Quiet Thanksgiving

We had initially planned to spend Thanksgiving with friends, but that fell through. Then I was thinking I might get a couple dives in over the weekend, but the weather turned out to be shit. So in the end it was a quiet weekend and I spent a day clearing out the garage.

I now have enough space in there to set-up a daddy play area; TV, Papasan chair, computer for some tunes, etc.

Got to get the junk I've take out onto eBay.

My best Google Voice fail to date!

Message from Debbie, according to Google Voice... Hi it's me. I'm sending out an email about assigned to use back and I just wanted to check week. Jam claiming if you could visit. Let it without mistake fish,especially I watch passions, so give me a call placed. FYI, Google Voice is a voicemail service that translates your incoming phone calls into text and emails them to you.  It does particularly bad at understanding Debbie's Yorkshire accent!  As of yet they have not added an option in their UI that allows me to list the place of birth of a caller ...

Good Diving, despite the weather

The wave model for this weekend was not so good, but I had a navigation class scheduled at 11am, so I headed down to Monterey anyway.

There was a dcosv club dive at 8am, so I went on that, it was at the Breakwater in Monterey. Entry seemed a bit rough, so I got a fin on before I entered the water, which may or may not have been a good idea. It made entry clumsy, but I was able to kick out past the breakers more quickly.

We didn't dive along the breakwater, as I usually would, we were swimming out North to look for an old cannery pipe. We didn't find the pipe, but we did see a lot of other cool stuff.

We were 'harassed' for a while by a sealion that would swim down to see us (about 50ft down at the time), swim around me, take a look, then swim off, to return a couple minutes later.

I saw two sunfish (or Mola Mola), weird looking creatures. Never seen those in Monterey before ('cept at the aquarium). There were a lot of jellyfish around too, someone suggested that's what attracted the sunfish in so close to shore.

Couple of really nice, big crabs, probably decorator crabs - my crab knowledge is not so great.

Unfortunately I didn't do too well with my air this weekend. I had to surface after about 35minutes dive time - though with a max depth of 60ish feet, that probably isn't too bad. Unfortunately I had quite a long surface swim back to the breakwater to exit. Fortunately there wasn't too much kelp, kelp-crawl is always the worst thing to be doing after a dive, when you don't have air spare.

As it turned out the navigation class was canceled, so I did a second dive club dive. There wasn't much to see on the second dive. The surge was also getting bad. Again, it wasn't a very long dive.

'spensive cars

We were at the Silicon Valley Trivia Challenge on Saturday, it was held at Club Auto Sports, San Jose. 

One of the companies that does business there is Club Sportiva.  Club Sportiva have an interesting business model: You pay them $3500 a year, then you get access to some fancy cars - Aspen Martins, Porchs and Ferraris, etc.  You have 10 days use per year, presumably you sign the car out, thrash it around the back roads of California, then fill it up with gas and return it.

For $1000 you can have a day experiencing some of their vehicles driving around Napa etc.

Luckily I don't care much about cars, so I wasn't at all tempted to make a purchase on Saturday night.

Actually, I was just looking at their website.  They also do Exotic car rentals.  For about $600/day you can rent a Ferrari.  I know some people who might be up for that next time they visit California.