Two minutes of truly bad video documenting a cool dive.

So we just got in the water, and we are floating about 30 feet from the rock where we went in, and I say to Rick: "Before I go looking for abs, I want to take the video camera down first, just to see if I can get some decent video of the bottom."

That is the video you see here. It is complete crap, and you won't be able to make anything out of it unless I explain what is going on, which is why you see all this text on top of the video. I am going to explain everything.

The camera is a Canon Optura 60 in an Ikelite underwater housing.

This is what you see: In the first part of the video, I am holding the camera out of the water, and the auto focus on the Canon has decided to focus on a droplet of water on the housing rather than the far more interesting stuff in the background. I don't notice this because I an floating in 52 degree water and getting pushed around by waves and preoccupied with breathing and the notion of staying alive. In the next part of the video all that can be seen is a featureless greenish color. Here I am in my pre-dive drill, where I just float on the surface, breath through the snorkel and try to relax and get my heart rate down below tachycardia levels. The camera is just hanging below my arms pointing down, and you are seeing what I am seeing in the 12 inch visibility - which is to say - green nothingness. At some point I take a few deep breaths and kip dive to the bottom with the camera extended in front of me. Its not that deep, maybe eight or ten feet. Here you see the camera going through grass and kelp and then the bottom. Of course, it is still out of focus, because the camera is apparently still looking for the droplet on the housing case. The interesting thing, is the brown smudge that is visible when the camera clumps onto the bottom. the brown smudge is an abalone. So with my first breath and first dive, there is an abalone. This never happens for me. And I don't have an ab iron with me because I have this worthless camera.



So here is the picture: I am upside down in water, the camera strapped to my left wrist and pushed on to the bottom, so I can grab some grass and rock for leverage, and hope the camera is pointing at the abalone, then - with my right hand - I grabbed the ab and popped it off the rock. Out of breath, with the ab in one hand and the camera in the other, I pop back to the surface.

One breath, one dive, one ab.

If the video had turned out it would have been great.