Maui Dives

I recently lost my dive log. A mortal sin for a diver, luckily I am not an orthodox diver. As a programmer I realized that there is a better way to record dives than paper books. It would be really nice to have an interface to post blog posts that include diving information. This would follow the data blogging trend.

I think that a dive blogging platform should include:

• A way to post a description


• A way to upload dive profiles from dive computers.


• A way to securely link a dive to a dive company. A replacement for the traditional stamps that dive companies currently used. This could be performed with e-mail.

This would have many nice features over traditional dive logs. You can calculate statistics about your own diving and statistics about dive companies. There would not be a huge audience for this but it would be a very dedicated following. In this spirit I am going to post descriptions of 4 dives in Maui.

November 13, 2007
# 3
Location: Molokini back side
Company: Mike Severns

We dove down to 100 on the wall that goes down to 150 ft. We slowly worked our way up from there. It was a great dive the dive masters were very good and knowledgeable, pointing out unique fish to the area. The most interesting fish was seeing a fairly large ray swim by.

#4
Location: Maui Shore
We dove down to 65' to see a sunken WW2 amphibious landing vehicle. The vehicle was fairly rusted out but cool to see. More interesting was the frog fish that was on the vehicle hanging out. There were a couple of antler corals near by, but not too interesting.


November 14, 2007
#5
Location: Molokini crater
Company: Pride Of Maui
I want to preface this description by saying that I choose the Pride of Maui because I a large number of people I was traveling with were going on a snorkeling trip on the boat.
This is a snorkel factory. If you know anything about snorkeling you will likely be annoyed with the crew, this is designed to for people who nothing about diving. The boat rarely sees scuba divers. We rented all of our gear and it was some of the worst I have ever used. The first 3 tanks that I tried did not have enough pressure. They did not have wet suits for us, even though the promised us suits. The dive master told us he had not dove in 5 months. We had no dive computers, or watches. A little bit scary.
The dive was very nice but the dive master was a tool. He had screwed up his weight so he was picking up rocks to weigh himself down. He was too lazy or clumsy to stop his pressure gauges from dragging on the coral. We saw one small shark at the very end of the dive.



November 14, 2007
#6
Location: Maui Shore
Company: Pride Of Maui
This was a very shallow and short dive. We were able to see four turtles and lots of eels. Our dive time was limited to the fact that we did not have a watch and had to be conservative, and the fact that the snorkel boat imposed a time limit on our dive time.
Avoid Pride of Maui at all costs!!

Big Sur Half Marathon

This weekend Annie and I ran the Big Sur Half Marathon in Monterey. I was blow away the beauty of the area. We finished at 2:03. I was kind of hoping to break 2 hours, but not bad for a first time. We did not take any pictures so there is not much to show.

I would love to write more but it is late and I am diving in the morning.

UPDATE:
I have a bit of time to update the post from LAX. The organizers put on a great event. There were a bunch of bands along the way to cheer us on. Ranging from a lone piano player, horn quartet, rock band, hippie drum group and the best was a taiko drum group. The taiko drums group was most of the way out along the beach. So you heard them twice, once right before the turn around and once right after the turn around.

SF2G Haloween

Here are pictures of the San Francisco to Google ride on Halloween morning. Some are blurry. I am only in a few pictures, but you can get the picture. It was really fun to roll down the road at 20 mi/hr with tunes blasting riding to headlights.