Forgot My Water-Camera Today

 

Forgot my water-camera today.  Always good to do, once in a while.  During my 45-minute paddle-workout, I found myself still checking photo opportunities, but I also found myself noticing other things.  The quality and consistency of my strokes, for example, or lack thereof.  The balance points of the board, if I changed position.  Also, aspects of the sailboats and motorboats on Richardson Bay that were other than telegenic: waterline bio-creep; working boats vs storage boats; changes in mooring positions; new flags, new sails, and new decorations.  I also focused more on using the slight swell to my benefit; it was slight, so that took focus I usually don't spare when the camera is handy.

Notebook: Whale-Watching / Kayaking

1.  I will have to set aside the camera a bit more deliberately to engage my whole sight and other senses.    Next time around.  The camera itself, turning it on, fussing with zooming and focusing, really narrows the experience.  I love having the shots to document and to spark memories, but I want to look and see more fully in the moment.

2.  The experience really was rooted in wet neoprene, in the seat of the wetsuit, in the motion of the swell under the kayak, in the lifting and the dropping and the shifting and the pulling and the pushing.  On the afternoon of the 30th, the tug was back into the harbor, but the swell was rising and the wind had created chop, so there was a constant motion -- up down thisway thatway-- that the morning had lacked, had been so flat and calm.  I love the water movement, and the sit-on-top is so well-crafted to ride such movements.  Even now, two days later, if I just sit and unfocus, I am moving in my mind with residual body sense-memories.  A lovely sensation to me.

3.  Then, besides the emphatic floating quality, the sounds!  So many birds flying, shrieking, calling, ker-plunking into the water after the anchovies.  Pelicans and terns and murres and cormorants and classic gulls.  Terns and pelicans out with us, mostly.  Then, the barking of sea lions in the distance, the splashing of seals nearby, the crunching-lunching of otters.  The chatter of humans: excited, agitated, inane.  "HOLY SHIT" were the first words out of one fellow's mouth, as he rounded the small point to leave the harbor only to be faced with a lunging whale.  (That fellow was off his game, more nervous than his date, and he shadowed JP and me off and on, nervously.  Still, such caution in such a situation is no bad thing, and his date may have been more water-savvy -- or simply oblivious -- than he was.)  The whales' spouting, blowing, and splashing.  Occasionally, the power station would let out great blasts of steam that would mimic the whale spouts--and would confuse me, for a moment, as I looked for that other whale.  The water made the most noise and the most noises, lapping and slapping and splashing and crashing along and onto the jetty, the kayak, the whales, itself.

Profile Pics: A Summer Version

Or, "Mere Mortal II".

Yearning (Oh, I Miss The Salt and Kelp)

I need to go diving.

(And, to be realistic, this diver would have a camera in his hands, not the speargun, and he'd ditch the tank for free diving.  Well, a tank dive would be fun too.  Oh, and the knife would be strapped to a leg.)

Maybe next weekend--or the one after that.

Postcard: Saltwater Reflection

I was very fortunate with the disposable camera this day in Monterey Bay. Fortunate with the light and the angle too.














I was free diving just northwest of Lover's Point, out from the parking lot at Otter Cove. I should check my notes for that day. I tend to write up my dives while enjoying the basic bacon & eggs at the Lighthouse Cafe in Pacific Grove, but I don't have a standard dive journal to hold all such notes. I use whatever is at hand: teaching notebook, napkin, postcard, blank pages or spaces in the book I'm reading. (You'd think I'd be more systematic, but then you wouldn't know me very well, would you?) I like the loose approach. I like writing up my notes wherever and however, and the writing matters more than the cataloging or rereading.

Except in a case like this one.

Where are my notes from . . . 2006?

What book was I reading that trip? Whom would I have written a postcard to that day? Was I carrying one of the usual Moleskines? I'm pretty sure I shot a much poorer picture of a bat ray that day also, so where's the rest of the roll?

By the way, all of the water-photos I've posted so far have been taken with your basic disposable "waterproof" 35 mm cameras. I have been lucky so far, though I plan to upgrade my equipment soon. With better equipment, I just may get luckier more often, more predictably, in the best sense.

And, what's Jack Johnson's line about moving like a jellyfish?