Dissed!

I got an email from da f0ssZ first thing this morning telling me that he wanted to call off the Friday dive because of the tropical storms churning our way, due to arrive then. I emailed him back lauding his wisdom, even if I wasn't happy about having to ditch a dive. It was cool, though, because I was going to the Cooper today. I was all ready to leave when I found out that I had lost my cell phone. When I finally found it, I saw that Ted (the dude I was supposed to dive with) had called 3 times. I called him back, and he told me he wanted to cancel today's trip because of weather concerns. Crestfallen as I was, I decided to salvage the day in the Edisto. I packed up my boat and headed off down the road. I launched the boat and motored down the river to the spot I was going to dive. I assembled all my gear and turned on my air. It sounded different, so I looked at my pressure guage. It read 250 psi (for all you non-divers, it was supposed to read at least 3000 psi). Then I saw why - the o ring between the valve and the tank was all twisted up, allowing the air to leak out. MAN! Could anything else go wrong? I replaced the bad tank with the other one, knowing that my underwater time was slashed in half before I even began. The vis was pretty bad and the water was surprisingly cold, but at least my mask wasn't flooding like last week - I wisely switched it out yesterday. As I fought the current and swam between the log jams, I picked up teeth everywhere. I was actually shivering for half of the dive, believe it or not! Still, I powered through it and sucked my tank dry before I called it a day. The bend I was diving was loaded, so it killed me to quit, especially since I knew that the two tropical systems coming our way would probably spell the end of diving this river for the season. Rain is bad for diving, but good for land collecting. It may be time to switch gears for a little while. I'm positive I'll squeeze a few land collecting trips in before I start my new job on Monday.