 19 genera.

The queen angelfish (Holacanthus ciliaris), notable for the crown it wears. They live in harems. It is a popular fish in the aquarium trade, and you can see why.

The queen angelfish eat sponges, jellyfish, corals, plankton, and algae. Juveniles act as cleaner fish, removing parasites from bigger fish. Carl Linneaus first described the queen angelfish in 1758, in the 10th edition of his Systema Naturae.

Settle in! We have a lot more fish to go. I’ll be dragging out these photos and videos for weeks.

It’ll be a good way to wade through winter, which is a strange thing to contemplate when you’re deep in Mexico.

Hard life, I have to say.

adventures / errands / family / Friday / photo — Comments Off
5
Jan 24

More presents!

This evening we wrapped up our last Christmas holiday of the season. The god in-laws (just go with it) host us every year. Two empty-nesters are at the center of a house of 15. There are presents. There is lasagna. There are many photographs. It’s a nice time.

Before that, though, it was errands! An oil change! Clothes shopping! Grocery shopping! Lunch! And so on!

I visited Target for the first time in … I don’t recall the last time I was at a Target, to be honest. More than six months. Close to a year? Maybe a year? Anyway, not much has changed at Target. Middle of the day on a Friday after the holidays is a good time to be there, even in one of those stores that feels a little old and tired.

One of the self checkout stations had just … had enough.

There’s a lot to consider here. Is it the neatly creased paper? The crumpled part of the paper? The frowny faces? The target in “broken”? That it says broken?

I think it is the crying frowny face. One is sad, but the other is in tears. There are two levels to the upset nature of things at Target, and that hits home while you’re buying socks at the next self checkout.

Near the house, the line crews are doing line work. It’s a cold day to be in a cherry picker.

At the last Christmas of the year all of the kids presents were a hit. My lovely bride nailed it again. One of the little boys bought me a present. He’s five, and thinking of others. It’s a toy dinosaur excavation kit. When he comes over next time, maybe he’ll help me uncover the bones inside the “fossil.”

Another one of the kids wrapped a present for me — a really awesome mug. You’re just touched when the young’uns think of you.

And the lasagna. First generation recipe. I just sit in the corner and discretely eat as much as I can. That brings this year’s three Christmases to a close with seconds.

history / markers / New Jersey / photo / We Learn Wednesdays / Wednesday — Comments Off
3
Jan 24

There’s not a word for it; it won’t matter tomorrow

I wanted to write about motivation but, really, who has the energy for that? It’s something akin to ennui that’s been afflicting me the last few days. Not ennui, but something close to it. If there’s a place where that feeling and paralysis by analysis might intersect, that’s where I’ve been living.

There is much to do, but it seems like a lot so …

You power through, because that’s what professionals do. But there isn’t a lot of joy in that. There is, instead, a tiny bit of fear: What if I messed up an important date, or sequence or things, because I found myself with a galloping case of Tuesdays that covered the first part of the first week of the new year?

Besides, he said on Monday, there’s tomorrow. Which is the same thing he said on Tuesday. And what he spent part of today saying.

Tomorrow, much work will be done.

Getting a good solid start, that’s the secret. It isn’t motivation; it’s momentum. Tomorrow I will create it. I will manufacture it. I will rip it from the air and these keys at my fingertips. I know the secret. The secret is to find the opposite of ennui, enthusiasm, in deadlines.

The self-imposed deadlines start tomorrow.

This is the 21st installment of We Learn Wednesdays. I’ve been riding my bike across the county to find the local historical markers. This one isn’t in the Historical Marker Database, but it’s the 40th one we’ve seen in this series. And the marker is about a now empty lot.

I can’t find anything with a few simple searches about that first academy. But the town’s high school was here, too, for a few years in the early part of the 20th century, before moving down the street and around the corner. I found a photo of the class of 1907. Someone wrote that it had 18 students, the largest the school had enrolled to that point. It also included the school’s first black graduate, apparently. If that’s true, it is interesting, since the marker tells us integration came later.

There were postcards featuring the Copner school. Here’s another one.

There were two generations of men named Samuel in the Copner family around that time. I believe that old school was named after the first. He was said to be an early and loud advocate for public schools in the area.

There’s also a black-and-white of the old Grant Grammar school.

Here’s the lot(s) today.

That church will come up in a future edition of We Learn Wednesdays. In the next installment, we’ll see a house that dates, in part, back to the 17th century. It has, as you might expect, a busy history. If you’ve missed any markers so far, you can find them all right here.