In my quest to acquire still more bad-ass but useless skills, I took a course in high altitude diving. Lake Atitlan sits at 5000 feet, which means the air pressure at the surface is 15% lower than sea level. Because dive tables and depth gauges are all calibrated to one atmosphere, this necessitates slightly different protocols. Nothing too fancy, but I got to dust off some of my rusty knowledge of partial pressures and Boyle’s law.<\/p>\n
Because the boat we dove off was quite small, we suited up on shore. Nothing felt quite so silly as walking past women in traje while wearing a wetsuit and carrying a tank of air.<\/p>\n
There’s actually very little to see in the lake, so the altitude is the interesting part. We saw a drowned but standing tree, some volcanic formations, some warm mud due to underlying activity, and several tire-fish and cans of Gallo. More exciting than my training dives in Lake Mascoma, but only by a little. But now I have an extra PADI certification, and another useless skill under my belt.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In my quest to acquire still more bad-ass but useless skills, I took a course in high altitude diving. Lake Atitlan sits at 5000 feet, which means the air pressure at the surface is 15% lower than sea level. Because dive tables and depth gauges are all calibrated to one atmosphere, this necessitates slightly different […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[28],"class_list":["post-778","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-maya-adventure","tag-guatemala"],"geo":{"latitude":14.6999998,"longitude":-91.1999969,"description":null},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levinger.net\/josh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/778","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levinger.net\/josh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levinger.net\/josh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levinger.net\/josh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levinger.net\/josh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=778"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.levinger.net\/josh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/778\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levinger.net\/josh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=778"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levinger.net\/josh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=778"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levinger.net\/josh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=778"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}