After cleaning up aboard in the morning and generally procrastinating any and all tasks, I dinghied out to Creole Rock with camera aboard to take some pictures while diving. I put the x2 and x4 extensions on the lens and the result was that things had to be within a couple of inches of the lens in order to be in focus, so I didn’t get too many pictures but had a fun dive and no know for certain that my dive computer has bitten the dust (I replaced the battery and saw a brief LCD flash on the screen, but it has been dead since).
Up I still had over 2000 PSI left in the tank, so after a brief pause aboard, I went to dive on Zanshin and scrape the bottom with the king-size scraper I’d acquired in a French hardware store. I took the camera along to get some shots of how ineffective the U.S. installed bottom paint is in the warm and fecund Caribbean waters and also took some photos of the anchor chain and buried anchor.
Working with the scraper in scuba gear just a couple of feet below the surface is tiring work and Zanshin‘s bottom was pretty dirty. There were numerous small barnacles (dead ones left over from last season) and the beginnings of a green “beard” growing on the hull. I’ll have to dive on the boat again in order to use a kitchen scrubbing pad to clean the scum away, but I’ve probably added a good knot of boat speed and have only done the aft portion of the boat! Getting rid of barnacles is not fun; the crumbly bits get between dive BCD and skin and itch, then one has to be careful not to let any unprotected body part touch the hull, since those little protrusions are very sharp and immediately cut skin.
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