Last Sunday, in the midst of the rain storms currently besieging the Pacific Northwest, Jason and I decided to go diving on the Oregon Coast. The tide seemed perfect for an early morning drift followed by a dive at slack tide later on. Neither of us have been diving as often as we used to — my last dive was the weekend after Father’s Day — and we’d wanted to make sure to get in at least one dive before the end of the year. Jen and Evan were up for an outing, too, so they came along as our surface support.

We knew the weather was going to be a challenge, but as we arrived at the North Jetty Coast Guard tower near Florence, which is where we enter the water in order to drift the incoming tide, the water conditions were surprisingly good. There was a bit of surface chop and current from the wind, but the in-water visibility actually appeared better than other times we’ve dove there.

Gearing up and traversing the large jetty boulders down to the water’s edge — usually, probably the most dangerous part of this particular dive — actually went exceedingly well. But once we hit the water, the problems started.

I’ll refer you to the full dive report on Diverhead.com for a detailed, blow-by-blow account of what happened, but suffice it to say that multiple equipment-related issues eventually resulted in both of us becoming physically exhausted and calling-off the dive. Unfortunately, when you’re drifting along the North Jetty, you don’t just climb out wherever you want, and you definitely don’t turn around and get out where you started. No, you just have to drift down to the exit whether you are underwater or on the surface. And that’s exactly what we did.

But even then, Mother Nature had one more surprise in store for us, but you’ll have to read my full dive report on Diverhead.com to learn about that. In the end, I lost one of my fins, Jason lost his 20 lb. weight belt, and we both lost a little pride in our ability to defy the forces of Mother Nature for a few minutes of underwater adventure.

This entry was posted by Steve on Thursday, November 9th, 2006 at 1:52 pm and is filed under Diving, Friends, Local/Regional. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.