7/31/2006 4:00 AM – Today I got in 63 Minutes of bottom time diving with Dave. I brought the Shrimp with again and all the fish went insane. We must have had a thousand around us at one point. I found that if I take the tails off and then mash the meat up a little, they really go insane because even the little ones can get in on the scraps. One thing is for sure, the fish are no longer afraid of scuba divers. After the shrimp was gone they kept following us around. We did find the underwater dive platform in the lake so it was a good dive and the best part was that I did not even need to wear a wet suit. Just swimming trunks and a t-shirt along with the gear. The best part was that I really got some good bottom time in while feeding the fish. I found that I was not using my BCD when I should have to keep me at 12 feet and I was kicking a lot to hover which used up a lot of air. Next time I am going to just work on my BCD usage and learn to hover more. One thing was certain, after I got done I was worn out with breathing on the tank for an hour. I went home and fell asleep for 8 hours. But I have an early start to the day to finish up the latest project.
7/27/2006 10:30 PM – Today was another busy day. I was working on getting thing’s in order for the TV show pilot and then I went diving. I brought my camera with to practice working underwater. I also brought some freezer burned shrimp I had at home with to feed the fish. Oh wow, they went nuts. I must have had a thousand fish around me at one point in the lake. They were even coming up and eating out of my hand. It was fun.
Here are a couple of screen video caps.
Up close and personal saying FEED ME.
7/26/2006 11:30 PM – I went diving today at a new place that is actually right by home. The dive shop had a fun dive get together at Lac Lavon lake in Burnsville. The visibility was great and the fish were very friendly. I am planning to go back there soon with the video camera and film the fish as there were hundreds of them all around us. Here is my dive profile from the dive computer from tonight.
7/25/2006 3:00 AM – Yeah, I tried getting on a normal schedule but as fate would have it, no dice tonight… I was running out to drop off some videos to blockbuster when I saw a lightning storm to my south by maybe 10 miles. I had my camera gear with and laptop so I said hmmm, lets check it out. I got down just south of Farmington and the lightning was lame and I checked SwiftWX Radar and I saw a storm right by my home and thought I messed up so I went home. On my way home, I saw smoke and I saw fire. I got on a massive pole barn fire that was a four alarm fire in Lakeville, MN.
The fire was started by the lightning from all the reports I was hearing and the lightning was pretty intense in that area for a few minutes. And the owners said it was a machine shed where they stored hay and equipment. There was no power hooked up so everyone is thinking it was the storm. And there was no animals in the barn but the barn was 100 feet by 200 feet so it was huge. Now it is time to get some sleep after I take a shower and wash off all the smoke smell.
Here is the lightning footage that I shot before the fire.
7/24/2006 4:30 PM – Sweet, with gas at $3.10 a gallon, I got really lucky as the storms are coming to me today and I can just work from home. I shot this photo about 45 minutes ago from my living room deck. I love storm chasing on foot!!! That cell fired up and burned out over Minneapolis but it was fun to watch it go up and I got some bad ass time lapse footage of it. Click on the image below to see the full size image.
7/24/2006 6:00 AM – After getting 12 hour’s of sleep, I am back on a normal sleep schedule for now but I know that will not last long… Looking at the NHC forecasts and the computer models, there is still something brewing down in the Gulf Of Mexico that may hit Texas and there is still Hurricane Daniel and Tropical Storm Emilia. Hurricane Daniel looks like it may head towards Hawaii but as a tropical storm. I might go if it looks like it will come in as a Hurricane or strong tropical storm. Right now it looks to be slowing down some in it’s forward track so it is just a waiting game. Tropical storm Emilia is just going to be off the Baja coast and not going to be making landfall anywhere so I’m not planning on that chase. I know the the hurricane hype from last year has everyone in the media going nuts but I had a talk with an old friend that retired out of the media business and he always clears the confusion. He said, just wait because it is still early in the season. Ok, time to get some coffee and make breakfast and do my forecasting for the day. It may be a chase day but right now it looks to be in Wisconsin. Hill’s And Tree’s… Or as I like to call it, stay home and play video games because you can see the forest for the tree’s but you can’t see through the forest. Oh yeah, look’s like I picked a good time to sleep for 12 hour’s because SEC is reporting that the CME that blew off the sun last week never hit earth so there were no auroras last night.
7/21/2006 Working on the site today and I did get a lot of coding stuff done. I should have some more catalogs done. I In other news, Spaceweather.com is reporting a possible aurora chase in tomorrow. Look’s like a CME was hurled off the sun the other day and may be heading for earth. If the sky is clear, I may head up north to try and view it but the smoke from all the wild fires may be too much for it.
7/20/2006 Recovering after a long day of storm chasing yesterday.
7/19/2006 Having this mobile hard drive with me to edit and update the site in the field is sweet. Right now I am driving home from a great night of storm chasing. The day sucked since the cap held and even with the tornado watch in Iowa, it was a total bust.
As I was driving home the storms fired. Oh boy did they fire up. I have a ton of lightning footage to look through and even got some video style I have been wanting for years and finally got it using my .05 fish eye lens. The .05 is for the underwater housing and when used out of the water it really distorts the image since it is so wide. Well, I did not care for this since I pointed the camera to the sky and got the crawlers.
Also ended up almost getting cooked a couple times when the storms first started out since the lightning was so intense. Here is one of the images from tonight. I have a bunch of images to go through from tonight. If I recall correctly, this is the first time I have shot lightning with my Nikon D70s. Man has this years storm season sucked!!!
Here is the video from this chase
7/19/2006 4am (still damn early) Ok, just been up all night long working on the web site. Now that I got the damn images in order, I can actually get some work done on it. I got some more catalogs up.
About to get some sleep before today’s chase but I looked at the latest NHC forecast on Tropical Storm Beryl. This thing is going to be a fish storm!!! Fish storm as in it will only annoy the fish and not be that big of an impact on the north east coast line. The storm is not forecasted to become a hurricane and it is not forecasted to make land until New Foundland. It will be a big news in the media on a slow news week but that is about it. I also just looked at the latest GFDL forecast and it has the storm being a non storm as it get’s sucked up by the front pushing into the east coast today and tomorrow.
7/19/2006 Very Early Morning (2am). Just woke up and saw that Tropical Storm Beryl is not doing much and looks to be moving off shore more then it will be much of a factor to the east coast. But it could change and I could be wrong. Right now NHC does not even show the track making landfall. Now the big story for today is the severe storms. Today there is a mod risk for much of southern Minnesota. I will be out storm chasing today. Could be a chance of seeing a tornado today so right now, Tropical Storm Beryl is really a non factor for me today but that could change.
7/16/2006 Did not even leave the house today to go shoot some lightning video. I shot this footage from the deck as a small storm put on a light show.
7/5/2006 Working from home today and shot a pretty cool time lapse sunset video from the deck. The footage speed is 4000 times faster then normal to show the setting sun and the twilight after the sunset.
7/3/2006 I’m back in Minneapolis now. Ah, home sweet home and I did not get bent on this trip. After looking at my dive log I was a little freaked out about flying home today but the flight was 25 hours from my last dive. The area of the wreck were I was diving was 110 feet max but Brian brought me over to a part of the wreck where I got down to 114 feet and the dive computer freaked out on me. I went past my 110 foot dive limit and we got caught in a bait ball on the way up so the ascent rate started to get out of control until I dumped the BC.
The bait ball is a large group of fish swimming around like a tornado in the water with a large Jew Fish in the middle using the small fish as bait to eat the larger fish that try to eat the smaller fish. The small fish swarm around the Jew Fish for safety but they saw Brian and I must have thought we were Jew Fish and blinded us by swimming around us. The Jew Fish in the bait ball looked at us and was like hey what are you doing in my bait ball.
I’m home now and my dive computer said I was good to go. Now I am actually planning my next trip to go back diving and shooting video after the next hurricane. I want to see what the effect of a hurricane would be on the dive sites. Below is a screen cap from my dive computer showing the depth of the last time on the wreck.
7/2/2006 I’m back on dry land. Wow what a great vacation. It was only about a decade over due!!! No cell phone, no internet, nothing but relaxing and scuba diving. Back at the hotel in Fort Myers relaxing for the night to decompress after diving the Baja California ship wreck at 110 feet under water. Below is a vid cap of some of the footage I shot. Brian shot a lot of great stuff while I was still trying to get familiar with the under water video equipment.
The underwater video housing for my PD-170 is freaking like trying to move a 55 gallon drum under water. The best part of the trip was that we found some bottles and glass dishes to take home from the Baja wreck that was sunk in WWII by a German U Boat. I’ll upload video when I get a chance but now I just want to rest.
Oh yeah, this is going to be a brutal hurricane season. The average temp around the Dry Tortugas at 85 feet under water was 85F. The crew said that the normal temps for that depth where we were diving should have been in the lower 70s that deep. The photo below shows at 84 feet it was 85 degrees.
