Red Shirt, Blue Shirt SCUBA

2019-03-01

For the first day of Autumn in New Zealand I decided to get a bit wet. SCUBA Diving in Milford Sound sounded like a plan. The water temps are around 60' F. Pretty cold, but not crazy cold. A fairly thick wet suit would have been fine, but there are places that are colder that I would like to dive in the future so I chose to try Dry Suit Diving. Dry suit diving is interesting. You wear a fully sealed suit with long underwear under it. The diver adds air as necessary to stay warm. It is similar to regular diving, but there are a few things to think about, such as your suit can become pretty buoyant, trying to float you to the surface, which is a bad thing. Other things to consider is that the legs of the suit can become full of air making you float toes up, which is a bad thing. The main advantage is that if everything works, it keeps you warm and dry. This is a good thing.

Me in my dry suit with my instructor.

This was my instructor. Notice I am wearing a RED shirt, err, suit.

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This was the other dive master. You might notice that he is wearing a BLUE shirt, err, suit. When we were going ashore to walk around a waterfall I got pretty nervous. I have seen enough Star Trek episodes to know what happens to Red Shirts on landing parties.

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My dive instructor was Carrie, but I almost got Zac. Zac was scheduled to be my instructor, but when he found out there were going to be three beautiful young French women on the boat, he begged to be their dive master. He didn't count on them not being the safest divers. Nor did he realize how hard it would be to keep them safe, considering they did not speak ANY English. Still, it was fun watching him try to explain the safety briefing with zero language recognition. I think the girls had fun too. Sorry guys, I don't have any pics of the ladies. You can see the pic of Zac, with the pink hat, above.

I stayed about an hour and a half away in Te Anau as it was the closest available place. I had to meet the boat at 8:00 AM. I had it planned perfectly, what time to leave, how long it would take on the twisty road with the occasional tourist. I knew it might be cold. What I had not counted on is that the sun would not come up until 7:00 AM, and even then it would not be visible for quite a while due to the mountains. It was a clear, dark morning, not much over freezing. I was a bit worried about black ice. Fortunately the ride was uneventful and I got there in plenty of time.

As we were leaving the dock we saw a bunch of birds on one of boats. The were a flock of Kea's. These birds are a bit of a problem. They will pull the wiper blades off cars, pull seats apart. They have been known to disassemble parts of boats. They have even figured out how to take the gas caps off some of the boats and disappear with them. The rest of the trip I imagined the wires I had on the bike being torn apart. I had heard of bikes having seats ripped apart. I guess the birds were too busy huffing gasoline to bother with my bike.

The interesting thing about diving in Milford Sound is that it is a fjord (not a sound) which here means that the top layer of water, 10 to 40 feet, is fresh water and the lower layers are salt. It was interesting to swim through a layer of weird looking water, where the salt and fresh waters mix. This along with the tall mountains nearby limits the amount of light that gets through. This means that there is life at shallower depths that normally grows much deeper. A good example is the Black Coral (which is white). These things are huge, and are some of the slowest growing corals in the ocean. If you ever see black coral for sale, don't buy it. Destroying this coral for cheap jewelry was very popular in the past, but has fortunately been stopped in most places.

This was the boat we were taking.

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Oops, nope, it was this one. They had another boat, a big pontoon boat, but no one told them that the pontoons could explode if left in the sun. Minor detail I guess.

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