Russian Sub in Rhode Island

If you've ever read my profile on the geocaching website, you know that I found my 300th geocache on board the Russian Juliett-Class Submarine in Providence, Rhode Island.

Back when I found the geocache, it looked like this...

Before

Well, it was a good thing I found it back then, because the submarine subsequently SANK during a storm in April of 2007. Here's what it looked like afterwards...

After
(Note this is taken from same angle as previous photo)

In the latest news, efforts are being made to raise the sunken submarine.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (June 7, 2008) Navy Divers enter the Providence River to begin diving operations on the wreck of the former Soviet submarine Juliett 484. Navy and Army divers, along with federal, state, and local authorities, participate in a joint service operation to raise the sunken submarine at Collier Point Park in Providence. U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Eric Lippmann (Released)

I wonder if any of those Navy Divers are geocachers and if they'll grab my geocoin that I left in the geocache. If any of you diver guys are reading this: It's in the Doc's office. It's an ammo can painted white with a red cross like a first aid kit.

Something's missing here...

Okay, so I have previously written about my dissatisfaction with Island Divers. The only reason I went there in the first place was because one of my shipmates told me there was a dive shop right there on Hickam AFB. I figured: (a) It's pretty close and convenient, and (b) The Air Force is pretty well known for treating their people well, so it must be a good dive shop. Boy was I wrong.

I dropped off LW's scuba gear (buoyancy compensator (BC) and regulator) for service there in the middle of March before we left on our vacation to Maui. Then we were gone on vacation for a while and I was busy at work when we got back, and I just kept forgetting to check on it.

Here we are in May, and I called the shop to say, "Hey... uh... how about that gear I dropped off for service?" The guy on the phone was terribly apologetic that nobody had called to tell us the gear was ready and it had been ready and sitting there for some time. Okay, roger, thanks. I'll be in to pick it up soon.

This afternoon, I swung over to the shop to pick up the gear. I told the guy my last name and described the gear to him. He went looking in the back and seemed like he was gone for a long time. When he returned, he handed me LW's regulator, and he handed me this:


I realize some of you may not be scuba divers, so you may not recognize what that is in the photo. THAT, my dear readers (all five of you), is the inflator tube to LW's BC. Note the distinct absence of the BC to which it is supposed to be attached. To help you with the visualization, it is SUPPOSED to look something like THIS:


But alas, this is about the extent of the functionality of LW's BC right now:


The guy called over to their main shop (the shop on Hickam AFB is just a satellite shop). After what seemed like forever on the phone, the guy on the other end of the line said all he could find was a pink BC with no inflator tube attached. The guy on the Hickam end of the phone line said, "THAT'S IT! Send it on over here!" It should be in tomorrow.

I'm sorry, but are my expectations of customer service totally out of the box here? When they received JUST an inflator tube at the Hickam shop, would it not be reasonable for the employee receiving it to say to himself, "Self, that's awfully odd. I WONDER where the REST of the BC is that goes with this inflator tube? MAYBE I should CALL THE SHOP and ask them WHAT THE HECK?"

I'm really kicking myself now. If only I had KNOWN that 90% of LW's BC was at the other shop, then I would have picked it up when I was AT the other shop for the dive last Sunday!

Unfortunately, that means I will have to set foot in the Island Divers shop once more. After that though, I refuse to ever set foot in that store ever again. I'm just so done with these people that I had to laugh this one off this afternoon. LW keeps telling me it's not funny and she wants her gosh darn BC back. I wholeheartedly agree with her, but I've crossed some psychological threshold from being pissed off into a state of bizarre comic disbelief that anyone could be this disorganized.

Not the Best Day Diving

Spotted Puffer

Besides the spotted eel photo I posted ealier,
this was my second favorite photo of the day.

Quick Aside: If you would like to see all the photos I took from today's dive trip, click here. (51 total photos in this shutterfly photo album)

An old shipmate and friend of mine came into town this weekend. He wanted to go diving on the Corsair on Sunday morning, so I started calling around the dive charters. First I called Dive Oahu, since they were the guys I dove with last time. They were busy with a class though. Next, I called Island Divers, because they run the scuba shop on Hickam AFB. They said they had spots available on the Sunday morning boat, and they would try going to the Corsair if conditions permitted. If not, we'd dive somewhere else.

Check-in time was 0800 at their dive shop in Hawaii Kai. According to their website, they'll pick you up from your hotel in Waikiki at 0700. Right as we pulled up to the dive shop and got out of the car about 0745, some guy was yelling into the shop about he was leaving to go pick up the others from Waikiki and he'd be back. I said to myself, "Self, he seems to be running a little late if those people are going on our dive boat this morning." But I figured they knew what they were doing. They're professionals, right? This is what they do for a living.

We went inside the dive shop and signed the standard liability waiver forms. My regulator had been squeaking on my last dive, and I need to take in for maintenance, so I planned on taking a rental regulator. I asked the lady behind the counter who I should see to check out a regulator. She looked at me like I had three heads and replied in a very curt tone, "We don't normally give out rental gear to CLUB dives."

Dumbfounded, I said, "What club? I'm not in any club." She was stupified and didn't understand why I was on this boat if I'm not in the club. I said, "I'm not a member of any club and I have no idea what you're talking about. I just signed up to pay $XX to go on this boat dive." She said, "Oh..." and thought about it for a minute. She asked for my name and looked me up in her computer. She saw in the computer that I had turned in a regulator for service a few weeks ago. That was actually LW's regulator, but she assumed it was mine and continuing her anti-customer-service attitude asked what was wrong with "my" regulator that just got serviced. I explained that was my wife's regulator and that mine was squeaking last time and needed service. She said, oh, yours will be FINE! I didn't feel like arguing with her and figured they would have a spare on board in case of any problems. (Do you see where this is going? For those of you non-literary types, that is called "foreshadowing.")

Next, one of the employees hollers out that we should start loading our gear on the boat. They didn't give us any sort of brief before putting our gear on board. Just, go ahead and load your gear on the boat and we'll get going. The result was total chaos. Everyone was stumbling over each other and trying to figure out whose tank was whose in the mix of air tanks and NITROX tanks. There were several rounds of musical-tanks as people switched from one side and one setup station to another. Rich, Greg, and I grabbed three tanks on the starboard side and got our BC's and regulators set up.

I had my own weights, but Rich and Greg needed to use the dive shop's weights. There was a bin with a whole bunch of weights and belts on the deck. Since the dive shop staff had provided no guidance prior to getting on board other than, "load yer gear and we'll get movin," Rich and Greg started to pull out weights and belts and tried setting up weight belts. One of the dive masters spotted them doing this and got all annoyed with them for "messing up the system" and if they could just hold their horses, then he would explain everything to the group. Oh... Okay. We're happy to wait if that's what you want us to do, but our last guidance was to load up and get our stuff ready.

The crew stopped everyone from setting up their gear to give a safety brief. One guy started the brief at the forward end of the boat, then another guy at the aft end of the boat interrupted him and started over giving the safety brief from scratch. Not everybody was there - a couple of girls were up flirting with some guy strumming a guitar in front of the shop. The people actually on the boat didn't listen to the safety brief and kept talking, and the dive master didn't tell them to be quiet or listen up.

Oh, and come to find out, that guy who got in the van and took off as we were arriving was actually the captain of the boat. He was off somewhere in a van picking up more divers, so those people that are getting picked up didn't get the safety brief either.

Then dive master at the aft end of the boat asked for everyone's attention and started briefing the dives. (Corsair wasn't even in consideration for today's dive.) He was practically done giving the brief for the first dive site when another crew member clued in on what he was telling everyone and said no, we aren't going there today. They started arguing over what dive sites we're going to. The dive master who had started the brief didn't put up much of a fight and said okay, I guess we're going to this other place instead, and commenced giving us the dive brief for THAT site.

About 0900, some of the "club" members sitting on the port side started complaining about how late we were. They said we should have already been in the water, but we were still waiting for the captain to come back with the other divers he was picking up in Waikiki.

Now, for LW's planning purposes, I had referred to the dive shop's website that said we should be back by around noon (they have an afternoon charter to do afterall). The captain finally returned and started up the engine while the last couple of people set up their gear. We got to talking with one of them. He said he was in town for the weekend and he had rode with the same dive boat the day before. He was supposed to give some presentation at a conference at 3 p.m., and the dive shop staff told him they'd be back by 11:30 or "12 at the latest." They didn't get back until 2:30! Yikes.

We headed out to sea, and it was rough. It wasn't very windy, but there was a good 4 foot south swell that heavily rocked the boat. In the end I think 4 people ended up spewing their breakfasts over the side to feed the fish. I was feeling a little queasy to my stomach and just rested with my eyes shut.

The first dive site was a barge at 90 feet. There was a heavy current going in the direction from Diamond Head toward Koko Head. As soon as we jumped in the water, we had to grab the current line dragging in the water behind the boat or else float off to distant lands.

As soon as I jumped in, my octopus (back-up regulator) went kaput and started gushing air. I tried to no avail to stop it. I ended up having to climb back up onto the boat and have them trade out my regulator for their spare. Their spare was a piece of junk with broken mouth pieces that I had a hard time keeping in my mouth.

Other equipment problems of note were the tank valve was broken on one of Rich's tanks, and the batteries were dead in one of the rental dive computers someone else was using.

I got back in the water and we proceeded down to the barge. The current was so strong that kicking our fins was almost useless. We had to pull ourselves down to the barge using the mooring line. Once we got on the bottom, the current wasn't as bad, but still noticable. I started the dive with only 2400 pounds in my tank (full is 3000 pounds) because of the problem with my regulator free-flowing.

It ended up being a pretty quick dive. We did one lap around the outside of the wreck and then swam once through the middle before we headed up the mooring line back to the dive boat.

It was miserably rough on the surface. While others were barfing their brains out over the side, I sat quietly and tried to doze and wish I was back on shore.

Thank goodness, the captain decided it was too rough there and took us in to a drift dive along the China Wall. The second dive was actually really nice. I was able to go with a full tank of air this time. I saw a lot of fish and several moray eels (note my picture du jour). Visibility was pretty good, but not fantastic. Water temperature was in the mid-70's and I was fine in my 2.5mm shorty wetsuit.

Blunoz diving along the China Wall

Heading Back at the end of Dive 2 on the China Wall

By the time we finally made it back to the dock, it was like 1:30 p.m. and all the people who had signed up for the afternoon charter were sitting around complaining about how late we were coming back.

So, while the second dive was nice, the lack of organization, inability to keep a schedule, equipment faults, and poor customer service led me to give Island Divers a thumbs-down. I won't be going out with them again.

Photo du Jour

Okay, I have a lot more to write about and more pictures to post later, but I was really excited about this one picture I got on the China Wall off of Hawaii Kai today. I wanted to share it with you all before I get cleaned up for dinner. I'll come back later and write more about our adventure today.

Spotted Moray Eel in the China Wall

Pausing for a Moment of Thanks

There are times when I stop to reflect on my upbringing and consider how lucky I was to have such generous parents. I've previously written about how they supported my interest in international travel. Another expensive hobby that they enabled me to pursue was scuba diving.

As a small child, I always remember we had this series of Jacques Cousteau books on the bookshelf in our living room. I used to like to flip through them and look at the pictures of stuff underwater. That didn't really lure me to the water, but I think it laid the foundation for what was to come later. The first I remember really having a burning desire to take scuba lessons was when I went to 6th grade camp at the Catalina Island Marine Institute (CIMI). We got to put on full wetsuits and go snorkeling, and I had a blast. I wanted to go deeper and stay down longer.

Back then, you had to be 14 years old to take scuba lessons. My Mom & Dad gave in and let me take scuba lessons for my 14th birthday. My initial certification was through the YMCA program on the Naval Station in San Diego. After that, I did a LOT of scuba diving around San Diego, and several day trips down into Baja California with a local dive shop.

Not long afterward, I woke up Christmas morning to find a short round cylindrical object wrapped for me under the Christmas tree. Turns out it was a tank boot with a note for me to go see what was in the garage. In the garage I found [Cue Sound Effect: Angelic Choir Singing Hallelujah Chorus] my new scuba tank, BC (buoyancy compensator), and regulator setup. SCORE! CHA-CHING! CHA-CHING! At that point, the only thing I didn't have was a wetsuit, and who knew if I would grow more or gain or lose weight, so I could just rent wetsuits until my body size stabilized. Having my own tank, BC, and regulator was AWESOME.

So what brought all this up, you ask?

I'm going scuba diving tomorrow morning with some visiting friends from San Diego. We were walking through the NEX this afternoon and they had a big Dive Oahu tent sale going on in front of the store (it's going on this weekend and Memorial Day weekend). As I looked at the prices on the BC's and regulators at the NEX, and then again tonight as I was packing up my scuba gear to get ready for tomorrow morning, it just struck me what an awesome gift that was. I imagine my Mom and Dad had some considerable sticker shock spending that much money on me for Christmas that year (I don't think they ever spent that much any Christmas before or after - not that I'm complaining!). It's just amazing that was over 20 YEARS ago and I'm STILL using the same scuba gear.

Blunoz in 20+ Year Old Scuba Gear
(Note the silhouette of a turtle in the lower left corner)
YO-257 Wreck off Waikiki, 2008

During my last two years of high school, I was also blessed by the generosity of my dad and stepmom up in Oregon. They were enablers of my scuba habbit in that they allowed me to get a part-time job at a local scuba diving shop in Portland (see my C-card photo here) and provided me with a car and insurance to get there. Oh... and a good amount of gasoline, too. :-) (Much to my dad's annoyance when I would return the car with an empty gas tank - sorry about that, Dad.) They would also allow me to take the car to the Oregon coast for the weekend to go scuba diving out of Newport or Tillamook, or up to Hood Canal in Washington. They also spoiled me with a Nikonos V underwater camera back when they cost five times what they cost now on eBay.

Anyway, I decided to take a break from packing up my scuba gear for tomorrow and say thanks to my parents for enabling me to have such great experiences scuba diving over the past two decades.

Weekend Recap

An Unusual Experience at the Barber Shop

On Saturday, we had lunch at the NEX, then LW went to the Commissary while I took the boys to get haircuts. In case you haven't been there before, the NEX barber shop in Pearl Harbor is HUGE. There are probably twelve barber chairs in there, usually with about 9 or so barbers working during the day. The waiting room has enough seats for about 20 people to wait, and they're normally full in the middle of the day.

The parking lot was PACKED, so we were expecting the worst (both in the commissary and the barber shop). I opened the door to the barber shop and did a double-take. Not only was the waiting area half empty, but the people that were sitting in the seats were all wearing barber coats! They didn't have any customers! The waiting area had transformed from an area for customers to wait for barbers into an area for barbers to wait for customers. Very bizarre.

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Worst Restaurant Experience on Oahu (so far)

After church on Sunday, we decided to forego our favorite Zia's and try one of a handful of places in Kailua that an acquaintance had recommended. First we tried going to Moke's, but there was a line of people waiting out on the curb. We were starving, so we skipped Moke's.

Instead, we tried going to the Mexican place next door to Boots & Kimo's. I think it was called Cisco's Cantina. We walked in, and it smelled pretty darn good in there. There were about twelve tables in the place, and only three of them were occupied.

Hindsight: I guess maybe that should have set off alarm bells in my head since Boots & Kimo's next door had the usual line of people waiting outside - why weren't people lining up to take the empty spots in THIS restaurant???

There were no employees anywhere in sight. We noticed that there were menus out on each of the tables, so after a minute or so of standing there we just decided to grab a table. Eventually a waiter came out of the kitchen and delivered something to one of the other tables. He made eye-contact with me and said, "I'll be right with you." Okay, cool.

Over the course of the next 20 minutes, it became apparent to me that he was the ONLY employee working in the front half of this restaurant. Heck, for all I know, he was the ONLY employee working there PERIOD. He could have been doing the cooking in the back for all I know. In that time, he visited our table once to take our drink orders and LW asked him if they had a kids menu. He said yes and that he'd "be right back."

Yyyyyeah, not so much.

After several minutes of watching him visit each of the other tables, he did bring back our soft drinks with some chips and salsa, but that was the last we saw of him for about another ten minutes. Maybe he was cooking in the back, who knows. We were starving, and LW had a hair appointment for 3 p.m. that she was NEVER going to make at the rate he was going.

We had consumed ALL of our soft drinks and very nearly ALL of the chips and salsa and he still had not come back with the kids menu much less taken our food orders. LW and I decided we had waited long enough and it was time to abort. We left a few dollars of cash on the table to cover the soft drinks, packed up the kids' coloring books and stuff and left.

We went back to Zia's. Their special today was a papaya seafood salad with shrimp and fresh ahi, and it was delicious. The speed of their service wasn't super fast, but I have no doubt we got out of there a heckuva lot quicker than we would have over at the Mexican place. As it was, we barely made it home in time for LW to hop in the car and leave for her hair appointment.

Anyway, the whole point of this was that I couldn't remember the last time (if ever) I went to a restaurant and actually got up and left like that because nobody was serving us.

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Family Movie Nights

One day on vacation, the boys caught a few minutes of Around the World in 80 Days on TV and wanted to watch the rest of it. I picked it up at Blockbuster and we watched it for Family Movie Night on Friday. Little did I realize, this would be the boys' first Jackie Chan flick.



My first Jackie Chan flick was Rumble in the Bronx with Jud in NY. I had never heard of Jackie Chan before Jud took me to see that movie, and WOW what a lot of choreographed action!
Around the World in 80 Days was a pretty good movie. ES and I enjoyed it at least. YB wasn't able to follow the storyline so well and he ended up playing Webkinz on my computer while we watched the movie.

Saturday night we had another Family Movie Night and watched Back to the Future. ES really liked it a lot. I wasn't sure YB would understand it or like it, but he did sit through the whole movie.





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Hooray for Recycling!

We just got a notice that they are going to begin curb-side recycling pick-up in our housing area on April 22nd. Finally!!! Almost in time for Earth Day, eh? I'm so glad I won't have to feel guilty about tossing recyclables in the trash anymore.


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Blast from the Past

I meant to include this in my post about scuba diving on Thursday. My guys got a good laugh out of seeing the photo on my scuba certification card.


Just now, as I was adding the photo to my blog, YB saw it and asked "Who's that?" I told him it was Daddy. He smiled. I asked him, "Doesn't it look like Daddy?" He smiled and vigorously shook his head NO. NO?!?! Common, I don't think I look THAT different, do I??? Okay, so that was almost 19 years ago...

Dive Oahu

This afternoon I had the wonderful opportunity to attend the reenlistment of one of my Sailors just forward of the pilot house on the wreck of YO-257. YO-257 was a Navy oiler that was intentionally sunk off the coast of Waikiki to create an artificial reef. This was my first chance to go scuba diving in Hawaii, and it was AWESOME! We hired a charter with Dive Oahu, and David, Hector, and Ike did a great job.

Time: We met up at Dive Oahu to get our wetsuits and stuff at 12:45. The boat actually left the dock around 1:30 p.m. and got back about 4:45 p.m.

Temp: The water temperature was around 73 degrees, so we wore "shorties" (a 3mm thick wetsuit with short sleeves and short legs). I guessed at 18 lbs on my soft lead weight belt, and it was perfect.

Visibility: I think visibility was probably about 75 feet, because from the surface we could see the top of the wreck and the top of the Atlantis submarine going by, but not the bottom.

We did our first dive on the YO-257 down to a depth of about 90 feet. As the boat slowed to tie up to the mooring buoy, we could see the large white blob of the Atlantis submarine below us. We all descended to the main deck of the wreck and did the reenlistment ceremony there in the company of two sea turtles. Then we swam around the rest of the wreck to check out the hundreds of beautiful tropical fish.

This was the first time I have taken our Cannon PowerShot A520 with the underwater housing down scuba diving. I didn't want the first test to be at 90 feet. Plus, it's been a few years since I've been scuba diving and this was my first dive in a new (different) wetsuit, so I left the camera on the boat for the first dive to just get used to handling my buoyancy control. As a result, I don't have any pictures to show you from the first dive.

Update 4/4/08: Here are a couple of pictures from one of the guys who took a camera on the first dive:

That's the Eng on the left and me on the right.

This is me looking into the pilot house.

That's the EA (Electrical Assistant) checking out one of the two turtles that were on the main deck of the wreck.

For our second dive we went to a reef in closer to shore in about 40 feet of water. This time I took the camera, and it worked like a champ. I was really pleased with the pictures I got (even though the colors are subdued without a flash - I forgot to get batteries for my flashlight, too).

Traditional Blunoz Self Portrait.

This is to give you a feel for the visibility.

Today was the first time I've ever seen a moray eel with my own eyes underwater, and I actually got to see THREE of them. Two were these really pretty white ones with yellow spots. The other one was a green and blue one in the rocks. Note, I did not dumb-down the resolution of these photos, so if you click on the picture above you can check out the details on the moray eel. I would estimate it was about 3 feet long.

Another first for me was getting to see a white-tipped reef shark. It was about 4 to 5 feet long.

We saw tons and tons of tropical fish, too.

Before climbing back up on the boat, I took one last Blunoz Self Portrait, trying to get Diamond Head in the background, but I mis-aimed and got Waikiki instead.

LW and I used to scuba dive a lot together back in Monterey before we started having kids. We would really like to go scuba diving together again sometime soon, especially while we're living here in Hawaii.