Sometimes It's Sink AND Swim

Well, as it turns out, not all dry suits are created equal, and if there was any question of this, the video, seen below (omg the technology!) will put any rumors to rest.

Today, I went out with Melanie, John and Jenna (all on the WDFW REU project) with a simple goal: swimming in line through a kelp bed, and counting fish with the aid of a snorkel, flippers and dry suit. In the Biz, this is referred to as a snorkel survey. For myself, the similarities between the description of a snorkel survey and my experience on the 4th of October sorta ended there!

Preparation was fairly easy:
1) get snorkel
2) get working dry suit
3) count fish

- too bad I couldn't quite fulfill number two. So there I was, swimming out to count fish when I suddenly felt as if some very cold, wet noodles were slithering down my back to pool like a mess of pasta at my feet. So I thought to myself: "Great the suit leeks a little, I guess I should'a checked this thing a bit more carefully". As I continued to swim out to the kelp bed, looking like nothing so much as a bright-red wallowing sea lion, I find that there is a school of smelt 15 feet below me, estimated at maybe 50 fish or so. As time elapses, the noodles are turning into ropes, but I am determined to finish my transect- and besides, now I am immersed in the kelp beds. For those of you who have never snorkeled with a failing dry suit in the middle of a North Pacific bull kelp bed, let me elaborate: A kelp bed is similar to a forest, in fact, many notable people whom I cannot name actually call them kelp forests, but I digress. This kelp bed-forest moves with its own breeze, which is actually the movement of the tide as it moves to and fro. Bull kelp, species Nereocyctis luetkeana, is the fastest growing species of sea-weed in the world and provides essential habitat for different forage fish such as smelt, herring, perch and occasionally salmon. This is the plant that you have probably found washed up on long beach and the like, looking so much like a strange, slime drenched tentacle from a bad B movie. In any case, a forest of this is not exactly smooth swimming, and I found that it was becoming more and more difficult to make headway through this forest of grasping tentacles. I was now about 3/4 done with my outbound transect, when I noticed that my fins, that at the beginning of my swim were comfortably just below the water, where now about a foot and a half below the surface. Now. Water weighs about 2.26 lbs for every liter of water, and to loose ~1.5 feet of buoyancy, my suit had to have taken on at least the amount of water that would have been contained in the now full legs of my dry suit. Now I'm no scientist (ok so I am), but that means that, even say there were only 5 liters of air in each leg, I was now carrying 22.5 lbs of water in my "dry" suit. Well, to make a long story short, I decided, to be frank: to hell with the rest of this transect, and got back on shore before I was carrying my own weight in water. In the end, I looked like someone had made my legs out of sausages, whilst my pals all thought it was quite funny... (nothing a little hole punch wouldn't cure he he he.) The moral of this story is: sometimes it's sink or swim, and well, sometimes its sink AND swim.