Driving the Gravy Train

I got a new mask and I've been dying to try it out. It was still higher than we like to go, but we decided to dive a site that's up on a bank in really shallow water. When the river is too shallow we can't hunt the site because there's not enough water to make the silt move away. The site is very near the one where I found the two points a few weeks ago. Anyway, conditions were not ideal. It was overcast and that makes it tough to see and even tougher to film, but we were determined to find something. We fanned deep into the sand to find the deposits and let the current clear up the water so we could see. Then we picked out the fossils. Early in the hunt I spied a gigantic tooth just on top of the oligocene formation. Teeth always look bigger in the water, but this one - WOW! Fortunately I knew it was broken in half before I picked it up, because as soon as I picked it up it fell apart. A little later I fanned out an outstanding little point. Made of quartz, it blended almost perfectly with the sand in the dim light. As soon as I surfaced to stash the awesome artifact, I saw a worried weezling pointing out into the water about 20 feet from us in the deeper water. A set of two dorsal fins and a wake like a jetski, he thought they might be sharks. But no, they were dolphins! The closest I'd ever seen. If I didn't have the camera on macro mode I would have filmed them. Seeing dolphins that close in the wild is just incredible! We hunted a little longer, but we both decided to leave about the same time. As soon as we got out of the river, it started raining. Whew, just in the nick of time. We could have gotten wet.

It was a great day in the river - except for my new mask. I love that it doesn't leak, but I hate that no amount of defog will keep it from fogging the instant my face breaks the plane of the water! When I got home, I did a little research and found out that there is some compound on the glass to keep it separate from the molds during the manufacturing process. Apparently, it causes water to form droplets easily thus the fogging issue. I searched the dive forums on how to remove the compound. One site said to use a cigarette lighter to burn it off. That sounded like a bad idea to me, so I looked on. Another said to use Comet cleaner, which I did. It didn't scratch the lens at all as several posts assured me it wouldn't. Hopefully the next time I go out, mask fogging will be less of an issue.