Or, I Love Kelp
My Uncle's Question: Have you ever gotten tangled up in kelp while snorkeling or SCUBAing?
My Answer: Not in any way that mattered. I'm very patient in kelp--my formative diving years were spent in free diving for abalone up north. Plenty of kelp practice. That said, I hate kelp-crawling (moving across the surface on the kelp); I had a dive partner once who decided we were too low on air and insisted that we had to kelp-crawl to stay on the surface and not use the tanks . . . . I'd been trained to slip under, whenever possible, and been trained to accept a lower pressure level in the tanks. Since he didn't hear me, I had to stick by him (he was my partner, after all), but that was a not quite necessary hardship). This was at Pt. Lobos a few years back, and I will say that my compass navigation did stick us in the middle of that thick kelp forest. Still, I would have switched to snorkels, even, and harbor-sealed under and up . . . .
