Last weekend, after having to delay it a month due to weather, I got to dive the Texas Clipper and it was a blast! Video should largely speak for itself:
The above is video taken from my second dive. I didn’t get any video for the first and, in fact, were it not for one of the helpful folks at American Diving, it might have been gone forever. For my first dive, I had the camera rigged up with a chin-strap, which worked really well to keep it on my head. Trouble was I didn’t think to turn the camera on before I did all that so I tried to do it in the water, but had my mask over my strap and then it just got all jacked up. At any rate, lesson learned. I think if I go with a chin-strap in the future (which is still best for head-mounted stuff), I’ll need to tether to my BC. In the meantime, I am comfortable enough with my buoyancy that I can often just hold the camera with my hands. So for the second dive, I just either left it hanging off my BC or held it with my hands mostly.
Not too much was missed by not having video of the first dive. We went down to 115 feet (blew my previous depth record of 48 feet out of the water) and saw some other parts of the ship, but air goes real fast down at that depth so a good chunk of the time was spent descending and ascending. On the second dive, we went down to 89, but a majority of the dive was spent around 60-70 or so and lasted longer as a result.
All in all I had an absolute blast! It was an all San Antonio trip as it turns out since both folks form Dive World and Dive Masters went coincidentally and quite a few folks I had dove with recently went as well so all around had a blast! Looking forward to going next year too! I’d love to dive that thing all the time, but man it’s a long drive. Probably too long to do it more than once a year, but still an incredibly fun dive!