Summer 1986

Summer 1986

I scheduled a business trip to Los Angeles. It is a nicer destination than most of the places I have to travel so I decided to stay over the weekend and play tourist. I convinced Aimee to fly out and meet me. She was expecting to lay on the beach. I had other plans.

I dragged Aimee with me to revisit some of the sites I saw as a young kid with my family in 1965. We went to Universal Studios and signed up for the tour. They still have some of the classic sets, like Beaver Cleaver's house, but have added new attractions related to recent movies, like Jaws and King Kong. It is all great fun seeing how films are made.

We later drive out to the coast to visit Marineland. This oceanarium sits on a beautiful spot on the Pacific coast. The highlight is the Killer Whale show where we see the monstrous Orky and Corky jump completely out of the water. Little did we know, Marineland would close permanently only a few months later. On the way back we stopped to see the retired Queen Mary ocean liner in Long Beach harbor.

June 6-7, 1987

June 6-7, 1987

Aimee seems like a willing travel partner, so I asked her to make it permanent. While Aimee and her mom worked on the wedding and reception, not surprisingly, I was in charge of the honeymoon. I picked two weeks in Hawaii, my dream vacation. I am hoping to do some Scuba diving while there, so I convinced Aimee to get certified too. She took the course and now needs to get her Open Water certification at Pearl Lake in South Beloit, WI. To keep Aimee company, I sign up for my Advanced Open Water Certification on the same weekend.

Aimee does her checkout dives (e.g. removing her mask) with a group atop the roof of the sunken bus. My advanced training is with only one other student. It starts with underwater navigation, and continues with a search and rescue dive to find a milk crate and lift it to the surface, a deep dive (75 ft), and finally a night dive to a sunken submarine. Despite being summer, the lake is ice-cold and we have to wear a full wet suit for every dive. In particular the deep dive is bitterly cold.

After the certification I did a couple fun dives investigating all the other sunken items in this training lake. The most interesting is a large twin-engine airplane that looks like a DC-3.