Tooth Fairy Again

We didn't even know Ilea had a loose tooth, but she pulled one out yesterday eating an apple. She's looking pretty funny now, with lots of holes in her smile. I think this makes 7 or 8.

Crazy RC hydrofoil

Here is a very interesting Radio Controlled hydrofoil. It is amazing the things you can do when you have a high thrust to weight ratio in a vehicle.

Another gone...

Ilea's 7th tooth came out on Tues, June 14. She chewed it out on a bean in the chili we were having. It is the upper right, one over from the middle. She loves getting a golden dollar coin from the tooth fairy, although she does try very hard to stay awake to see her.

We are SCUBA open water certified

Jenny and I finished all the open water dives last night required for our SCUBA PADI Open Water certification. We did the dives through TL Sea which is a great local dive shop in Des Moines, WA.

We started on May 31st with 2 nights (Tue, Wed) of course work and written tests. It wasn't too difficult, but we were pretty tired after each night because the chairs were very uncomfortable. The tests were easy since we had read through the book before the course and they really helped us before the tests.

Thursday was our first confined water (pool) practice. We started with a 200 yard swim and 10 minutes of treading water. We basically learned how to put our gear together and then did a number of basic skills (clear mask, fin pivot, recover regulator, clear our ears, share air with our second regulator, etc...) The next few days I felt like I had a mild hangover. I found out that the air we breath while diving is very dry and it dehydrates you. So I think that I was very dehydrated over the weekend (and I didn't know it). The next Tuesday and Wednesday we did more skill work (remove/put on weight belt, remove/put on BCD, neutral buoyancy float, Controlled Emergency Swimming Ascent, etc...). I made sure that I drank lots of water before and following the remaining dives and didn't have any other dehydration problems.

The next Thursday we did our first two open water dives at Redondo Beach, WA. This is a pretty nice location for easy entry to the Puget Sound. We got all of our gear on and then headed for the water. We thought that these dives would be very cold and were not looking forward to getting into the water. We were pleasantly surprised that with wet suits, the water was not very cold at all (until you get fairly deep). We did a few skills on the first dive and then just did some exploring around. It was very cool. We saw a number of crabs (large and small) scampering about on the bottom as well as a few fish and some jelly fish. There were a number of neat sea plants (which I haven't a clue what they were called). After 30 minutes underwater to a maximum depth of 38 feet, we headed in. It was all pretty exciting. We replaced our tank and prepared to go back for our second dive and more skill demonstration. The second dive took us to a maximum depth of 40 feet for 37 minutes. When we came up, Aga had brought the kids to the beach to watch us. They were pretty excited to see us all geared up. We finished packing everything up and then went to Pizza with the whole group. It was all pretty fun.

The next day, Friday, we did more skill work for our third open water dive. This time we had to wait around a while for everyone to do their skills. We were starting to get pretty cold just sitting on the bottom at about 20 feet. Then our instructor, Lavonne, took us around to some of the sunken boats (small craft). We went to 48 feet for a total bottom time of 52 minutes. When we finally got out of the water, Jenny and I were both very tired. Jenny was pretty cold and feeling exhausted. We had one more dive to do and then we would be done. This last dive had the skill that we were all dreading, full mask removal, replacement and clearing. The hard thing about this was that we had these hoods on to keep our heads warm but it made putting the masks on much more difficult. Both Jenny and I did pretty well. We also did a few other skills and then we went deeper with two other dive masters. The really cool thing about this dive was we got to see a very large octopus sleeping under a sunken boat. Very cool! We cruised around for quite a while at a pretty deep depth (maximum of 60 feet) and finally came up after 35 minutes. We got out and it started raining so it wasn't much fun packing up. Again, we were starved and tired.

We are thankful the whole thing is over. Overall it was fun, but exhausting because it was a lot of work and late nights over a number of consecutive days. Since we are going to Cancun, Mexico soon, we thought we should get some more experience so we signed up for a couple of Adventure Dives (Deep Diving and Navigation) so that we would feel better about diving in Cancun.

Inside a tornado

Have you ever seen the movie Twister. There are some tornado chasers who try to put some recording instruments within a tornado. These guys actually did it but without the ping pong balls. There are some pretty impressive videos of a tornado from a short, squat cone that had 6 operational video cameras. The last part of the video shows the how the path of the tornado goes through some corn fields and barely misses a farm house. Wow!

Another down!

Last Tues, May 24, Ilea lost her 6th tooth! Upper right, one away from the center.