The Great Below, Revisited

So Noelle, Dave, Esther, and I took a trip down to Monterey Saturday morning to try a dive at the Breakwater. It was kind of exciting because I've never been on an unsupervised dive before. Noelle manned the ground stations while the rest of us dived, which was very cool of her. We had some technical difficulties (Esther's first BC didn't work and later her dry suit leaked) and I managed to lose my weight belt ($$$), and we had to abort the first dive, but we managed to get another dive in. The water was pretty murky, probably 5-10 feet of vis, but it wasn't super cold (at least to me, with a 7mm wetsuit on). We swam around the kelp forest and I even saw a jellyfish underwater! On the surface there was a dolphin/porpoise a squad of otters, and I think I got buzzed by a harbor seal. Esther was out after that dive because she was pretty cold from the leaky drysuit. Dave and I were thinking about going in once more, but we decided not to after we spent half an hour in neoprene and neither of us warmed up at all. A pretty good start to diving sans instructor, but it showed how pathetically out of shape I am. I had all kinds of aches and pains after that, especially in my legs, and they don't seem to have let up much since then.