When there is eight feet of vis at least we can know that it could have been worse; it could have been three feet as it was the day before. (I wasn't at the bridge on Friday. An instructor relayed that information to me.) With eight feet of vis the dive was at least doable for open water students who really wanted to move through the course. I was glad to see the radar showing thunderstorms moving through Riviera Beach before I left the house for our 5:30 pm rendezvous because I figured that would clear everybody out of the park and make parking that much easier. A rainy day on the weekend is by far preferred by me, especially when the high tide is in the late afternnoon or early evening. Parking can be a real challenge. Despite the storms there were many people there! They had simply moved their picnics under the bridge! I got a parking spot easily enough, but there were many cars there, many more than expected. The heavily overcast skies and the late (7:00pm) high tide made the vis even shorter than the eight feet it would have been on a sunny day. Toward the end of the dive it was very much becoming a night dive and I had no light. My two open water students had trouble equalizing to the point where I figured it just wasn't going to happen, at least not in the next several hours when the beach would be long closed. By the time we got back to the beach it was much more evening than it was afternoon in terms of light. My students and I were in 3mm full wetsuits having heard about the very cold offshore temperatures and anticipating water colder than the recent 86 degrees we have enjoyed. The water temperature was 82. We were all very comfortable for our 54 minute dive. A highlight of the dive was the little web burrfish, "rare to uncommon Florida" in the Paul Humann book, but not rare to uncommon at the bridge! There is always something special. Get in the (not as cold as I thought it was going to be) water, Ham
