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Electoral Surgery posted:I'm taking my advanced open water course this week. It started at six people. Four dropped out after the gear checkout pool session on Friday night because their rental drysuits were leaking; I watched one guy pour two quarts out of a boot. Yesterday the one guy in a wetsuit dropped out because he was feeling sick, couldn't manage buoyancy and felt like he couldn't breathe underwater. So today I got two dives private instruction, and tomorrow we go out for two more after work. I have a bunch of friends who work in Florida, while I'm now up in New England. I make sure to periodically send them photos of my dive computer's temperature readout so I can hear them scream from two thousand miles away. It's also fun to mention the feel of snow under your dive boots as you walk down to the water and watch their faces. I made a few buttons to hand around the people at school who dive during the winter for our research last year. I kind of want to find a way to make them into legit patches, but it amuses me nonetheless. 
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Sep 30, 2019 17:27
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Squashy Nipples posted:Hardcore, man. I only dive wet, so I usually pack it in around mid November, picking back up in early May. I'm a poor grad student, so I've been diving wet too - but because I'm a pretty big guy and most grad students in marine biology these days are women, I tend to have an advantage in the sense of "they're smaller and have a higher surface area to volume ratio, so will be cold enough to end the dive before my blubbery self is going to die." A lot of our work is actually up at Nubble Light in Maine. There must be more science done per rock at Nubble than anywhere else in the Gulf of Maine at this point. Edit to add clarification: this isn't me throwing shade on the women I work with, because they're all badasses and very good at what they do. I just have more natural insulation on my body than they do. Timmy Age 6 fucked around with this message at 18:38 on Sep 30, 2019 |
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Sep 30, 2019 18:36
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Squashy Nipples posted:I'm a loving walrus, I have plentiful blubber. Some say "dad bod," I say "dive bod." It's a useful adaptation!
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Oct 2, 2019 14:47
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Ramrod Hotshot posted:This isn't quite SCUBA, but since we're talking Keys, has anyone been to Ft. Jefferson to snorkel/freedive? It's pricey, but a friend of mine went and raved about it. Granted I'm not sure he'd ever seen a coral reef before. Is it in much better condition/different from say, Molasses Reef in Key Largo? Oh holy hell yes. The Tortugas are way better. Turns out that having an intact ecosystem due to National Park protections makes a difference. I was lucky enough to get to do some research diving out there and it was incredible.
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Oct 18, 2019 02:58
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sharkytm posted:She's an AAUS-certified scientific diver, and a marine biogeochemist. Her diving mostly consists of 4 activities: The joys of research diving! I did my master's in the Keys, so everyone thinks reefs and clear water. I dove out at the reef maybe five times in three summers. The vast majority of my work was up in Florida Bay, so I was standing on my head in six feet of murky water looking under things. That being said, I love doing the work dives, because not only am I allowed to touch the wildlife, it's actually literally why I'm there. Science is fun.
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Nov 2, 2019 22:16
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DeadlyMuffin posted:If I lived in the affected areas I'd be tempted to fill a big aquarium with lionfish. They're pretty. That’s what the people whose fish these are descended from thought, too... They’re super tasty, though.
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Nov 8, 2019 21:50
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This is a super edge case, but because GoPros are so small, I think they get cold and drain their batteries more easily. I was helping on a project last January doing photo quadrats off the coast of New Hampshire, and the GoPro they planned to use went from full charge to zero after literally just a handful of pictures. I have a Panasonic point and shoot in a housing and that seemed to have enough thermal inertia to keep chugging along. Not an issue if you aren't planning to do any diving in almost-literally-freezing cold water, though! 
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Dec 17, 2019 17:59
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Jato posted:Anyone have suggestions for dive shops and/or worthwhile dive sites in the St. Petersburg/Tampa area? I worked for a bit with Florida Fish & Wildlife in St. Pete and we got our tanks and gear serviced at Bill Jackson's in Pinellas Park. You can rent gear there. There's not a ton of good shore diving in the immediate area, but if you don't mind doing a bit more driving, Venice Beach is about an hour down the road and is all right. There are some artificial reefs just offshore where you get snook and groupers hanging out, plus it's known for the fossil shark teeth you can find in the sand. I think when we did it back in 2016 we hit up Service Club Park but that was just something we picked without too much local knowledge.
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Mar 28, 2024 00:56
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Trig Discipline posted:I haven't had a close call with a submarine but the goddamn glass bottom boats full of tourists would come and just hover over us while we were working in Curacao and it pissed us off to no end. For one thing it's a safety issue, but for another thing we don't want tourists seeing us catch fish for research and think it's okay for them to do the same. The methods we use (barrier nets, dip nets, and chemicals while on SCUBA) are straight up illegal for anyone who doesn't have special permission. We're also often negatively buoyant and crawling around on the substrate, so it's not even a good example to set for the tourists for how to dive safely/responsibly. Research diving is loads of fun like that in touristy areas. Even when just getting down to the water - I'm sure there are dozens of tour buses worth of photos of my colleagues and I lumbering down the rocks to shore dives by lighthouses. Extra fun when you're overheating in 7 mm of neoprene and a hood on a hot summer day and some rando family of retirees wants to hear all about what you're doing! Fortunately, in those spots, I'm usually just the helper and I can abandon my buddy to her fate of telling them about her work while I happily splash around and cool off in the shallows. There are occasional benefits to mostly working in places that aren't as, uh, scenic.
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Apr 23, 2024 02:19
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Trig Discipline posted:Yes! I have worked at CARMABI off and on for almost twenty years now (jesus christ really?). I've done a ton of work on those reefs right across the channel. They're generally nice but can get a bit nasty sometimes, but if you can get a little boat and head maybe 500m further up along the coast it is absolutely amazing. I cannot for the life of me fully express how much I enjoy the stupid bullshit improvisation aspect of field research, which is doubly the case for diving work - maybe someone somewhere was silly enough to build a tool for the strange task I am doing, but odds are they didn’t need to do it underwater…
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Apr 26, 2024 13:54
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