Wednesday, October 25, 2006

San Diego!











Matt B and I headed out to California last weekend to visit Jocelyne and take a little vacation -- we had a blast. It was nice to check out Jocelyne's apartment and meet her roomate (both of which are very cool), not to mention using the hot tub and pool in the apartment complex. Also, her place is only a couple miles from the Del Mar beach. This beach (in addition to being beautiful) has awesome surf waves. Unfortunately, Matt and I were only able to try body surfing, but next time I'm definitely bringing my kayak.

In addition to visiting, we checked out the San Diego Wild Life Park, where there was a new baby elephant that we got to see. I actually liked the Park better than the zoo because everything was bigger and the animals had huge areas to run around in and do their own thing. We also hit Old Town, where Matt had a gigantic Margarita and I lost my ATM card. And who could forget lunch at Chinese Double Happiness?? I also managed to put my new (and really nice) cell phone into the washer with a load of laundry. It's now a really cool looking paper weight.

Aside from seeing Jocelyne, the main inspiration for the trip was to do some Scuba diving that the weather cheated me out of last time I was there. I got to dive two shipwrecks, the HMCS Yukon and the Ruby E. The Yukon is a Canadian Destroyer that was intentionally sunk as an artificial reef. It's absolutely huge at 366' long and four stories tall. It's size, in addition to the fact that it's laying mostly on its side, makes it a little disorienting and to navigate when you're down there. It's also quite deep, sitting in 105' of water. It did have some really cool stuff growning on it, though.

In addition to the Yukon, we dove the Ruby E, which is a Coast Gaurd cutter that was also intentionally sunk in about 75' of water. This wreck was easier to dive and was completely covered in Strawberry Anemones. It's still almost completely intact (even the prop is still atached), and was really fun to check out. Most of the pictures are of her.