February’s weather was mostly crappy, but it looked like it was getting better this morning.

However, for various reasons I was not able to dive.

I’m hoping to get back in the water this Friday or Saturday.

On another note, I have been going through my vast collection of VHS tapes and digitizing the best.

I found an old SoCal Connected episode that features the Ocean Defenders Alliance.

SoCal Connected – Ocean Defenders (Circa 2010)

As important as the Ocean Defender’s work is, it is interesting to note that the producers of this episode are obviously not SCUBA divers.

In one part the narrator says something like, “The dive is so deep that the tanks are filled with a special mixture of Oxygen and Nitrogen.”

And of course, for dramatic effect, Don has never been this deep before and is a bit nervous.

This was an interesting retro-find.

July 4, 2019

I took four days off from my regular job to do a fireworks show and get some diving in.

This is my 12th year that I helped to set up a fireworks show at Big Canyon Country Club in Newport Beach.

I decided many years ago to turn my teenage lust for M80’s and pipe bombs into something more productive, and legal.

This is show business, and anything really could go wrong; in previous shows, we’ve had many ground explosions, the show wasn’t wired correctly and the grand finale went off in the middle of the show, and a couple of years ago, we had started a small brush fire that the fire department quickly put out.

Now, the Fire Department has a map of all the addresses that surround the canyon, there are high pressure fire hoses marked with glow sticks surrounding the golf course and now they made us move further down range because of an unforgivable incident that happened last year.

Last year, unbeknownst to us at the time, a cataclysmic incident happened.

Apparently, a piece of mortar fell onto a homeowner’s imported Italian Marble patio and made a mark.

We had to move the mortars further down the fairway, more towards the middle of the golf course, where there is more distance between the mortars and the houses.

We also had to condense the show into three smaller rows and the grand finale; the cake displays were placed closer to the audience, which meant we needed two firing boards.

We were checking the wiring right up until 20 minutes before the show; the board has a “test” mode that verifies the connection, but doesn’t put enough juice through to set off the charge.

I was expecting the worse, considering the new set up, but the show fired almost perfectly.

Out of 600 plus rounds, we had three mortars that didn’t go off – that is a lot better than we ever expected.

The new Fire Marshall was happy, too; we may get some complaints of debris due to some shifts in wind, but no fires.

Here is the Fireworks Show from my GoPro on the firing board.

July 7, 2019

Now it was time to get back into the water.

I woke up early and headed down to Terranea Resort, arriving about 7 am.

Terranea Resort is 10 years old now; it hasn’t been easy, but they have embraced the divers over the years, with only a few misunderstandings.

I called the dive, the water pretty much looked like shit.

Maybe the recent earthquakes stirred up the ocean floor?

Thanks to President Trump, America just keeps winning.

More next week, I hope.