We went diving today. And so today was a good day. Also, my ears began cooperating today, meaning I could dive better. But let me back up.
When we first came to Cozumel in March 2022 I got a great allergic reaction to something on the island. Couldn’t breathe. Got on the boat and away from the island and it all went away. Late in that week I picked up some OTC medicine, and that helped the breathing, but not so much the diving. Descending was a big problem. Coming back up to the surface was no great treat, either. So, this year, I brought some medicine with me. What do you know, the allergy problem came right back. I started taking the medicine, and blamed this guy.
Descents were slow on my first dives Monday and Tuesday. Coming back up was also a little unpleasant.
But, today, my ears and I had a little talk. On the ascent of the first dive of the day my ears were making all sorts of noise. I don’t know how everyone else on the dive boat didn’t hear them. And then, they opened up as they are supposed to. On my later dives, I descended like a normal diver. I even beat my lovely bride, who is a fish, to the bottom on one of the dives.
(This is not the point, in any way, but it’s a useful measuring stick.)
Anyway, here’s the first video I shot of the dive trip. This is a simple one. There will be many, many more.
Here’s a photo of a conch shell, if you couldn’t get enough in that video.
This little collection of coral and sponge looks like a video screengrab, for some reason. It’s a shame, too, because it was really quite beautiful.
The filefish is just a catchall name, made of more than 100 species, which are classified in 27 genera. They’re found all over the world. Some people call them foolfish, leatherjackets or shingles. I’ve never seen one that looks quite like this.
Oh look! A sponge!
Nothing in this one, but you never know about the next one.
More diving tomorrow, more photos and video. You’re going to see a beautiful eagle ray!
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.
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.
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.
I took this photo the other day, and I keep forgetting to publish it. That’s too bad, because it’s a great nod to the apparent lack of thoughtfulness of others. This is outside our building on campus, and these are handicapped parking spots, as you can see from the blue lines and the sign.
All of which makes this installment of Hoosier Hospitality amazing.
You can’t really move scooters unless you rent them, of course. The wheels are effectively seized to prevent free rides. So you have to muscle them around, which is what I had to do. But, on the off chance that anyone needed the space, at least someone was thinking about you.
I can say this about Hoosier Hospitality: it’s alliterative.
We haven’t run the tab feature in a few weeks, and my browser is groaning under the pressure. This is the place where I am memorializing pages that I might want to refer to again, but might not earn a bookmark.
The documentary genre is a more varied one than many people give it credit for. As a type of film, documentaries do usually aim to inform or educate about some kind of non-fiction story or topic, but that’s not their sole purpose. Some aim to evoke certain feelings or experiences more than anything else, others aim to present an argument or point of view in a persuasive manner, and others are mostly concerned with simply entertaining audiences the way a work of fiction might.
Furthermore, some documentaries aim to do a combination of the above, or maybe even none of the above, instead opting to do something else entirely. Exploring the world of documentary filmmaking can be a truly eye-opening thing to do, and reveal worlds or unique perspectives that aren’t as easy to explore through other genres.
Ok, so you’ve decided to buy your own scuba diving equipment. Whether you are newly certified or a seasoned diver, used scuba gear may seem like a great opportunity to save some money. Buying secondhand diving equipment can either be the greatest deal of your life or the biggest mistake, the difference is knowing what to look for.
We like to look out for you guys, so here are 6 tips to buy used scuba gear:
Deep in the Mojave desert, about halfway between Los Angeles and Phoenix, a sparkling blue sea shimmers on the horizon. Visible from the I-10 highway, amid the parched plains and sun-baked mountains, it is an improbable sight: a deep blue slick stretching for miles across the Chuckwalla Valley, forming an endless glistening mirror.
But something’s not quite right. Closer up, the water’s edge appears blocky and pixelated, with the look of a low-res computer rendering, while its surface is sculpted in orderly geometric ridges, like frozen waves.
“We had a guy pull in the other day towing a big boat,” says Don Sneddon, a local resident. “He asked us how to get to the launch ramp to the lake. I don’t think he realised he was looking at a lake of solar panels.”
We return to 1998 in the Re-Listening project. For the blissfully uninitiated, I am going through all of my CDs in the order in which I acquired them. It’s a stroll down a musical memory lane. It’s fun. And I’m writing and sharing some of it here. These are not reviews, because the web definitely doesn’t need another quarter-century-too-late alt band review. But they are a good excuse to post videos, pad out some content and have a little fun, which is kinda the point of most music.
This record is from 1997, but from what surrounds it in my old CD books I know I picked this up the next year. I imagine I got it from one of the two independent music stores that were in town at the time, but I don’t remember that part, here. This is one of the alt bands that personified the 1990s, and you can hear that immediately in the first track.
Toad the Wet Sprocket saw this record, their last for more than a dozen years, climb to number 16 on the Billboard 200, both on the strength of what had become a dedicated fan base, but also the single “Come Down,” which settled nicely in the top 40 in the U.S. and in the top 10 in Canada.
That song was so ubiquitous I was certain Toad was putting it on every record, and every musical coordinator had it in shows, movies, and commercials, but apparently not. I can only blame myself, and the A&R people at Columbia Records who had this on the air somewhere within ear shot every 17 minutes of my early 20s.
And here’s Glen Phillips doing “Throw It All Away” solo. I can never decide if this, or the full band, is the better version.
The answer, of course, is which ever you hear live.
The whole record is a fine continuation of Toad the Wet Sprocket’s work. The production is great, it’s hard to argue with the instrumentation. Glenn Phillips and Todd Nichols are in full throat. Everything works and there’s a little something for every mood. But I am always listening to Coil to get to track 11.
This is what I wrote when I finally, finally saw Toad the Wet Sprocket live last year.
I don’t know if “Crazy Life” was my first protest song or the first for my slice of my generation, but I’m pretty sure it was the first one I really noticed. The first one I read about. And I read a lot about Peltier. I’ve never really settled on how I felt about it, not really, but this is Wounded Knee.
The Eighth Circuit thought a jury would have acquitted him had information improperly withheld from the defense been available, yet the court denied a new trial. And if you really dive into the story it’s easy to question how the system was used. But I don’t know, not really. None less than Nelson Mandela, Mother Teresa, and the Dalai Lama have campaigned for him, though, and that means something.
The point is, this song made me look it up, and think, and ask questions of things in general and specifically. And I probably shouldn’t like a pop song this much, but anything that scrapes your brain for a quarter of a century is worth noting.
And I love Todd Nichols’ sound.
Toad have released two records in the years since, 2013’s “New Constellation,” which was a crowd-funded album, and the Starting Now (2021). Some of their other work, and re-work, will show up later in the Re-Listening project. And like Chris Spencer says at the end of that 1997 video, you can catch them on tour this year, too. We did, twice, last summer, and I’m a little bummed I won’t get to see them this time out. But you can!
