The total Eclipse weekend at White Star Quarry

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Hello and welcome to Diversync, the Netcast and podcast for scuba divers. My name is Rich Synowiec and you're listening to episode 522, recorded in April of 2024. And I'm trying to do a bunch of podcasts at once that are going to be about 20 minutes long because that seems to be the average that people are watching and listening on YouTube. So it's kind of a neat thing to be able to be kind of big Brother in a time of big Brother and see that you can find the fact that what people are looking at and what people are listening to and being able to do that. And I'm still way new at this whole thing, but I am not as versed as I want to because I just. It's a full time job.

And so if you're going to do this podcasting thing, I know a lot of people who have been doing it really well. I was talking to a couple of them that are doing scuba podcasts, and boy, do they put a lot more time, energy and effort into it. It's almost a full time job, but they have a full time job, so they have an income coming in, so they're doing episodes and they're tweaking them and they're using it. Mine comes straight out of the gate, and I don't. I do the ums and I do the bad video, and I do the part that you can't see. And I have the little bit of hum in the background. And my fish tank sometimes troubles it. And it's. You can see how bad my fish tank is behind.

If you're on the video, if you ever see this, you see how bad my fish tank is. It's all algae, but my one fish is really healthy and happy. He's a little itty bitty tetra, and it was a school of tetras at one time, and that's been far too many years to even imagine. But my world is always just a mistake in time management. I have getting up a whole lot earlier. I have been exercising. I have been going to the gym. I have been putting donating my time, energy, and effort into things that sometimes taken up a little bit more than I want to. But the big thing is, I tend not to say no, and I don't have any time off.

So I usually will try to squeeze something in edgewise because I don't have enough instructors and I don't have enough staff. And it's kind of a balance. We're trying to, in a slow season, have enough staff that I can afford to pay them and at the same time be able to make enough money to be able to do the other things that we need to do during the dive shop thing. So also, as you guys know, because I talk about it a lot, I am a factory service tech for Hollis rebreather, and the idea was that they would use me to help them get caught up with repairs and assemblies and things like that. And that has been going gangbusters as well. That has been pretty much every free moment that I've had this month has been working on rebreathers.

And then on top of that, thank you very much for everybody who uses me directly instead of going through Hollis rebreather, because that just cuts out the minimum end and lets me take care of my customers better. But I'm going to tell you that the time management thing from my last episode, we talked about March being super busy. It was all worth it for those of you guys that are in the totalitari. And I probably am pronouncing all this bullshit wrong, I'm probably not getting it exactly right. But if you're watching this on YouTube, that's the picture of the totalitari that we saw from White Star Quarry. That's a picture I'm gonna put up. It was taken by my daughter on her iPhone. I had 15 cameras running, and the stuff that I got was good, but not that good.

And of the actual darkness. Now, for years since I was in high school, I have seen partial eclipses where the sun's super bright. You get out those glasses. Or if it was back in the eighties, like the first one I saw, were using a spot thing where you had to look it over your shoulder and you watch the shadow in your hand. That wasn't that excited, but. But you get these filtered glasses and you get your welding glasses, and you get all these things over the years, and you look at the partial. And most of everybody that I know has seen a partial eclipse. Very few people that I had in my world has ever seen a total eclipse. And I knew that the eclipse was going to pass over White Star.

I kind of got it two years ago, and I decided I was going to do this whole diving thing around it. And what it was I was going to write a patty specialty about eclipse diver. And I had it planned that were going to test how to do it during the beginning of the dive and during the end of the dive and all that kind of stuff. And I turned it into Patty in early of 2023. And the person that I had turned it into, who was reviewing it, said, we need a little bit more substance to this because we think it's a good specialty, but I think you have it wrong, and we want to make sure that you don't have to do the dives, so put more substance in it.

I said, okay, why don't you think I have to do the dive? And that's when I found out the actual blackness was only about four minutes long. And so for you guys that have not seen that, our weekend was called the Eclipse 2024 eclipse camp out and dive. And I went all out. I rented four campsites at the quarry to put 30 people on it. We had these awesome, amazing embroidered hoodies made of divers incorporated. They are spectacular hoodies, and they're really comfortable. And I put some money and energy effort into it, and then I price it out to be three days of diving, three nights of camping. And that was my cost. I did breakfast every day. We did free air fills included in that. We had the hoodie included in that.

And because it was so early in the season, we had my staff plus five customers. My mom and dad came down, which was really cool. That was exciting, and a lot of really good friends. My staff all showed up, but one guy, but he went to a different place to watch it. But I'm going to tell you, the first day was really good weather, and we had a great day of diving. The second day was really good weather, and that was Sunday, really good diving. And then Monday, the day of the Totalitari, we had a morning dive, and then we all got out. We got prepped for the afternoon. It was coming at 03:00 and. And we all watched it as it started crossing the thing. It was kind of just a big, we're watching it through the thing.

We were talking, spending time on social media, taking care of, trying to get good pictures of the sun. I had never seen anything. I had never. I didn't know what to expect. So it was kind of like a thing where I was just glad everybody was having a good time. Everybody was there. We had lunch, we had a bunch of stuff there. And then when the quarry turned black, when the sun actually blacked out the sky, I'm gonna tell you guys, it was life changing. And if you have not seen a totalitari, I'm gonna tell you have absolutely no idea what you were missing. It was probably one of the most incredible sights that this space junkie has ever seen. I have never seen anything that was that remarkable.

The sun was completely blocked out except for a nice little halo, and the cameras couldn't even pick it up. It was still so bright on the cameras that most of them couldn't pick it up. And it's just a dim little dot in the sky on the cameras, but you looked up and it looked huge, and the quarry was black, and all around you saw sunset.

So it looked just like you were.

 look at the sunset, but it was 100% all around you. And everything was weirded out. The dogs, everything got cold. The dogs were weirded out, the animals around the birds stopped. It was just real. And the wind stopped, which was just bizarre. And you looked up and you looked up at this sky. And I had been doing AI artwork of the totalitari to promote this thing. I was having fun with this AI thing to do pictures, and if you want to go back and see them, go on diversinked.com or go on Divers Inc's Facebook page and just scroll through it, because I thought they were really good. I was playing with what I knew about art and what I knew about different artists to try to get my own style on there.

And some of the stuff was just really good, but it didn't even compare to the actual thing. I understand now why people spend decades prepping for each one of those four minute events. I came back home and I sat down to find out when the next one was going to be in our world. And it's going to be in 2026, and it's going to be in Iceland and Greenland and a couple other places over that in Spain. It's going to pass over Europe. And I literally went on my calendar to find out if I was doing anything, because I was going to do it again. That's how spectacular it was. And the chance of the next one have me being around for the next one.

I'll be a hundred years old when the next one comes, or 80 something years old when the next one comes here that we can go see. I'm gonna try to do it other time for the next two that are coming up in our world somewhere. I'm in isle Royale, and so I'm actually gonna be on a technical dive trip that we had to book years in advance. So on the next two, I mean, I'm booked out to 2030 on my isle royale trips. So it's kind of a thing that we don't announce it until the next one. We have isle Royale this year, by the way. We still have spots left in our july technical trip, but it's in August of 2026, and I'll be in isle Royale on a technical trip.

And then it's august of 2027, I think it's 27, something like that, and I'll be in isle Royale again. So I can't begin to tell you how incredible it was. And the traffic coming home was horrendous. It took me 2 hours. Coming back from the quarry took my wife 4 hours. She left 2 hours ahead of me. It took her 4 hours to get home. And it's normally a 45 minutes trip. There were so many people out. The quarry was pretty dead. There was a lot of divers who had come down not to dive, but just to hang out, and everybody was invited to come hang out with us. But the people that saw that, it is a life changing thing. It was one of the more incredible things. And that's. I guess I can't even tell you.

I was never gonna believe it, never gonna believe that anybody would ever need to go see a total eclipse until I saw that totalitarian. And. And if you didn't see it, if you said, it's not that for me, you don't know what it's. You're missing. If you didn't actually in the shadow where it's all blacked out, you need to put that on your bucket list to do something like that in your lifetime. It was. I've seen some incredible things diving. I've been places where more people had been to the moon. I have done some incredible stuff. I've seen some credible transformations in people, but nothing could compare to what it was when that. I mean, I understand why it's a thing of mythology, because it was just incredible. So, yeah, that's. That was like, the first. That's how April started out for me.

And then spending the rest of April, I was now dialed in to try to get the quarry back up to speed and getting all the. Everything done so that we could do what we needed to do, because I won't be here opening day for the query or the second day of the quarry concession being open. So I'm handing that to my staff, to be able to do that now in the world of never being able to say no to stuff. For the entire month of April, I've been doing a shit ton of rebreather work and a shit ton of service work because I don't want to say no to people because it's all money coming in.

But we also did a tech 40 and this one weekday, Tech 40, because I had already been committed to IDC, which I'll talk about in the next podcast. But I was already committed to IDC. And so for the I didn't have any more weekends left to be able to do tech, and I had two customers who wanted to do Tech 40 open circuit. And this will be the first time that I did the new Tech 40. And the new tech 40 introduced in edema last year at 2023. November of 2023, the new Tech 40 included a Trimix option for instructors who were Trimix trained. Now, I automatically qualified because I was a Trimix instructor trainer. So I was basically just able to cross over to the new thing.

But some of my peers, they, who are Trimix divers, they crossed over, but they had to cross over in a different way. And they were able to do the crossover by. And I actually got a couple of them scheduled. They were able to do the crossover because at the Tech 40, 45 and 50 level, if you're a Tech 40, 45 or 50 instructor, you can be the Trimix equivalent with a little bit of additional online work. And then they had, then you had to be a Trimix diver. You don't have to be a Trimix instructor to teach it. You need to be a Trimix diver.

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And what it basically does is it gives you the option at the shallower depths to include Trimix in your repertoire of tools to give to your technical students in case they want to overcome narcosis or a regulator that needs a little bit less density in the gas. It's funny because I put this out on Reddit. I've been following Reddit, and I have a Reddit channel now, and I've been answering questions on Reddit, and I put out my own question. Do you think the Trimix is a good thing for Tech 40? And the biggest thing that shocked me was that so many people were trying to make it aware of the gas density issue. And while gas density can be an issue for somebody with shitty regulators, I've never had an issue with it with Poseidon regulators.

And I find it odd that over many years, this is now becoming something people are talking about because we've known about it for decades, but it's never been something that we bring up. And so when we look at it from something that we bring up, the idea of gas density being an issue, a lot more people were bringing it up and read it than I thought. But it was in a great conversation. And I appreciate everybody who came out there and did that, but my two students did amazing. It's still only four dives, but this time of year, because of the temperature, we did one dive each day until the final day, and then we ended up. It scared me on the final day we got down there because I. I didn't even think about the quarry not being open.

We got down there, everybody was late. So I was like, oh, my God. I didn't call to make sure they were opened. And so went to a different quarry that's not mine. And I thought, oh, I wouldn't be open, or would I? I wouldn't have this concession open. But it was open and everything was good. So all good. Congratulations to the two tech Trimix, Tech 40 Trimix divers that I have because I just went all out with them to see how that whole thing worked. And it worked out pretty good. One guy said he didn't feel a difference in the Trimix. The other guy did. So. So that's it. So that brings me to the end of this episode.

And I will come up with another episode shortly and we'll talk about my Patty weekend IDC's and then what I'm doing to prep for my trip coming up. And remember, guys, it really does appreciate if you follow me on all of my social medias. I'm on Twitter, I'm on Instagram, I am on LinkedIn. As diverse incorporated, we have tick tock as divers sync right now. We're going to be end up moving that to divers incorporated as well. And then you can follow me on all the Facebook pages that I have. If you are a patron of Patreon, then I appreciate that. In 2020 hindsight, I think it's awesome that I am able to use that as a test platform.

I would have done it earlier because I can put out people that put out stuff that I may suck at and those guys will be very happy to tell me, rich, this sucks. Don't use it. So, but things that I do and I don't really know that it's good for. I'm a lot more candid there. So that's there. But I appreciate all your support. Thank you for listening. If you're this far into it, then my upgrade is are working. I'm trying not to be 30 minutes podcasts. I'm trying to keep them under 20 because that's if I have more than one, you can get more than an hour, but that's the way episodes should work. So until next time, guys, we'll see you.

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