Sunday October 26th, 2003 Underwater Pumpkin Carving

This may have been the best day on the coast this year. Refreshed with an extra hours sleep, thanks to the collapse of Daylight Savings Time, we drove up to participate in Bamboo Reef's Underwater Pumpkin Carving Contest. We hit the coast to bright skys and a flat ocean. All of the pullouts were filled with the cars of ab divers, and the ocean was as covered with boats as Spencer's shirt after spaghetti.

Stillwater was hopping! Tom Stone had created a zone of Halloween cheer, and divers were gearing up. In addition to Molly and I, club member Kari Vallindras was there, and another five or six divers.

While we suited up and all several divers came out with Ling Cod and Abalone.

Tom went over the rules and let us loose. Only dive knives allowed, and only virgin pumpkins.

So I carried our pumpkins in a bag, along with an extra weight belt with 8 lbs on it, and off we went. We swam straight out and then descended in 21 feet next to an abalone covered rock and set to work.

The first problem with carving pumpkins underwater is that the darned things float. We were okay getting them under, because I had a weight belt clipped to the bag, but once the time came to carve the darn things all bets were off. Molly and I wrestled a pumpkin out of the bag, and managed to cut off the top.

A big bubble of air escaped from pumpkin head, and it became much easier to manage. We then put a few rocks inside and got on with work. We then repeated the process with out second orange orb.

Pumpkin duties out of the way, we had a nice little tour of Stillwater cove. There are abalone all over the place! In order to maintain an objective judging, we were equipped with plastic garbage bags and instructed to bag our pumpkins as we came out of the water.

After the dive it was time for lunch! Tom had a bbq and made yummy dogs and burgers. Something strange happened, and Spencer ate four hot dogs. Everyone enjoyed the unguarded candy bowl.

After lunch was the unveiling! Pumpkins were lined up on the wall, and high pressure judging activities happened. While we were packing our gear in the morning Madeline had suggested we put a mask on our pumpkin, so we did. This was enough 'creativity' to counter our Picasso like lack of symmetry and structure and win third prize, a copy of The Diver's Almanac to the pacific coast, from Baja to Washington or Canada or somewhere north of here.

I didn't really notice who got them, but second prize was awarded due to the nice details of ears and eyebrows, while first prize was awarded for the 'pleasing symmetry and classic jack o lantern form.'

The only down side was that Molly had two weeks of homework to catch up on since she was in England until the day before, and this was not to be her evening to catch up. She went to sleep at 4:30 in the afternoon and slept through the night.