A weekend of diving and driving
Well it’s been a fun weekend overall, and an extended one for those of us lucky enough to live in Okinawa and my employed by the local government. Yesterday marked the end of the Battle of Okinawa, and therefore was Okinawa Memorial Day, with all public offices and schools closed for the day. So, while many families attended their ancestral tombs and shrines for the day to have picnics and pay homage of some sort, I elected to get into the ocean and pay my respects to Poseidon, Neptune and Darryl Hannah from Splash!
It was actually the 2nd attempt at getting into the water after I had tried on Saturday. Was scheduled to meet a diving student and start an Advanced Open Water course with her. So we met up, got to the dive site and geared up. All was well until we got into the water and about 4m/12ft down when my dive buddy indicated there was a problem and that they wanted to surface. So we went up and my buddy said they were having problems breathing from the regulator. I tried breathing through it and it seemed to be tough to inhale; almost as if the diaphragm inside was sticking. I looked at the alternate second stage and tried breathing through that and encountered the exact same problem. Very strange. If you hit the front of the 2nd stage (near the purge button) it seemed to loosen up for about 20-30 seconds before it started sticking again. As we were planning a deep dive there was no way I was going to take any chances with equipment, so we had to call off the diving. Have sent the regulator off to get checked but I only had it serviced 2-3 weeks ago. Hopefully it is just something that has stuck and needs lubrication or similar. I could have taken the regulator apart and given it a visual inspection, but I would rather give it to someone who has easy access to the parts and who will know straight away what the problem is. So instead on Saturday we decided to snorkel around Maeda Misaki instead. The sun was beating down and the water was about 29C at the surface; it really was beautiful there. We snorkelled around to the “cave” but that was just a huge mass of people colliding into each other, elbowing each other in the face to get past etc, so we didn’t stay in there for long. At one point I had someone just push my head down under the water to give them leverage to get past - not nice. The sun was pretty strong and I could feel the backs of my legs had been burnt a little by the time we had finished.
Saturday night was spent doing a little racing on a quiet road. I wanted to give the methanol injection system I’d installed on my car another workout and managed to do that with a few passes. Although one guy managed to curse my car again (whenever he is out and we race, my car ends up misfiring!), I set a personal best 400m / 1/4mile time of 12.22s, with a speed of 184kmh. There was a slight tail wind but I can live with that! On the picture below you can see my 100m time & speed at the bottom, and then my 200m time & speed. Compared to before the methanol, I have knocked off about 0.25s and gained about 5kmh on 1/4mile runs which is a decent start. I have a new intercooler that I have to fit up and get some custom made piping for which should help cooling and help my times a little too. There is one thing about my car which is really pleasing though. When I first got the car and started meeting a few people who were racing, I asked a few times to go into other people’s cars and was impressed by the speeds and experience they gave me. Now it’s come around and in the past 2 weeks I’ve had 3 people ask for a ride in my car, and I think all of them have been impressed..
So that was a pretty successful night and leads us through to Sunday. Sunday morning was my high school baseball team’s game in the Okinawan baseball tournament which I always anticipate with dread, as it inevitably ends in tears. But I turned up with a bunch of teachers and students and watched out school stumble to a 4-2 defeat at the hands of a school who really didn’t perform that well against us. Cue lots of crying from the players and supporting students. I understand they are saddened at the loss, but the crying always has me a little confused at times. I wish some of them would cry when I give them their test papers back next week, as some of their scores should bring them to tears! They’ll take them though and may laugh about them. If that happens I’ll just remind them about the baseball loss and see their eyes well up. You have to be cruel to be kind sometimes. Plus, it makes my days a little more fun!
Which then brings us full circle to our day off yesterday. Went up to Maeda with 4 tanks and used them all. 2 of the 4 dives were Advanced Open Water ones with a student and 3 out of the 4 dives were beyond 30m/100ft. At the end of the day I was sunburnt, loaded up with nitrogen, dehydrated (despite downing over 3l of water during the day) and knackered! Didn’t have the effort to make myself dinner and just fell asleep on the sofa at about 8:30pm. Kept waking up when I rolled onto a sensitive bit of sunburn, but apart from that I slept all the way until 7am this morning. Am feeling a little tender on my shoulders and I’m sure I will feel sore during the week. The dives were worth it though. 2 octopii, 3 eels, plenty of nudibranchs and a couple of sweetlips which appeared to be in the wooing stage or at least the pre-mating stage as they kept going to kiss each other as we watched. Fun times.
So that’s me just about up to date with everything. Not much more to say for now but I’ll be in touch with more news soon.
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Hi Dave,
Glad to hear that you’re back in the water! Good thing to have the reg checked first before attempting deep dives. Might give some interesting situations having to knock your diaphram up every 30 seconds or so, definately will show if your students can deal with stress. NOT!
Saw an Octopus the other during one of the IDC dives, that made me and the students very happy!
Good luck with your car!