The reason winter scuba diving in the Pacific Northwest is so spectacular is because there is high visibilty (no algae) and a vast variety of stunning underwater animal and plant life. I just cannot believe I got to experience what I did, even at the cost of immense difficulty, a few panic attacks caused by near drowning (in my mind
) and... immense difficulty.The first day I started out in a dry suit that I had not previously tested in water.
Dry suits for scuba diving are like space suits (and the world deep underwater is as alien as space!) and VERY UNCOMFORTABLE. I cannot even communicate how terrible they are to don, wear and remove. First you start with a stiff fleece/polyester bodysuit 2 inches thick. Wool socks. Then you put these horrid booties on over the socks. Then you put on thick gloves. When you get in the suit, your feet which already feel NOT good, I don't know how to explain it just... layered, swaddled, shut in, claustrophobic, go in the legs and dry boots of the suit. The top part of the drysuit sucks because of the rubber seal for your neck and head, and the fact that you have to put your gloved fingers in the drygloves. Once you fasten your double heavy duty waterprood zippers you have to get all the Self Contained Breathing Apparatus on. HEH. First you put on belts of lead weight, to enable you to sink in the very bouyant suit. I had to wear a total of 40 pounds of lead weight but we didn't know that at first; so many trips (4) back up out of the frigid water for more weights. They went around my waist and on my feet. Then the Bouyancy Compensator (BC) which is the jacket and the (heavy) tank of air, and the regulator which has the hoses for your mouthpiece, spare mouthpiece, for getting air from teh tank into your BC, annd your gages. The dive knife, the light. The fucking neoprene hood, and THEN the mask which covers your eyes and nose, so the only part of you squeezing out of this suit is your lips. Did I mention you have to do all that doubly gloved???Well. I got in the open water for the first time to submerge and had a very unpleasant experience. Fuck that suit. I couldn't move. On top of that a little water leaked in through my neck seal, which absolutely sucked, as it is December and water going into your contained body environment while you're wearing lead weights in the ocean is not a pleasant feeling. The silt was all stirred up from other divers and the water looked so disgusting and dead. The tide was coming in and the swells were large. I panicked. I felt like I was going to drown. I'll admit the fate of my little brother was weighing heavily on me and I cried and had to get out and get that suit off as fast as I could, which turned out to be a half an hour.
So I missed that dive but we went to the dive shop and got me outfitted in a wetsuit, which is what all the other divers were wearing. The only reason I was in a drysuit is because I have the hookup, and theoretically you would have a much better time being dry in freezing saltwater. If your dry suit fits properly and you can move!!!! Anyway, a wetsuit keeps you warm by trapping a layer of water between the suit and your skin. You are still covered from head to toe except your lips, but.... that first time you get in the water and feel it saturating you is also not pleasant! Luckily much physical exertion was required to don the gear as I stated before, and I felt that the fact I was working hard helped keep me warm.
So I had to do all this stuff like take the gear on and off in open water above my head, pretend to rescue somebody, take my mask off underwater (don't try this at home, folks. You take that puppy off while you're unnaturally breathing under the pressure of 15 feet of water and it all wants to go straight up your nose. I had to practice this skill a lot in the pool.) and I also had to demonstrate my abilty to control my bouyancy (uncontrolled ascents and descents are VERY dangerous) and all of that. I actually didn't get to go out to the tire reef attraction or do anything fun at all for the duration of that 14 hour day. The hotel and jacuzzi bathtub was niiice, but when I came back in from smoking a bowl on the balcony my uptight roomate was all like "what was THAT all about"???!!! Which I thought was nosy. "It's fresh out there" I said.
Ok so now I get to the fun part, bear with me if you've actually read this far. This morning we went to the Keystone dive, as I looked at the choppy ocean waves and the dawn clouds and the wind whipping everything up I wondered if I really wanted to do this. Did I really intend to journey out along the ocean floor to a depth of 40-60 feet? Getting in that water was once tiring, cold son of a bitch. But once we were under there... wow! I mean... wow! I never knew there was so much cool shit going on under sea level. Were there fishes?! There were so many fish at one point I was swimming in a huge school of fish and they were all cute, like aquarium fish. There were many different kinds. When I saw a big blue one that resembled an eel dart out from the rocks at me I screamed, but he was cool. There were all the white tube thingys which retracted when you touched them. There were sea cucumbers which are funny cause they are phallic and get hard when you touch them, hahaha. But don't laugh undrwater coz it messes up your seal and then you have saltwater in your nose and eyes. Then we saw a sea lion! He was no more than 10 feet away from me, swimming around lazily, so much for him to eat near that rock wall! The foliage at the bottom was beautiful, so irridescent and colorful, though we started to lose color as we went deeper down! My light cast things in erie vibrant true color. There were also crabs quite easy to catch and many kinds of huge and small sea stars. I looked up and we were so far down I couldn't see the surface... just fishies and diffused light and long ropes of plant matter growing upwards. At that point I pretended I was a mermaid.
Thank you for reading about my experience. Scuba diving is incredible... incredibly liberating, challenging and exciting and new. I hope you all get to try it someday!
-Caro
At least we'll get to hang again before you go diving. Goa Curry here we come! 
