clarification

I'm not leaving LJ any time soon. "Moving to JournalFen" was a bad way of putting it. What I mean is I'll continue using LJ for everything and also post fan stuff to JournalFen, until/unless I can't post fan stuff here anymore, in which case it'll be non-fan stuff here and fan stuff on JournalFen only. If that happens then I'll probably make the switch to just using JournalFen for everything eventually. But I don't expect it to happen, at least not any time soon. I'll also switch to a free LJ account when I'm due to renew, instead of keeping it a paid account, assuming I can do that and still keep my old posts.

So it's not time to say goodbye to LJ friends! To be honest I might forget to x-post to my JournalFen at first anyway, so definitely keep reading here.

ow

Free advice: if you've been diving every day for five days and your forhead is all sunburned, don't scratch at it.

I've put some vitamin E on it now. I've been wearing my hat when I'm out of the water since Tuesday but I think I'm still recovering from Monday's sunburn. Plus I can't help getting a little exposure while I'm in the water (and therefore unable to wear my hat) - you see from the icon that my hood doesn't cover my forhead. The sunscreen doesn't help much.

My total number of dives is up to 23! 1 yesterday and 2 today. That doesn't include spending Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday training in the pool.

We have this weekend off and then next week we're going to camp down by Big Sur for five days and dive from there, starting on Wednesday. Today's dives were about search and recovery. We had to search for painted rocks and my team only found five out of ten. The visibility was horrible, about five feet. I could just about see my feet but anything further away was an indistinct blob. I think only one team found all 10 rocks anyway. But most found 7 or 8. D'oh. We did do a good job, though, on an unexpected thing: my buddy got his tank snagged on a rope and I had to go back and free him. The co-instructor - who was there supervising - said we did well: he stayed calm and I realized he'd fallen behind and I went back to find him. Which is harder than it sounds, considering I was about 8 feet away from him and therefore couldn't see him until I got closer; I had to use my compass. We also managed to navigate from one anchor to another and there was a lot of wave action. And we got through the surf zone with 4-5 foot waves. Woo!

On Monday, we're going diving in the kelp forest and before that we get to go to the Aquarium to see the fish we're supposed to look for. On the Big Sur trip, we'll acutally collect data for Reef Check California. Which means I'll have to have all the fish memorized by then. I have flash cards. It's about 20 types of fish and I'm already familiar with some of them. Yay blue rockfish! We'll also look for invertebrates; I know them already.