The book is closed on the 2008 dive season. At the end of every year I send out pictures from this years trips and recap some of the highlights of the year. I also inform people of next year's plans so you can set a time to come with us. That is if you dare.
The Dive club ran a trip to the island of Bonaire in January for 10 days. We had 16 people join us. The dive store ran a trip to Roatan for a week in March. We all signed up for a shark dive expedition that took place on a sea mount many miles off shore. It was quite an experience. There was between 16 and 20 sharks that joined us. Very exciting.
The spring found us investigating some new wreck sites and checking out the old ones. Winter storms have a habit of exposing sections of wrecks that have never been uncovered for decades. We find a lot of cool artifacts in this fashion. This spring we located several old wooden schooners that have never been dove before. How do I know that? Well, look at all the artifacts we recovered. I found so many deadeyes this year that I don't know what to do with them all. Actually, I do. I'm going to burn them in the fireplace this winter. The wood is so dense one deadeye will last for several hours. Besides, deadeyes we found many brass trunion pins, brass spikes, rudder attach brackets, the list goes on.
We ran two successful trips to the St. Lawrence Seaway, one in June and one in Sept. We logged a total of 44 dives to the Roy A. Jodrey. The Jodrey was a 700 foot freighter sunk in 250 of water. We also recovered many artifacts off a wooden schooner that sank in 1886, the Vickery. Some years back we noted that all the ships masts had fallen down a ledge aft of the ship itself. All the rigging lay undisturbed between 150 and 170 feet. Well, this year we disturbed them. What kind of divers do they have up there that just let that stuff sit?
We took some awesome photos of huge lobsters. The one I'm holding, Bryan pulled out of the bow of the Alva, my favorite Cape Cod shipwreck. The Alva, was William Vanderbilt's personal yacht, a three masted steam powered schooner made of steel and sank in 1892. The year I was born. Sadly, a shoal covered over most of the wreck in the 90's but I think it's unsanding. Ask me to take you there next summer. We put the lobster back in it's hole after the photo's were taken. I made Jodi go back to the boat and get her camera so we could get a picture. Something that big and old deserves better than to be eaten or mounted on a wall.
I spent a ton of time on the charter boat. I bet of the 200 plus dives I did this year, 100 of them was divemastering on the boat. It's so much fun. I love to take people who are new to diving onto our local wrecks. I love to addict people to New England wreck diving. I think I addicted a bunch this year. I became a dive instructor this year along with Jodi, Roger, and Che. And that was also a tremendously rewarding experience. Hopefully, this winter and next spring myself and Jodi can become technical dive instructors. That's what I really want to do, teach that kind of diving.
Anyway, next year. More Seaway trips June and September again. You gotta come do it. It's the best wreck diving on the planet. Even if all of our boats are full, go buy a boat, go steal a boat. Whatever it takes. Ask me, I'll help you steal it. Come with us to Bonaire in Jan. Two full weeks this year. Never mind, I just remembered, sadly, the trip is full. Our big project next year is to dive a monstrous freighter that sank east of Chatham in the late seventies. No one (to my knowledge) No one............. has ever dove it. I included a picture of it in the e-mail. Don't recognize the name? That's because it had a different name when the picture was taken. It's called the Regal Sword. It's wicked deep I know, it sits at 270. But look at the picture, the wheel house comes up to 170. That's not too bad. The currents are just sick out there, if it's too crazy we just turn around and go back to the boat. And, maybe another Doria trip. I just get so seasick when I go out there. That's the worst part of it. I threw up a big chuck of my spleen last year. I'm pretty sure that you need one of those to live and I don't know if I can lose any more organ's.
Two years ago Gary Gentile and myself hired a commercial fishing boat to take us to "hang's" that the captain swore were shipwrecks. We spent an entire day going to different sites, all off Chatham, I marked every one on my GPS. We then went out and dove the ones within 10 miles of the coast. Every single one was just a pile of rocks. Very disappointing.
One object we marked was 25 miles off shore, east of Chatham, right at the edge of the shipping lane a few miles from the Regal Sword. The object I marked was in 110 feet of water and it's highest point was at a depth of 87 feet. The captain swore to me that this was a shipwreck.
Over two years it's taken me to get out to this site. I never wanted to take my boat, with the one engine and all. Yesterday we headed out on Chris's boat. Yes, it has two engines. The winds were out of the northeast at 10 and the seas were running about 5 feet.
Sadly, about 20 miles out we ran over a 500 pound ocean sunfish, a Mola Mola, it never had a change, we caught it with both engines.
Anyway, I took control of the helm and located the object within 30 minutes. We dropped the hook three times and each time the hook slipped off. We then set up a hook not attached to the boat and threw it into the water with a ball tied to the end. It was at this point that we realized just how hard the current was running this far off shore. The current pulled the ball underwater, it also pulled the 20 pound grapnel and 15 foot of 5/8 chain off the site.
We pulled up the hook and replaced it with a sand anchor.
Dave Wood and I suit up and enter the water 50 ft. up current of the ball. In two seconds I'm at the ball, Dave misses it entirely. I can't believe the force of the water. I can only manage to pull myself down the line hand over hand, six inches at a time. I stop at 50 feet to rest, the reg is freeflowing in my mouth from the force of the water pressure hitting the purge. I reposition myself on the line pinning it between my inner arm and chest and continue down. I'm looking forward and a massive black object begins to form in front of me. My heart rate, already nearing the red line goes up even more as I anticipate the discovery of a virgin wreck.
Slowly the object becomes clear in the nearly 50 foot vis. It's a group of massive rocks. Surrounding this underwater oasis are more cod fish than I've ever seen. I count three massive lobsters in my field of vision. I spy some of the biggest flounder I've ever seen. Dave tells me later the rocks were covered with nudibranchs. ( I never look for those things, they give me a tummy ache when I eat them) On the north side of the rocks is a massive scallop dredge and a huge lobster trap, both captured by the giant rocks. I still think it was a fantastic dive even if we didn't discover a new wreck, just getting to the bottom in that kind of current was reward enough. Seeing all those cod fish, diving that far offshore with awesome vis.................. I wouldn't want to spend a Sunday any other way.
We did a wooden schooner for our second dive, Dave taking these pictures. We recovered some nice artifacts.
On another note, another friend was out sidescanning and "something" came along and "ate" the towfish. His towfish is 4 feet long. Whatever took it, did it in one bite.
Wed, I'm going out there and dive the wreck he discovered just before the towfish was eaten. It was probably just a goose fish. I'm sure that was all it was. What else could it be?
Here are a couple of pictures from a different Port Hunter trip. Vis is the normal 5 feet. The camera makes it look better than it actually is. Today's trip to the Hunter was fantastic considering yesterday it was blowing to 35 knots and 7 foot seas. I'm gonna say vis today was between 10 and 15 feet.
As I was swimming along, it occurred to me. Most places in the world, if you had these conditions, people would be complaining. "I couldn't see 10 feet, I'm never coming here again." People who dive wrecks in the northeast should have a special c-card. There would be no training agency on the card. No card that says divemaster, advanced blah, blah, blah, instructor, nothing. It simply says NORTHEAST WRECK DIVER. You show that card anywhere in the world, and the dive shops take you into the fill station, point you to the mixed gas area and walk away. They set you up on you own private boat, take you to places where the current is too strong, the wrecks are too deep, and the critters are mean and ferocious for everyone else. They worship us like the wreck diving gods we are. If you can dive around here you can dive anywhere in the world and think that it's lame.
Anyway, I was exploring a part of the ship that had recently collapsed and I discovered two crates, two wooden crates that are unopened. I know this area like the back of my hand and the crates have had feet of sand on top of them for decades. Tomorrow's charter was supposed to be to the Pinthis. I changed the location, partly because of the awesome vis we had here today and partly because of those damned crates. I didn't have any tools with me today. Tomorrow I will.
I have one spot left on the boat. The season is almost over. The water is warm (63) The vis is awesome. The wreck is loaded with striper, tautog, scup, and.................. tropical fish.
Come with me on one of the last dive trips of the year..............
Come with me and lets see what's in those damned crates...............
The crates. There was nothing in them. One was empty and the other was filled with some type of metal that had corroded away to rust. In the third and forth picture is a 5" artillery shell. The shell was lying right next to the crates. Some divers pointed out that the percussion of me swinging the hammer onto the hull could be enough to set off the warhead. The fifth picture is of the Hunter's massive rudder.
I did discover a brass valve attached to the winch just aft of the stern deck house.(picture #9) I removed it. It will clean up nice, I'll display it at the wreck show next month. Dave took some pictures of tropical fish that were all over the wreck.
Our second dive was in Woods Hole on some scuttled ships. There are two barges, an old 40 foot sailboat and some type of cabin cruiser. They're all right next to each other in 75 feet of water. One interesting thing to see down there is one of the life boats off the Andrea Doria. It lies 50 feet away from the other wrecks.
I was really hoping to find something interesting in the crates. About 25 years ago I was divemastering a charter to the Horatio Hall. One of the customers mentioned that he spotted a crate on his dive. I casually asked him where on the wreck the crate was. That afternoon we went back out there on a second charter and I recovered the crate. On the deck of the boat I pried off the lid. What greeted us was the most horrific smell I've ever encountered. That alone should have caused us to toss the thing over the side. I dug thru layers of this rotting mush and discovered tin cans of Canadian sardines. The deeper I dug the more intact the cans were. You could still make out some writing on the cans.
I brought the crate home and painstakingly removed about half a dozen cans with the labels intact. I cleaned them up and still have one today. They say Moosehead Sardines and a date of 1905 I think. I wouldn't even mention it except for what happened next. I took all the rotting fish and tossed it into the woods behind my house and promptly forgot about the whole stinking affair.
Three weeks later I see my neighbor, a state trooper, working in his yard. I go over to talk with him. He had just gotten back from his honeymoon and I wanted the hear all about it.
He told me this most horrible story. First off while he was away his house was broken into. Secondly the wedding day was ruined. Seems right before they were to leave for the church, the loving bride, all decked out in her $2000 wedding dress was sitting on the couch when his German Shepherd jumped into her lap and disgorged his stomach contents all over the dress. It destroyed the dress. He was convinced that someone tried to poison the dog, he had never smelled anything so foul as what came out of that dog.
After thinking about it for a minute, it dawned on me what probably happened. The dog got into the pile of 85 year old rotting sardines. Had to be. The wedding was the same weekend as the recovery dive. I confessed my part in the sorted affair, me not wanting him to think people were out there purposely trying to kill him and his dog. I pointed out to him that is bad luck to see the bride on her wedding day anyway, and she should have stayed at her mothers or something that day. We never really talked much after that.
Anyway, I'm thinking of diving off my own boat on Wednesday of this week. So far it's myself and Dave Foley. I have room for two more. If your interested.............................................
Ride the Harley. Go diving. Ride the Harley. Go diving.
It was a tough choice. Today was so beautiful. I used the renovated ramp at Green Pond today. The town must have spent a million dollars to rebuild it. The ramp is wide enough to launch two boats at once. Dock space on both sides. Not many parking spots, in the summer, forget about it.
I don't know what's going on with the slack lately. We got to the Port Hunter 30 minutes early and no current was running. I did a 90 minute dive on the wreck and still no current. The vis was again over 10 feet. The wreck is infested with tropical fish, just incredible. If this is global warming I like it. Pretty soon the coral will start to grow around here and the vis will be 200 feet. We'll be able to look over the side of the boat and see the Doria.
Sweet!
Anyway, I tried out a new photographer today. Not good. I gotta fire this one. The last 4 pictures are from a real photographer.
Sadly, there is only a few weeks left before the boats get put away for the season. ( the insurance company's won't cover the boat's between Nov 1 and Mar 31.)
The Captain cuts the power to the boat after more than an hour run to the gravesite of the Trojan from his home port in Osterville. The Captain, feeling a little green in the three foot seas, hands over control of the boat to me, with Bryan manning the grapnel hook up on the bow.
The depth sounder fails. After some trouble shooting we discover that the sounder works just fine if the boat is going 7 miles an hour or more. We can't hook the wreck at these speeds. Finally we settle on driving the boat to the numbers, tossing in the hook, and hoping for the best.
While this is going on the Captain, Chris, suits up and goes in, to clean the bottom of the boat. The thinking being that a dirty boat bottom is the culprit. Well, that wasn't the case, it made no difference.
We drop the hook right on the numbers and hook.............. something............ who knows what. Chris is already suited up so he heads down to do the tie-in. Several minutes later a plastic water bottle appears on the surface, our signal that a successful tie-in has been affected. Bryan and I suit up. We're getting ready to splash when Chris appears. We're not actually hooked into the wreck. We've hooked into the line of a ghost lobster trap. He tied into that. The wreck is actually forty feet away. I ask him the all important question. "How's the vis?" He holds his hand in front of his face. Now, I'm not looking forward to this dive, but we have to at least go down and untie the hook.
The two other divers, upon hearing the good news about conditions below, get sick. One has a "headache" the other, his "tummy hurts".
I start down the line, following Bryan. The vis is super. He's twenty feet below me and I can see him just fine. We reach the hook, which is suspended in a rats nest of old line at a depth of 85 feet. The vis has dropped to 5 feet at most. I make a mental note not to get tangled in the line on the way up. I transition to the ghost pot line. The vis gets worse and worse. Then I smack into a silt cloud, presumably from Bryan and the vis goes to ZERO. Then I smack into the mud/silt bottom at 110 feet and no longer wonder where the silt came from. I continue to pull myself forward. I become aware that I'm now kneeling on something hard, the wreck I guess? I can't see it even though my face is only a foot from it. Now it's the ghost lobster trap I see next, and it's precariously hanging on the edge of what has to be the wreck. All around this trap is thick line with those donut looking things that dragger nets use to keep the net off the bottom a little bit, while the net is being towed.
That's it, I'm DONE. I'm OUT. I can't see six inches. I don't know where Bryan is. And somewhere close is the rest of the dragger net and I don't like dragger nets. I shine my light back and forth hoping to get Bryan's attention. He appears instantly. You see, he was on the other side of the lobster trap all along. A lobster trap is what? Three feet long. I could not see him or his light from three feet. My hat in tipped to Chris. He did the tie-in. Alone. In horrific conditions. He continued. Alone. To the wreck, had a reg free-flow at the worst possible time and shut-down one side of his doubles. My hat is off to you brother. I can forgive the salty hot dogs.
The whole dive lasted 15 minutes. Longest 15 minutes of my life. We went on to do three more dives that day. Two, doing drift dives on Devil's Bridge, looking for the remains of the City of Columbus. We had no luck in that endeavor, but the vis on those dives was spectacular.
Our last dive was on the Herman Winter.
Oh, the sick divers. They were feeling much better once we relocated the boat. They made all the other dives.
Come dive with us if you dare. (just not the Trojan. I don't dare)
We just got back from a week in the St. Lawrence Seaway. On my boat we had: myself, Bryan, Jodi, and Justine. Mark came up for a day and did a couple of dives with us. Two other groups made the trip as well; Paul Trayner came up for a few days with his boat and several divers, as did Chris Ross. A total of 12 divers all together.
The weather was so so. It rained 50% of the time. Which didn't stop us from diving. We're going to get wet anyway. Justine did the most dives. She got in 19. She also participated in the last Jodrey dive. She can now wear the T-shirt.
Nothing exciting happened this trip. There were no NDE's (near death experiences). No boats were crashed, no lower units vaporized by seaway rocks. The closest we came to an incident was when, on the trip up, in blinding rain, and pitch blackness, I got the truck and trailer into the wrong lane at the Mass Pike toll booth. I had to park the truck and run over to a lane that was open and grab the ticket. It caused quite a scene. A whole line of cars formed behind me thinking the lane was open. In my defense I had two navigators both yelling different directions. "Go to this lane." "Go to that lane." The forth member of our party rode all the way up and back in the cabin of my boat. I only have a two door truck and we're trying to save money so we crammed three in the cab for the 8 hour trip. Someone had to ride in the boat, which I think might be illegal. He became known as the "boat troll" because we think he went feral in there.
Jodi took some great underwater pictures. Even without a flash. I'll send some of them out in future stories. We did two awesome dives that I'll write about. Bryan and I did several dives recovering artifacts from the rigging of the VICKERY, and we also did a dive on the JODREY, locating the section of hull where the massive 700 foot ship split in two.
Read them if you dare.
~j~
First Story-
On August 17, 1889, the wooden three masted schooner A. E. VICKERY stopped into Clayton NY and picked up a local pilot. The Captain of the VICKERY was fearful of passing thru the treacherous "American Narrows" at night. I think he should have just waited till morning because the "pilot" crashed the schooner at the entrance to the narrows. The ship sinking, the Captain ran to his cabin to fetch his revolver, presumably to shoot the "pilot" in the head. ( you gotta love the 1800's). The first mate, who was also Captain's brother, knocked the gun into the river.
Today, the intact remains of the Vickery rests next to the very reef that sent the ship to her watery grave. The top of the bow has 60 feet of water above it and the stern, 100 feet. The deepest part of the ship is the rudder at 130 feet. The wreck lies on a 45 degree slope. Several years ago I took a foray down the slope, aft of the ship's stern. I encountered what I thought was a grouping of logs. Looking closer, I noticed that one of the logs had what appeared to be a crows nest attached to it. These weren't logs at all but the remains of the ships three masts. On subsequent trips to the seaway, I discovered that the masts still have all the rigging that was standard for a sailing ship. Deadeye's of all sizes, block and tackle, bulleyes, just a treasure trove of stuff.
It would take some work to remove these artifacts, freshwater does nothing to the steel cables that hold this stuff to the ship. Deadeye's of a similar aged saltwater wreck would come off in your hands. Plus, did I mention that most of the artifacts lie at a depth of 170 feet?
Well, this year we armed ourselves with cable cutters, hammers, and chisels and we even set aside some of our doubles filled with trimix for the recovery. All told it took us three dives to recover the artifacts you see in the pictures. Bryan and I got the most stuff on an air dive we did with single 120's the last day. Bryan worked the cable cutters while I held the light and steadied the treasure.
Both of us are over breathing the regulators. The air at that depth is thick and chewy. It has the consistency of oatmeal. It's hard just to move it in and out of your lungs normally. We're working at over six atmospheres, it's a chore just to breathe. The air is pressurized to over 90 psi. The harder we work the more the narcosis insidiously invades our brains. It's harder to focus, harder to concentrate on the task at hand.
Did I mention the current? All this is taking place in a two knot current. And pitch black silted out conditions. The first three pictures are of us working the deadeye's at 170 feet. Yes, they aren't the best pictures. They are dark. They are out of focus. Hard to see and make sense of. Like something that Hieronymus Bosch or Salvador Dali would paint. But, do you know what? That is what it was like to do the dive. The pictures represent almost exactly what your brain is recording in those conditions, clouded with nitrogen narcosis. On the boat after the dive, Bryan told me he thought he had snipped off one of my fingers down there. That's how narced he was. He thinks he cut off one of my fingers and he goes right back working on the cable.
Bryan drops the wire cutters when he can no longer get enough air through the reg. I take up the work on what would be our forth deadeye. I'm also exhausted. I reach for his pressure gage and computer. He's been down here 5 minutes longer than I. 1200 psi left. His computer (one of them) says at this depth, he as 8 minutes of air remaining. He has 44 minutes of deco. I look at him and point to the surface. With him gone, I can do nothing with the last cable. No one to hold the light, no one to steady the cable. I head for the surface as well.
Like that is an easy chore in itself. Loaded down with tools, and artifacts we claw our way, against the current now, back to the stern of the VICKERY. We then climb the side of the hull to the main deck where we strap on our two 40cf deco bottles. Now we have even more gear to drag thru the water against the ( did I mention the two knot current before) current. We work our way to the bow of the wreck. But, our boat isn't anchored on the wreck. It's actually almost the length of a football field away, tied into a permanent mooring on the reef that the VICKERY smashed into. We have to pull ourselves across the void between wall and wreck.
We arrive totally exhausted. We lay on the mooing, we clip into it actually, and decompress on straight oxygen for the next 30 minutes. I included some pictures of the stuff we brought up, mostly on that last dive. Justine recovered several nice things on the wreck itself. Naturally, after the photo session we returned all of the artifacts to their exact location. Federal (in this case State) regulations require it. Leave only bubbles and take only pictures. That's our motto.
There are still almost half a dozen deadeye's remaining that we haven't brought to the surface and taken pictures of.
We'll be going to the seaway again next year.
Come help us recover deadeye's (for photographic purposes only) if you dare.
This is an interesting clip of a dive to the bow of the ROY A. JODREY. It's not your typical wreck dive. There's no mooring or line attached to the wreck. The 640 foot ore carrier crashed into Wellesley Island. The southern shore of the island is a sheer rock wall that drops straight down to 220 feet. The current rips through this area. I anchor my boat in a little cove about 200 feet up current of the JODREY. I throw an anchor off the stern and tie the bow to a tree on shore. I take care not to hit the bottom as I back roll into the water.
Today Bryan and I plan to explore the main deck of the wreck out to where the ship has broken in two. You see, the bow and stern of the wreck lies at a depth of 220 feet. The center section of the ship is unsupported by the bottom because the depth is approaching 260 feet. Over time this has caused the ship to split apart. This is our objective for today's dive.
I think the decent to the wreck is the most enjoyable part of the dive. We push ourselves over car sized rocks to the edge of the drop off at 30 feet. It's here that the full force of the current grabs us. Each of us has twin steel 112 cf tanks strapped to our backs and two 40 cubic foot stage bottles attached to our sides. We have only a short time to get ourselves to the correct depth (146 ft) before we're swept past the wreck. Which has happened to us.
But not today.
We reach the correct depth. The vis. is fantastic today, above the sun is shining, not a cloud in the sky. I can just make out the communications mast of the JODREY, it's ghostly shadow 30 feet away. We push off the wall and fight the current to the mast. Working quickly in the current we attach a strobe to the tower, our beacon of hope and a bread crumb back to safety.
That done, I begin the decent to the main deck. We pass the Upper Deck at 150, the Wheel House deck at 160. On the Texas Deck we slip into a stairwell and escape the worst of the current. Continuing down we pass the Fo'cle Deck and Spar Deck. Finally, we're gliding down the last stairwell and alight on the Main Deck. A quick check of my computers tell me that it's taken 9 minutes of my planned 30 minute bottom time to arrive here. I've already passed into decompression. My depth gage reads 191 feet. I survey the surroundings. Any semblance of ambient light has long since gone. The immense deck lies at 45 degree angle, with the port side being the highest. I can just make out the silhouette of the crane to my left and the gapping maw of the first cargo hold. A place where we've yet to venture.
We exchange "OK" signs and begin our exploration. After 100 feet the pipe that I've been following connects to a pulley and on the other side of that are three cables or ropes. After looking at photographs, Bryan and I are convinced that we were on the pulley system that lowered and raised the crane. As I transition onto the three cables I check my computer again. We're at 240 feet and 15 minutes into the dive. We must turn around shortly. The cables are now headed straight down. Other than a faint outline of the portside hull I can see no other wreckage. I have one of the brightest lights on the market and I can illuminate no part of the wreck. I've never seen such utter blackness. The beam of my 50 watt light is swallowed by this black malevolence. We descend the cable. No end in sight. The beginnings of fear start to grip the base of my spine. It's at this moment all our dive computers begin to wail a warning tone. It's like a cold, slap in the face. My body reflexively tightens. A quick check reveals that we've passed the maximum depth we can safely breath the mix we're on. 18% oxygen and 40% Helium. Our depth gages have passed 260 feet. I begin the ascent, but not before I steal one last glimpse of the stygian blackness that calls us to our doom.
But not today.
We reach the forward section of the ship with 5 minutes to spare. I spend the time in quite reflection. At exactly 30 minutes I remove and shut off the strobe, our life line to the surface. I span the 30 feet back to the wall with a few well timed fin kicks. A check of my computers tell me that I can't even decompress on the gas in my main cylinders. It only calculates out to 999 minutes. After that it just flashes 999. It's flashing 999 at me now. At 98 feet I switch to nitrox 40. The computers tell me if I stay on this mix I can get out of the water in nearly 90 minutes. I do three minute stops every 10 feet, all the way up to 40 feet. The whole time up I seek shelter behind natural rock formations from the roaring current. Sometimes, I'm forced to just cling to the unprotected rock wall, a flag in a maelstrom.
At 40 feet I switch to 70% nitrox. I have 40 minutes of decompression remaining. I slide into the cove out of the current. I remove all unneeded equipment and clip it off to lines attached to the stern of my boat. I slowly clear the computers. I try to make sense of the dive. Did we reach the break? Is that why I could see no wreckage. Why were we deeper that I've ever seen on my depth recorder? Just how much farther down could we have gone? What's down there? So many questions. So few answers. I stay an extra 10 minutes. I exit the water and note I had a run time of 107 minutes. Thank God for the relief valve I installed in the suit.
We disconnect from the tree and slowly drift over the corroding hulk of the Roy A. Jodrey. A wreck that just moments ago tried to make Bryan and I permanent residents.
But not today.
Dive with us if you dare.
The pictures are from some of the other great wrecks of the St Lawrence Seaway. Thanks Jodi.
Today we did a charter to the Nauset Barges and a wooden schooner loaded with foundation blocks. Surface temp was 65 degrees and bottom temp was 45 degrees. Depth, 110+FSW. Visibility on the surface was fantastic, close to 50 feet. On the bottom we had 20-25 tops. I jumped in first to set the hook. I had arranged with another divemaster and an instructor to pull the hook when all the divers were headed up.
I did a 32 minute bottom time on 30% nitrox. I started up the line with 18 minutes of deco, which I planned to half with 100% oxygen. I got the first warning sign that things were about to go bad when I reached my 50 foot deep stop. The line was no longer at a 45 degree angle. I put out over 150 foot of line (scope) and it should be at an angle. The line was straight up and down and tight as a guitar string. I looked up and immediately grasped the situation. I knew I could correct the problem with a little post dive brief during the surface interval. "What's the worse that can happen", I thought to myself. Man, I gotta stop using that phrase, every time I say it, or think it, the worse DOES happen.
The team below pulls the hook. In two seconds I go from a comfortable deco stop at 57 feet to a rapid, uncontrolled ascent that I didn't get under control until 34 feet. It happened in the blink of an eye. My computer is screaming at me, I'm dumping air from the dry suit, I'm dumping air from the BC. I'm trying to pull myself back down the line. And in hindsight, that was a terrible thing to do, I was just making it all that much worse for the divers below. Next, I see the divers below, all three of them, in an uncontrolled ascent and a steel grapnel hook, rocketing directly towards me. THAT'S IT. I'M OUT, and I part company with the line and the safety of the boat. ALL the divers below abandon the hook and dive for the depths. All of us lost at sea, over half the charter is now adrift and separated from one another. And it happened in the blink of an eye.
I'm adrift three miles east of Nauset. I have 18 minutes of decompression to do and I just did a rapid uncontrolled ascent that may, or may not, trigger a bends hit. I drop down to below 40 feet and establish neutral buoyancy , which by the way, is not that easy with no reference in ANY direction.
I've been enrolled in a technical dive class in hopes of becoming a technical dive instructor and I've done nothing but train for these types of situations. I deployed my lift bag and shot it to the surface. That one sentence sounds pretty easy. But there's a lot involved in pulling it off correctly. I reeled myself up towards the surface and at 19 feet I switched over to 100% O2 and started decompressing. I doubled the time that the computer said because of the rapid ascent.
The lift bag alerted the boat of my location and eventually they came and picked me up. We then began the process of locating all the divers lost at sea.
We dodged a bullet today. I was the only diver to deploy a lift bag. The seas were calm and there was no fog, so locating lost divers was not an issue. No one got bent or embolized. One diver violated his computer but never had a problem with it. Now I have to add one more thing to cover on the dive brief.
The day I stop training, the day I take this stuff for granted, is the day I quit diving. You never know what can happen. Yes, we regrouped, debriefed and did the second dive.
The pictures are from past trips, with better vis.
Come diving wrecks if you dare. (but practice first)
I've been doing a crazy amount of diving the last 10 days. No time to write any stories. I'll try to catch up. Last Saturday I did a charter to the Aransas and Perkiomen. It was the bad tide, so I was expecting strong current and poor vis. The current wasn't too bad and the vis was over 40 feet. On the Aransas I recovered half a dozen spoon and forks. I found a chunk of brass that was so encrusted that I had no idea what lay beneath. After cleaning, it turned out to be a beautiful broach with the profile of a woman. It was one of my best finds on the wreck. The customers caught tons of lobster.
Sunday we had the club cookout at Scargo Lake in Dennis. Several of us dove in the pond. Vis was pretty poor at depth, a couple of inches. They were good training dives.
Last Wed several of us headed to the shipwreck Trojan. We never made it, once we cleared Cutty Hunk, the last island in the Elisabeth Island chain, the seas, driven by a stout NW wind were mountainous. We aborted the attempt. We then tried to locate two wrecks in the lee of wind of those islands. No luck, nothing on the sounder and bounce dives turned out to be fruitless. By now it's noon and no one but me has been wet so we head for home and dive the wreck of the Kershaw, off the Vineyard on the way. It's a Port Hunter sized wreck in 80 feet of water. You would think that it was deep enough to leave intact. The Army Corps of Engineers must have signed out too much TNT that day because they vaporized the wreck. The only thing I recognized down there were the massive boilers. Everything else, just twisted steel.
Two days ago I did two charters to the YSD-56 (Navy salvage barge), and Herman Winter (steel freighter) It was a long day. 13 hours on the water. The morning tide had vis in access of 20 feet. The afternoon tide was less than half that.
Yesterday most of the instructor's and one or the divemaster's from the store decided to go out for a fun dive on the Endicott. The Summer is almost over and yesterday was just too beautiful not to dive. We got to the site and there was a charter boat already on it. Rather than try and raft on to them we headed two miles north to the wreck of the Mars. The Mars is a deep and scary dive. At high tide in the washout under the stern you can get almost 130 feet. Vis on the wreck is normally 2 to 3 feet. And pitch black. Some might call it stygian blackness. I did 42 minutes on the bottom and had 22 minutes of decompression. I used a bottom mix of Nitrox 31% and deco'd on 100% O2. After a dive on that wreck I always feel like I've cheated death somehow. On the way in we were going to do a quick dive on the Endicott, but that charter boat was still there. We went to a wreck symbol on the chart and it appeared that there was a wreck down there. We couldn't hook it so we tossed the hook in the water with a float tied to the other end and I jumped in to do the tie in. Depth was 80 feet, I did a search in 5 foot of vis using a reel tied off to the hook. The wreck turned out to be big rocks. This was the perfect opportunity for me to practice shooting a lift bag to the surface and carry out remote decompression. I'm filling the lift bag when I realize the up line has become detached from the bag. The bag is trying to blow me to the surface while I'm trying to attach the line. I finally did. The ascent was the best part of the dive. On my deep stop, I was surrounded by a school of carnivorous sharks (dog fish are a type of shark) and on the 15 foot stop I got into a school, a huge school, of blue fish. All the while free floating in the current in Cape Cod Bay.
The pictures are of past trips to the Mars.
I talked with Mark briefly last night. He was still several miles east of Nantucket, returning from The Doria. They were tied into the bow this year. Mark said the vis on the wreck was over 50 feet. Marcie recovered a bunch of stuff. A chandelier, some bottles, reception was poor, I didn't catch most of what he was saying. I'll get Mark to write a report and forward to you.
Summer is almost over. Come dive with us if you dare.
A couple of disclaimers first. The big lobsters that Bryan and I are holding. WE didn't catch them. We both hate taking the big ones. They deserve to live. Someone else caught them, we just held them up for the camera. The monster I'm holding on the bottom. I made Jodi go back to the boat and get her camera. Once the pictures were taken I released the lobster. I didn't put him back in the hole, I swam him off the wreck and let him go. Lastly, I can't tell you the names of the wrecks. They are virgin sites.
Today, I was a "double boat mooch" God I hate it so. We left for Chatham at 6 am. We got a couple miles from the tip of Monomoy when Bryan and Jodi's boat died. What is with the boats? We call Sea Tow. We wait. It's boring. Bryan and I suit up and dive in the mud in Nantucket sound. That was boring.
I really want to dive so I call up a friend. He brings his boat down to Saquatucket and off we go for the afternoon slack. Man what a dive. We hit three wrecks. Do you see all the brass that's on the schooner? Can you see the rows of brass spikes? How about the brass fitting on the rudder post? Do you see the artifacts I recovered after an hour of pounding? Here I am, beating the last bolt out of my find. I am 4 minutes from deco and I have less than 500 psi remaining. Do you think I'm going to swim away, leaving it there? With one bolt remaining?
Six minutes later, it comes free. I have 300 psi left, I'm at almost 50 feet and I have six minutes of deco. I still have to "pop the hook" I cleared the computer, no chance to build in any safety stop. I brought skip breathing to a whole new level. I was taking three breathes a minute. I was beginning to see things. And hear things. Someone telling me to "Swim into the light". I now know what "brimstone" smells like. As I type this I can actually feel the nitrogen bubbling out of my eyes.
I gotta tell ya. Descending down the line on a virgin site is an adrenalin rush like nothing else. To be the first set of eyes to see a sunken shipwreck in over a century is just incredible.
All artifacts were returned to their exact position after the photo's were taken.
Dive with us................ if ................ you..............dare.
Today we headed out to dive the Horatio Hall and the Pendleton.
The forecast called for light N winds between 5 and 10 knots. Well before we even left the dock it was evident that was not the case. The winds were out of the N all right, but they were blowing a steady 20. We got about 2 miles from the Hall and the seas were running a good 4 to 5.
We turned around and headed right to the Pendleton. It was actually fun to dive that wreck at slack for a change. I searched the whole wreck and caught 3 lobsters. Every other lobster I pulled out of it's hole was loaded with eggs. I had a feeling that I would land a big one on this dive. There is one spot on this wreck that no one else knows about. There is a tiny opening, and once you get inside it opens to a large space. It's about 20 feet long and inside there is usually a big lobster living in there. Well, sadly there was nothing inside.
Because of the conditions we opted for a dive on the wooden schooner we located in the spring. It's just a tiny fragment of a ship, really, and in 20 some odd feet of water not much of a dive to take customers. The conditions being what they were, it was that or nothing.
The pictures are from the spring. Ah, that was so much fun recovering all that stuff. A spike came up today just the same.
Come dive with me when conditions are better if you dare.
Today we left Ryder's Cove in Chatham with two boats to complete Technical Dive Training with Dan Crowell and Rick Marshall. For those of you who don't know Dan, he was the former owner of the Seeker dive charter boat of Doria fame. He's made over 200 dives on the Doria and produced a half dozen or so documentaries for the History channel on shipwrecks.
Anyway, on the trip out of Pleasant Bay my motor blew up and it ate itself. Well, it ate a piston. Can you tell from the pictures which one it is? I know you can't see it, but it cracked the cylinder liner in three places and it even cracked the engine block in one place all the way thru. For those of you who know nothing about engine mechanics........that's bad.
Ouch. It's gonna be about $5,000 to replace the whole power head. As most of you know, I'm retired now and I can't afford that. So if there any rich Doctor, Lawyer, Judge, or ex crew chiefs or other past boat mooches that have been diving off my boat for nothing but a small pittance gas fee for the last decade or so, now is the time to step to the plate and "help a brother out"
Yesterday we did a charter to the YSD-56 (Navy Salvage Barge) and the Herman Winter (Old steel freighter). Both very easy dives (or so I thought) for beginners. The pictures were taken last year by Dave Wood.
I jumped in and did the tie-in and went inside to look for artifacts. At the 25 minute mark I left the interior to check on the customers. There was only five of them down there. An alarm bell went off in my head and I flew up the anchor line. As I broke the surface I can hear Capt Hook, Billy, screaming at the top of his voice. I follow his gaze and 500 feet off the back of the boat is a tiny speck that I take as a diver just floating away in the current. I get on the boat, strip off the dive gear as I listen to Billy tell me how this diver entered the water not holding the down line. He just starts drifting away. We have THREE HUNDRED feet of safety line trailing the boat and it's 5 feet from this guy and Billy spends the whole time yelling at him to "grab the line". He never makes a move for it.
I jump in the water and go out to the end of the safety line and try to get this guy to at least respond to a verbal command. Nothing. I agonize on what to do. Do I leave the boat? Billy is all by himself now and what if something else happens? Who will un-tie the wreck? As I agonize over what to do, (man I'm wishing I had a snorkel) Billy starts adding line to the ball. All the dock line, another 150 feet of unused grapnel line, some of our anchor line. Now we have 700 feet of line out and still I'm not to this guy. But, I'm only 20 feet from him. I scream at him to "swim to me". He's slowly making headway.
Finally he reaches me, and I just can't even get into it with him why he did that. He's all safe and everything and seems none the worse for wear, so I tell him we now have to pull ourselves 700 feet back to the boat. All the while I'm wishing I had that snorkel. ( wreck/tech divers don't wear them) I'm about half way there, and I'm really working hard to breathe without that stupid tube when I feel the dude pulling on my fin. I really don't want to talk with this guy right now so I ignore him. Now he's really yanking on my fin. "That's it" I think. He's gone into cardiac arrest right here on the line.
I turn around and this guy says to me.......................... "Would you like to borrow my snorkel"............................
I look at it. It's three feet long and some heinous color. It has this giant contraption on the top to keep the tiniest of drops from entering the tube. All I can picture is me, dead on some dock of a heart attack. A 19 year old Coast Guardsman is saying " We can't fit him in the body bag" And someone else saying. "Take off that three foot, pink snorkel." Then they take pictures of me dead on the dock with the pink, three foot long, snorkel with the giant contraption to keep the water out.
The picture makes the paper and here are the captions that race thru my head as I pull myself back to the boat.
"Diver's neck snaps from over sized Snorkel".
"Great White attracted to over-sized, giant pink snorkel. Diver eaten."
"Diver has heart attack trying to swim through the water with massive snorkel attached to head."
I passed on the borrowing of the snorkel.
Come dive with us if you dare. (leave your pink snorkel at home)
I'm exhausted. I've done three charters in the last two days and I have another in the morning. I think I'm going to come out of retirement and go back to work for the government. It was easier.
Yesterday we did wrecks off Monomoy. The Aransas and the Perkiomen. I estimate the visibility on both wrecks at better than 40 feet. No one has been diving out there (to my knowledge) in the last ten days. Both wrecks were packed with lobster. The customers came up with a 16 pounder, a 12, and two others over 10. Plus another 30. I followed after them and cleaned up what they missed, which wasn't much. I got 7 and gave them to Billy, the captain.
Today we ran two charters to a wreck we rarely ever do, the Henry Endicott. It's a schooner barge loaded with cobble stones that sank off Manomet in about 90 feet of water. The water temp was 44 and the vis was about 8 feet. On the second dive I spied a huge lobster, it might just be the biggest I've ever seen. I bet it was pushing 20 pounds. As you know you can't take lobsters that size in the bay anymore. So this guy has a chance to get even bigger. WOW!
The pictures are old ones. All taken on the Endicott. Some, really old. There's one of me in my old red DUI drysuit. That was three drysuits ago!!!!!! My favorite picture is the second (I think it's the second) There are two divers just aft of the Endicott's stem. One diver, me, is illuminating the aft towing bitt that's just laying in the mud. The picture to me just embodies an northeast wreck dive. Dark, dismal, little color.
Sometimes these monster lobsters stake out a hole and live in it for years. I remember in the 80's a monster lived in the starboard stuffing box on the Aransas for two seasons. No one (to my knowledge) ever caught it.
If you want I will take you out to see this lobster this week. Take a picture of it!
When the retractable wheel on the trailer broke on us at 5 something in the morning I should have taken it as the omen it was and gone home and back to bed.
We get to the dock and I discover my pole spear missing. Another sign. How can I catch lobster for the customers with no pole spear. I had an offer from one of my friends on the trip to borrow his. I gladly accept and he hands me a coat hanger. Now you've all seen the pictures of the lobster we catch off Chatham. We're holding up 9 pounders. 12 pounders. 16 pounders. You don't catch a 16 pound lobster with a coat hanger. When he wasn't looking I threw it overboard. He also took pictures of the dives but never sent them to me. I included some pictures from other dives of what they would have looked like. As you can see the vis is heinous.
Our first dive was on the 5 (or 4) masted schooner West Virginia. I caught two lobsters. I passed rib upon rib, stuffed with bug I couldn't get my hands on. Maybe I should have kept the coat hanger.
The second dive was on the Pendleton. How to describe this dive...... (Oh, he did send me pictures of the dives, just now, so I'll use them. Thanks Dave!) Describing the dive............. your in a cup of brown coffee. The coffee cup is in a washing machine. (because of the 5 foot ground swells sloshing you back and forth.) In the washing machine with you is tons of jagged metal (the Pendleton is a blown up scrap heap) and also in there with you is rope and monofilament and nets and more line and more nets. Oh, and the washing machine just went on spin cycle cause the current is running a little over two knots.
(The pictures of the mass of tubes are from the Pendleton's collapsing boiler.)
I get to the bottom and can't leave the hook. Not one of the customers clipped in a carabineer (except Dave) and I have to stay there and count heads lest I pull the hook and leave one of them. I sit and I sit. Like a pin ball, bouncing off the jagged metal in the surge. They all head up and I pull the hook. I dodge metal and nets the whole length of the wreck. Just when I think I'm home free it happens. The hook snags a big ball of net and line. The 10 thousand pound boat in the 2+ knot current stretches the line like the guide wire on a carrier landing. There's no way I can pull the hook back against such force. I cut the nets and line.
That line. It's a line from an active lobster trap. Guess who was watching the whole operation? Who sees his lobster buoy float away. The lobsterman that owns it, that's who. He charges the dive boat, dive flag up and all, screaming that we cut his line. Nearly rams the boat. Words fly. Threats are issued. Pictures of the boat are taken.
Meanwhile I stick the hook on the very last piece of wreckage. It's holding by two tines of the hook. Now I figure I'll sit here and try and catch at least one lobster. The hook is hanging on one piece of wreckage, suspended six feet off the bottom. A little voice inside says "Don't swim under that hook" I listened to the voice, and it's a good thing I did because the force of all the current straightened out the tines and the hook popped free. It was gone from my sight in one second. I chased after it to no avail. I can only hope they notice my bubbles aren't on the hook anymore. I am determined to catch one lobster. I hunt for one on the whole southern side of the Pendleton. I catch two. Only to throw one back that turned out to have a questionable V notch later. I did get my one lobster.
I surface 15 minutes later only to see the dive boat, a tiny speck on the horizon. At least 15 miles away. All right..... give me one small exaggeration.............. I deploy the safety sausage and they finally see me like three hours later. All right, two exaggerations. It is no exaggeration that I don't like drifting......alone............. on the surface.............. off Chatham..... in the summer.
Come visit me in federal prison if you dare. (sabotaging lobster gear is a federal crime I think)
Saturday the charter ran to the Nauset barges. They're my favorite wrecks on the cape. They have the best sea life and visibility and they're not too deep. We had flat calm seas and Finback whales swam by the boat all day. Vis. on the bottom was not the best. 20 feet, I'd guess, and dark. Water temp was 42 degrees.
The plan was to dive Barge #703 and relocate to a different barge or maybe the stone schooner. Well, plans change. It's almost impossible for me to be the first one in the water to set the hook and be the last one up to pull the hook. Because of the depth and the decompression obligation I can't really stay longer than 30 minutes. At the 23 minute mark the last divers made it down to the wreck. I had briefed that the last group down might have to pull it, and as I headed up the line for my decompression stop I just hoped for the best.
Sadly, the divers in question botched the hook pull and it landed in a huge ball of dragger net. Picture 4, I think, shows the net it landed in. We all assumed that the hook had been pulled correctly. Upon my return to the boat my fin strap broke. Bryan, Jodi, Justine, and Roger were also diving the barge that day and they pulled over to us for the surface interval. I handed my fin to Bryan and he agreed that it could be temp. repaired with some band ties. He was handing my fin back to "Capt Hook" when I said "What's the worst that can happen." Well, the worst that can happen is that they dropped my fin into the 120 foot depths. Then they laughed about it, saying, "Hahahahahah that's the worst that can happen."
I'm like, there goes $200 dollars. I head to the grapnel hook and start to pull it up when I realize that we are in fact still hooked to the wreck. I gotta go back in anyway and pull the hook so I might as well go look for my fin. In fact all the divers agree to just do a second dive on the #703.
This time I go over the hook pulling procedures a little more in-depth with a dedicated hook pulling team, and off I go hoping for the best. I get to the bottom, only to discover the hook tangled into the net. With the utmost of care I unfoul the hook and move it to a safer location. I head out into the sand in the direction I think my fin is at. I run a line in the not so good vis accompanied by a whole school of dog fish. About 200 feet out I spot the fin.
I'm so happy!!!!!! I go back to the wreck and do a quick penetration of "A" deck, looking for artifacts. At the 32 minute mark I head up for 27 minutes of decompression. I cut that time in half by using 100% oxygen. Jodi took some of the pictures, the rest are from a bunch of different people over the years. Dave Wood, and Nate.
This is prime dive season. It doesn't get any better than this. Come with us if you dare.
Last Wednesday I did two charters. The morning was to the Herman Winter and the YSD 56. The HW grounded on Devil's Bridge off Gay Head MV. It was a 400 foot freighter. There's not much left. I recovered a brass coupling. It'll look great when it's all cleaned up. The YSD 56 was a Navy salvage barge, it lies off Nomans Island west of the Vineyard. It's an easy wreck to penetrate.
That afternoon we did at trip out to the Port Hunter.
A sidebar about the charter boat. Our new captain, Billy. He's never missed catching the wreck on the first toss of the grapnel hook. We've done like twenty trips together. His new nickname is Captain Hook. Hahahhahahahaha
Today I did a rare trip on my boat just for fun. Every year I catch lobster for a friends 4th of July cookout. Sadly, this friend no longer dives. I go out and catch lobster for him anyway. I feel sorry for him. It's not that he can't dive. It's just that he won't make the time for it.
Every year I go to this one wreck that I consider the best lobster dive on Cape Cod. I won't name it. You know, federal regulations won't allow me to. I only dive it once a year. Man does it hold some lobster. So few people know about it. I do want to thank one of my friends for not going to it for the last several weeks. I told him about my party and he laid off it. Thanks man. It's all yours again.
You can see by the pictures that we killed it. Look at the bug we took off this beautiful wooden schooner. It had to have been a 4 or 5 masted massive ship. And one other secret wreck as well! This is what hours pulling a side scan will get you. Your own, personal lobster supermarket.
Look at the fog. You can't see 10 feet off the side of the boat. We're all squinting because above us the sun is out. The old timers out of Chatham used to call this "black Fog" It's some scary shit. You don't get back to the anchor line and your never going to find the boat. You'd still be out there tonight. This is why Cape Cod has like 8 million shipwrecks. Can you imagine a 150 years ago and everything traveled by boat? Can you imagine traveling in fog like that with no loran? No GPS?? No Radar????
Nothing but a compass and God knows what else. There are so many wrecks out there.
It turned out to be an expensive day for me. My current line rapped around my depth sounder sending unit and ripped the wires out of it. I'll never get just a sending unit, I'll have to buy a whole new sounder.
All told we caught 20 lobsters. The two biggies weighted 12 and 9 lbs.
Come help me install a new depth sounder if you dare.
Saturday I dive mastered a charter out to the Horatio Hall and the Perkiomen. Two steel passenger steamers that sank in 1909 and 1885. Surface conditions were perfect. There were no winds all day, the sea was mirror flat. I threw the grapnel hook into the water and could see 20 or 30 feet down the line. Sadly, when I descended down to set the hook conditions worsened as I approached the bottom. I passed thru the thermocline into colder water and the vis went to crap. 10 to 15 feet at most. We had almost two hours of slack for some strange reason. We did an hour on the Hall and moved the boat two miles and still entered the water in total slack.
I recovered a nice brass artifact on the Hall and caught 4 lobsta. The biggest being nine pounds. I caught about six more or so on the Perkiomen. One of the customers, a veteran Chatham wreck diver came up with the 16 pound monster in the picture.
Bryan, Jodi, Roger, and Justine were diving on the Aransas that day as well. They caught 7 lobsters. We had a cookout that night and six of us ate two nine pounders.
The last three pictures I acquired at great personal cost of the shark attack that happened off Monomoy Friday. A seal watching boat happened to witness a 15 foot Great White bite a 400 pound gray seal in half. I'm sure we all read about that in the papers.
July is the best month to dive the wrecks. The water is the clearest (usually) and the lobstering is the best.
Today I dove with Dave Foley, David Wood, and John Billings on my boat. We left from Ryder's cove in Chatham. It was a piece of cake getting in and out of Pleasant Bay. It's not as sanded in as in years past.
We dove the stone schooner first. Sadly, the vis was pretty poor for this site. 15 or 20 feet. Maybe less. Bottom temp was 42 degrees. My computer marked 57 degrees on the decompression stop I did at 15 feet. Dave located a brass artifact that federal regulations prevent me from discussing. John flooded his suit on this dive and was done for the day. I spent my whole dive in the sand looking for something that broke free from my liftbag the last trip out. I didn't find it.
The next dive was on one of the Perth Ambroy barges. One we don't explore often. The #766. The bow and stern are relatively intact. The center section is collapsed. The vis. was much better here, about 20 to 25 feet. In one of the pictures is a lobster trap just loaded with lobster. Yes, we opened the trap and took the biggest lobster. If one of us had brought a catch bag we would have taken them all. It was packed with bug. I almost went back to the boat for one, it was just too much work. Relax, it wasn't anyone's trap. It was a ghost trap, entangled in the wreck and cast off by the fisherman. We left the door open so that it would not continue to catch and kill lobster. Yes, there were some dead ones in there as well.
I had a 15 minute decompression stop on this dive. I absolutely hate hanging in the open Atlantic this time of year. Even on a day where both wrecks are packed with seals. Shortly the seals won't dare swim this far off shore. We also spotted a pod of whales on the trip in. They were too far away to identify the species.
Lots of charters to these and many other of the Atlantic wrecks coming up. Sign up for one.
Sometimes people accuse me of exaggerating. I might write, "We went to the seaway with a hundred tanks." OK, so it wasn't 100 tanks. It was a bunch of tanks. I inclosed some pictures of the pile of tanks. You find 4 people that own this many tanks. I dare ya. In those tanks we had 2100 cubic feet of Helium. And 3000 cubic feet of Oxygen. And, for good measure we brought another 700 cubic feet of O2 in the big green tanks.
The second picture is the spot where (or as close to it that I could find) where Bryan got stuck. It's a picture of the collapsed crane where he tried to swim under at 210 feet.
We arrived in the St. Lawrence Seaway Monday, June 16 after an 8 hour drive from the Cape. We left at 4am. After that grueling drive I made the team, Bryan & Jodi Burnham, Mark Bramblett and myself set up all the tanks for the picture. I told them they had to do it. No one would believe we brought so many tanks up there. At 3 that day we headed down river to the wreck of the Daryaw. A 300 foot freighter that smashed into a reef and sank in 94 feet of water. A great warm-up dive for things to come. We all took note of the horrible underwater visibility-15 feet. I've never seen anything quite like it up here. That night, the TV said it was from all the rain. It's washed all this nitrogen into the water, causing an Algae bloom. Me? I think the Zebra mussels are dying off. On the wreck at nearly one hundred feet it was dark and gloomy. I sat there on the bottom trying to imagine what it would be like on the Jodrey, at two hundred and forty feet. It sent shivers up my spine. It really did.
The next day dawned dark and dreary. Overcast sky's and light rain falling. After breakfast, we motored the boat over to Wellesley Island and tied off to a tree just a few hundred yards up current of the Coast Guard Station. More on them later.............
The Jodrey sank right next to the station. It crashed into the island and slid down the sheer rock wall that is the shoreline of Wellesley Island. A straight plunge to 240 feet. I suit up first and intend a solo dive on the wreck. I'm not impressed with the vis. It's only 15 feet here as well. And the current is about twice what we're used to. Not quite Chatham-like but still pretty strong for lugging around twin steel tanks and two stage bottles filled with decompression gas. I ride the current out to the edge of the abyss and look for the line that will take me right to the Jodrey's radar tower at 143 feet. No line. It's gone. The wreck is actually down current several hundred feet and the line follows a series of ledges down the face of the wall. It's a Godsend on the ascent because the ledges provide shelter from the ripping current and a convenient location to do the various gas switches we do on the way up. For those of you interested in the technical side of things, we dove on 18% O2 and 40% He in the doubles. We decompressed on 40% Nitrox, which we switched to at 100 feet and a second switch at 40 feet to 70% Nitrox. Some of the team also did a 3rd gas switch at 20ft to 100% O2. We would try and leave 1800 psi in the doubles and top that up with air. We could get a second dive on each set of doubles. The resulting mixture being 19% O2 and about 24% He. It would keep us clear headed down to 180 feet on the second dive. Anyway............... where was I..................
The current has me. I have seconds to press on or abort the dive. I press on. From memory I locate the different ledges. The first at 50, the second at 70 and the last at 90. When I come to the end of the 90 foot ledge, the wall becomes bowl shaped and indented. As one descends from 90ft, it narrows like the sides of an hour glass. Thankfully, it's sheltered from the current. I descend into the black abyss. At 156 feet I scan into the chasm in front of me and just pick out the top of the wheel house. Pushing off from the (relative) safety off the wall I am instantly seized by the current. I fight the 20 feet to the wheel house. I climb back to the radar tower and place my strobe light, wondering if the other divers have pressed on. Hoping that they can see the strobe from the wall. That task done, I fight the current down the five upper decks to the (relative) safety of the main deck, which is sheltered from the current. The port side of which is higher than the Stbd. because the wreck lies at a 45 degree angle from horizontal.
At 184 feet I land on the main deck. It's taken me 9 minutes, 9 stressful minutes, to arrive here and I just lie there and relax. Concentrating on slowing by breathing rate to an acceptable level. Had I not had about 30 dives on this wreck I would not be here. There is no way to describe how pitch black it was. Had I not memorized every catwalk, every stairwell, every corner I turned, when the conditions were better, I would be utterly lost on this 700 foot, monster of a ship. There isn't a dive light on the market that could cut thru such utter blackness. Stygian blackness. I head for the starboard side of the hull. At 210 feet I reach it, I slide off the side of the ship, in the lee of the current and drop, to the seabed, excuse me, river bed. I can't even read my gages, it's so dark. I do 5 more dives just like this one. Sometimes I shoot video. Sometimes I hunt for artifacts. It was all such fun.
As I end my dive I pass Mark as he's about to make the leap from rock to wreck. Our expressions perfectly matched, each one of us knowing what we're both feeling. That there's not all that many people out there that could do what we're doing :) Mark, spends most of that dive running a line across the void and up a good portion of the wall so that all of us could benefit from the safety (relative) safety of a line. That's Mark. Sacrificing a dive for the good of the team.
We only had one NDE (that's Near Death Experience) on our combined 24 dives to the Jodrey. Do you remember me pointing out picture # 2. I hope it's picture #2. That collapsed crane has come to rest on the Stbd side of the main deck in over 200 feet of water. I avoid this area like the plague. Bryan, for some strange reason, known only to Bryan, decided that he should try and squeeze underneath it. We all asked him why, and his response was as we expected, " To get to the other side." Bryan gets wedged underneath the wrecked crane. This steel girder gets in the exact center of his doubles. He can't get out from underneath it. The wreck being on a 45 degree angle doesn't help. He can't go forward, that wedges him further. Oh, I should mention that he totally silts out the whole area at about 220ft. And, don't forget the stygian blackness. After several minutes of being totally jammed up, and kind of coming to grips with dying down there, he tries the one thing he hasn't yet. That's backing up, down actually. And it worked. He lives.
I'm a firm believer that we all get to make a few stupid mistakes while learning to be a wreck diver. Man, I've made them. If you've read any of my other stories, you know Mark's made them. If we don't learn the valuable lesson that we get from such errors................. a wreck like the Jodrey will eat you up and spit you out. Sooner..........or later............. It's just that simple.
Some other stories from the seaway:
Somebody reported to the Coast Guard that a boat was leaking fuel in the vicinity of the Jodrey. Guess who they go after. Who has to go over to the station and get questioned about a leaking boat? Who gets tracked down later in the day at his hotel and forced to give a fuel sample of his gas? Who gets read this official document and has to sign this document saying that if it turns out to be MY boat leaking all those hundreds of gallons that he will be forced to pay $32,000 a day till it gets cleaned up!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
HELLO..................... Coast Guard. We're diving on a 700 foot ore carrier that has been leaking fuel since the day it sank in 1974. These kids weren't even born in 1974. This would only happen to me.
Bryan is the only one on the boat and.........after putting on all that gear, realizes he needs to get into my cabin for God only knows what. He gets stuck. Twists his leg trying back out of the cabin and then falls over backward, with all that gear, and is stuck there.
Bryan is the only one on the boat and he can't reach his primary second stage. He puts the secondary in his mouth and rolls into the water, safe in the knowledge that Jodi will retrieve it for him once in the water. A Zebra mussel was in that secondary regulator and when he rolled off the boat it slid out of the reg. and into his mouth. He breathed it in and it got stuck in his throat. I guess you could call that another NDE.
The last picture. Look at the size of that snake. It has to be poisonous. It attacked me the last day of the trip. Anybody tells you I screamed like a little girl is a liar. If they produce video of it, it was doctored. Anyone who could do a free ascent onto the Jodrey in stygian blackness would not scream at the site of a little snake.
Here's some pictures from Wednesday's Race Point dive charter. Look at the size of some of the nudibranchs. I've never seen them so big. I also included some AWESOME finds from the Aransas that were recovered last weekend. Can you imagine finding that old German Harmonica? The date on it was mid 1800's. It is a fantastic find. The guy who found it didn't know what he had. He gave it to Bryan who was captaining the boat that day. How about the Bronze doll head!!!!!!!!!!!! That is the best artifact I've ever seen come off the wreck.
The charter boat is out there today doing the Race. We're doing it tomorrow as well. I'll be the dive master tomorrow. We have one open spot. This it the last Race trip until the fall.
I leave for the St. Lawrence Seaway in a few days. We are planning on doing 24 dives on the Roy Jodrey, the 640 foot, self loading ore carrier sunk in 250 feet of water. You would not believe the number of tanks we're lugging up there. If I can get a picture of them all together I will. It's impressive.
When I get back we will be moving dive operations to the Monomoy wrecks. So far this spring the u/w visibility has been fantastic.
The same group of divers went out on the Charter Boat again today. The fact that we got three straight perfect days in a row in which to dive is a feat unto itself. Plus, they were an awesome bunch of guys. Their leader, Rick Marshall is a great guy as well, and a good friend. Our destination was the passenger steamer Aransas and one of the new schooners we just discovered. The Aransas is still yielding artifacts at a never ending rate. I saw a diver today bring up the best find I've ever seen on the wreck. I won't even go into detail. Words couldn't do it justice. I hope someone from the group can get me some pictures so I can share it with everybody. Tremendous vis again today.
The schooner again yielded deadeyes and spikes.
The pictures, sadly, reruns. No cameras today. Dave Wood took some of them, Mike Walls, and some of the silverware and stuff I got from Rick Marshall.
I'm sorry for so many stories of late. I'm retired now and all I really do is dive. I get paid to do it and it's fun. Imagine that......there are jobs out there that are FUN! If I'm not diving off my boat I'm divemastering on the charter boat.
We had the same group on yesterday's charter that we had for the lobster trip to Race Point on Fri. We were all geared up for two deep dives on the Perth Ambroy Barges and the wooden schooner we located a few years ago. Both dives were bone chilling cold. It was 41 degrees on the bottom and not much warmer on the surface. We didn't see any schools of game fish, no whales, they don't like the cold anymore than we do. There were a few seals wandering around. The visibility was phenomenal I reached 50 feet, and the whole wreck opened up before me, another 60 feet below. A section of hull plate has unsanded and revealed a porthole, a fragment of one, actually. Nothing I'd waste time on recovering.
I found another deadeye and a pulley on the wooden schooner. I shot it to the surface on a lift bag and wreck reel. Sadly, something happened and they broke free and sank back to the abyss hundreds of feet from the wreck. Stupidity on my part. The pulley would have been nice. I burn the deadeyes in the winter because they're such a hard wood and last forever. The vis, who can tell how good it was. I always take a load of crap because my estimate is better than others. I say close to 50 feet.
Dave Wood took the pictures on previous trips. He'll be putting on a slide show of all his wreck pictures taken over the last 10 years at this month's Dive Club meeting June 23 at the Hyannis Golf Club, Rt. 132 in Hyannis. It gets scary in there when the lights dim, almost like being on the wrecks.
So....................... come to the meeting if you dare.
Today we did another Race Point Lobsta dive on the charter boat. Conditions were flat calm seas, cold and rainy on the surface. Underwater we had 15 to 20 foot of vis, with the thermocline at 20 feet today. Above it, the temp was 54, below it was 41. We stayed above, in the layer of warm water and caught, God knows how many lobsters. The last few pictures are from today's take. Notice the two large coolers filled with bug. With 7 divers doing up to 4 dives, one after another, it's easy to run up that kind of body count. And for every one of those lobsters caught, I bet we swam over 50 lobsters that are to short or covered with eggs. That adds up to seeing thousands of lobsters. All the eggers are huge. 5 to 10 pounds is the norm. I think it's still too early (water too cold) for the main group of crustaceans that come in shore every season.
For those of you who's never done a Race Point lobster genocide, you gotta come ONE TIME. It's just something you never see anywhere else!!!!!!!!
The last picture is of one of my rebreather buddies, who, after telling everybody that would listen, that he was the greatest lobster catcher ever..............he caught like two. You can tell by his expression that he wasn't happy about it.
He also wanted to make sure that I write in the story that I tried to sink the truck at the boat ramp on the way home.
Yesterday we left Sandwich Boat Basin at 8 am. Sea conditions were perfect, flat calm and 0 wind, although a light rain was falling. It took us less than an hour to reach the grave of the Pinthis, the Shell oil tanker that collided with the steamer Fairfax in 1930. The Pinthis exploded, it's cargo of gasoline, emolliating the entire crew and burning and killing many on the Fairfax.
As I'm suiting up, I realize I've forgotten both my main computers. I'm stuck with a backup that doesn't allow for gas switches. I had planned to dive Nitrox 32% and decompress on 100% O2. I've been nursing a pair of dive gloves that were destroyed in the great dead-eye recovery. I've been patching them ever since. I was in the water two minutes when I realized my latest patch job failed and both gloves were slowly leaking 41 degree water. I did 30 minutes on the bottom and it felt like my hands were burning in gasoline, which for the wreck we were diving, was appropriate.
The second dive I used a backup set of gloves. We discovered a huge Wolf Fish under the rudder. Dave got some great pictures of it. Vis was pretty good on the wreck, about 20 feet. A very dark 20 feet, there was a layer of mung on the surface and with no sun and low clouds very little ambient light penetrated the 110 feet of water. A dark and gloomy dive. Dave and I both penetrated the wreck all the way to the engine room. It has collapsed somewhat and with steel banging into our tanks from above and below we opted to turn around lest we get stuck in there. I included some pictures of how tight it is.
The ride home. The sea's had kicked up. Howling winds out of the SE. We battled 4 footers all the way back. We weren't two miles from the wreck when my engine started to malfunction. It was like one of the cylinders was cutting in and out. A wire shorting on something. RPM;s dropped to 3600 even with the throttle full open. The best I could do was 13 miles an hour. It took us 2 hours to get back. 4 footers, crashing into us broadside the whole way. I get to within 3 miles of the canal and the engine starts working perfectly. Now what do I do? I leave for the seaway with the boat in 10 days. I'm so late that I have like 30 minutes to get ready for an Eric Clapton concert. Which was unbelievable, by the way!!!!!!!!!!!!
The next three days we have charters booked and perfect weather forecasted. Race Point tomorrow. The Perth Ambroy barges Saturday, and the Aransas on Sunday.
Bryan, Jodi, Mark, and myself are headed to the seaway in two weeks. We're planing on doing one warm-up dive on the Daryaw, and six trimix dives on the Jodrey. Last June was the best trip ever. The sun is as high in the ski as it ever gets and the ambient light on the wreck at 240 feet is phenomenal. The early summer vis is between 60 and 100 feet.
Sept. 7-13 2008 we'll be headed back there to dive all the wrecks. Last Sept. we went up with 4 boats and 16 people. We had such fun last year. Except for Bryan. I included a picture of him shortly after he crashed his boat.(read the full story on the website www.capediveclub.com ) I also included some pictures of "The Jimma". I just love his expressions. Anyway, we have two boats already confirmed. If you have a boat, or you're just a standard boat mooch, contact us if you're interested in going. It's probably the cheapest dive vacation you'll ever take. Even with the high cost of fuel. A two person room at Otter Creek is only $65 a night. That's 32 dollars a person, for the week it's only $150 or so. We bring our own food and cook it on the grills ( warning: please don't set fire to the side of the hotel like Chris did last year. Please move the grill away from the building and stay with it while you cook.) that are provided. There are no charter fees, the boat owners only ask for help with the gas. It's only 7 hours away. I want some new blood on this trip, people who've never been. I offer a complete money back guarantee, plus $1,000 in cash if your not totally satisfied. (note: some federal regulations and state laws prevent returning any money. Check your local laws. )
Our only rule is the mandatory 5 o'clock booze cruise that we take every night around Bolt Castle. I included a picture of the gas powered blender we use. ( warning: consuming alcohol my cause brain damage and or the bends after diving)
The pictures of lobsters didn't come from today's dive. Sadly. I used them merely to illustrate what a ton of lobsters look like.
I divemastered on the charter boat today. We did our first P-town lobster dive of the year. We set the record for number of lobster caught on a charter. We grabbed 43!!!!!!
We caught most of them between 50 and 60 feet, where the thermocline resided. Surface temp was 54. The vis was 10 feet. The bait fish were so thick it would sometimes blot out the sun from above. Occasionally, massive schools of striper would sweep in and decimate the schools of bait fish. I saw nudibranchs that were huge, 4 plus inches. I never knew they could grow to such sizes in NE.
We covered many miles of underwater terrain, just drifting in the current. The lobster just sit on the sand wall. You swim along, grab them, and huck them into the bag. It doesn't get any easier than that. Some old trash barge must have overturned at some point in the past because we found a huge area where these old toilets littered the bottom for what seemed like miles. Lobsters lived in them, on top of them, next to them. It was like lobster condominiums down there. If I didn't know better I'd swear they were placed there on purpose. Federal regulations prohibit me from giving out the location. But, if you come out with us, I think I could find it again.
We'll be diving "The Race" for another few weeks. Come with us if you have a big appetite, and of course......................if you dare.
~j~
More New Dives - May 21
I know you're all tired of hearing about new discoveries. We have another to report. I gave a friend of mine, Chuck, the numbers to the "deadeye" or "wall mart" wreck. I asked him to SIDESCAN the area, see if there's other chunks of it. That's often the case.
While doing that, he went to a spot at the tip of Monomoy where he got a "hit," sometime in the past. Sure enough another shipwreck popped up on his screen. He took me out to the site Wed. Howling current, even at slack. If there is such a thing at the tip of Monomoy, slack that is. This is a massive schooner, three times the size of the other one. The holds are packed with coal. Enough coal to heat all our homes for the rest of our lives.
The water temp was 52 (yes it's warming up!!!!!!!) and the vis was 5 feet. I found a dead seal, nothing but skin and bone. wedged under a plank. Actually, half a seal. Looked like something bit it in half. Look at the pictures. You decide. Also, more deadeyes. What am I to do with them all? Burn them for heat next winter perhaps. They just keep piling up in the basement. I gotta do something with them.
I recovered another half dozen spikes off the deadeye wreck. I did a really stupid thing. While I was raising a large section of planking, loaded with spikes, to the surface.... in current and horrible vis..... I got tangled up with the liftbag and almost shot myself to the surface. Not a cool move. My pee valve also exploded on me again. What I wouldn't give for a 20 year old's bladder again. ALAS.
And, your not going to believe this. We went over another object on the way in. Could it be another wreck?????
The charter boat did it's first official trip of the season today. A lobster dive off Manomet. We caught a few bugs, enjoyed 20 foot vis, and saw millions of nudibranchs.
I need two divers for next Wed.'s trip. Come with me if you dare.
~j~
Deadeye Wreck May 7, 2008
Sadly, I've waited two days for the underwater photographer that I take on the Wednesday trips to send me some pictures. It's Friday afternoon and no pictures. The above water pics were taken by Dave Foley of items recovered two days ago on our latest discovery. Some divers have dubbed it "Wall Wart." I guess it's cause it's just like shopping there. All kinds of stuff everywhere. But Wall Mart doesn't carry deadeyes and brass spikes. I wanted to call it the "Deadeye Wreck" I guess I should have been first in the water.
Our first dive of the day was on the Horatio Hall. It was the bad tide. The tide with no real slack and the worst vis. We had great vis on the dive. I think it was about 25 feet. Water temp was 45. One diver caught sight of a seal towards the stern. That same diver had his hand right on the propeller and didn't recognize it. I included a picture of the propeller so Rick, I mean "the diver" knows what one looks like. By the way, all pictures of the Hall were taken in 2003. Do you see how much hair I had in 2003? What has happened to me? In five years it's mostly fallen out.
Sadly, federal regulations prevent me from talking about what artifacts have uncovered by the winter storms. I'm sure you'll get a story about it. The weekend is a wash. Gale force winds and mountainous seas. If any of you take U/W pictures I may have a spot for you on the Wed trips.
Come take pictures with me if you dare. (No hair shots)
~j~
May 3rd Walmart Wreck Dive
Have you ever heard the expression "Loose lips sink ships"? In my case it's "Loose lips FIND ships" A casual, overheard conversation between some salty fisherman about a productive fishing spot at Trader Ed's was all it took to set the Wreck Hunter Technical Dive Team in motion. Two years we've been hunting this site. Last fall, towards the end of the dive season I get a tip from someone on the inside, a disgruntled mate perhaps. The weather turned foul and before I got the chance to investigate, the boats are put away for the year.
Well, good things happen to those that wait. In less than perfect conditions, rain, wind, bone chilling cold, two years of research has finally paid off. The grapnel has barely hit the bottom when I roll into the 45 degree water and pull myself to the bottom. I recognize the remains of a fair sized wooden coastal schooner lying upright on the white, sandy bottom. It's cargo of coal scattered about. I drift slowly in the current past row upon row of ribs, decking, the keelson. I note the different materials used to fasten the ship together. Brass drift pins and brass spikes litter the bottom. I see iron drift pins and wooden dowels as well. I come to a mass of cables, maybe a dozen or more, heading off into the haze. My heart rate climbs as my nitrogen narced brain struggles to discern the significance of these cables. These rope covered cables. Scattered around me, are deadeyes as far as the eye can see. I quickly twist two of them and realize that the cable is corroded to almost nothing. They break off in seconds. I bring my prizes back to the tie in point and find a pile of deadeyes. I'm not the only diver to discover his (or her's) own personal stash of these prized artifacts.
I continue on to other parts of the wreck. Block and tackle lie everywhere. Never have I seen so much stuff. At the 40 minute mark, as we edge into decompression we gather at the up line and begin to shoot the loot to the surface. Deadeyes, three at a whack, head to the surface in a cloud of bubbles. The bigger, heavier, brass and bronze items, will have to wait another day.
Jodi and I the last divers down, pull the hook and drift slowly away, the last of the artifacts tied to the hook. I spot another deadeye, it's top, just barely showing above the sand. I can't resist. I signal her to "bury the hook" as I rap the steel safety line thru the eye. Still attached to the cable I decide to let the boat's engine pull this last deadeye from it's grave.
Every diver who went on the charter gets a deadeye. My thanks to the DIVE LOCKER for allowing me use of the boat to fulfill this personal endeavor.
Sadly, so many artifacts were left behind. I may, if time allows, head back to this site and recover one or two more.
Last Friday I took the Wreck Hunter out for the first trip of the year. Saturday we took the Dive Locker charter boat for it's first trip of the year. Our destination both days was the shipwreck PORT HUNTER. For whatever reason we had Caribbean like visibility for this site. What this means is we had about 20 feet of vis. at a site that on a good day has 5 to 8 feet. On most days in the summer, if you can count the fingers on your hand, you’re lucky. Most likely you’re lying. You can't see the fingers on your hand. You know how many there are.
The wreck has changed so much, the stern deck house has collapsed. I used to penetrate it every year, and now it's gone. Just aft of the remains of the deck house, a huge chunk of the wreck has uncovered. We discovered about a dozen sets of train wheels that had never been seen by me before. Several artifacts were recovered but, sadly, federal regulations prevent me from discussing them.
Our goal in the month of May is to start diving the wrecks off Monomoy. Everybody asks me how to get an awesome artifact or porthole. I'm going to let you in on a little secret. Dive the wrecks early in the spring!!!!!!!!! The winter and spring storms act like giant hydraulic vacuum cleaners, moving tons of sand off sections of these shallow time capsules. Every year our team recover portholes, deadeyes, silverware, letters.......... the list is endless. Just go on our website, www.capediveclub.com and look at the u-tube movie we made last year. Look at the pictures from our booth at Sea Rovers. What month do you think I recovered most of it?
I suppose I could just give you a porthole from one of the dozens in the basement, that will never see the light of day. I can only hang so many on the walls of my house you know. But,....................... we all know that will never happen.
Sign up for a charter. I'll help you recover it. (Yes, this is an add for the Dive Locker charter boat. I've sold out, I know.)
Many of us returned last Sunday from Roatan Honduras. We had an awesome time. Perfect weather, not a rain drop or a cloud in the sky. Water temp was 82 degrees and underwater visibility was between 60 and 100 feet depending on the dive site. There was a shipwreck right in front of the hotel. That wreck, I bet, had never seen a bunch of NE wreck divers before. We did some penetrations on it that NO ONE has ever done before. Ask Bryan about the escape tunnel that led from the engine room, up three decks to a body contorting, 90 degree exit. We discovered that AL 80's don't bend so easily.
We were lucky enough to do a shark dive. A 30 minute boat ride in 6 foot seas took us to a sea mount five miles off shore. The vis. in access of 100ft. The Gray Reef Sharks had already assembled 70 feet below me as I entered the water. You see, just the sound of the boat engine at diner time was enough to attract 18 big females. The divemasters kept them at bay with the lure of a 5 gallon bucket of fish heads. What impressed was the explosive power they displayed once the food came out. It was over in 5 seconds. I shot video, ask me to see it sometime.
The photographer's shot hundreds of pictures of nudibranchs and pretty sea horses. Some strange little crab that I think was actually just some kind of kelp. But you don't want to see those. The sharks and big snappers, right?
Saturday night we sent a diver over to Hathaways to make sure the pond was clear of ice and it was. Sunday was a totally different story. 90% of the pond was covered with at least a 1/2 inch of ice. We had to break our way in. We did some testing of the thickness prior to swimming any distance underneath it. With a little difficulty we could punch thru it from below, if you had to. Most of us decided to carry a rock to aid with the chore lest we get stuck under there. If you look at the last two pictures you can see our path under the ice leading over to the boat and then the car. You can clearly see the line of bubbles outlining our route. There was a small argument after the dive about logging it as an ice dive or not. I suggested that it wasn't an ice dive if you could break thru it, in under a minute.
The dive was attended by Mark Bramblett (in a single 80) (I've never seen him in less that twin 120's) Dave Foley, David Wood. And me.
Come see our display at Boston Sea Rovers. March 8 & 9. We have a few surprises to unveil. It will truly be a "Sea of Brass." We need help manning the booth this year so submit your application.
The Cape Dive Club just returned from it's first dive trip. We went to the Island of BONAIRE, 16 of us spent 10 days. Dave Foley had the most dives............33. Roger and Cathleen got married there. Frank made his first dive there. He's not even certified. I took him down anyway. Bryan Burnham did a dive to 100 meters. That's 330 feet. That's *@#*'ing deep. One of the days a bunch of us went on a charter called "Larry's Wild Side." The wind howl's out of the east 365 days a year. Sea's average 10 feet, No one but Larry goes there. Larry I'm pretty sure, is crazy. He runs a 25 foot Zodiac out of Lac Bay. The fish life on the east side of the island is unbelievable. Everything is on steroids over there. Huge fish! We saw Moray's as thick as telephone poles. Car sized Dog Snapper's cruised the drop-off. Spotted Eagle Ray's, Southern Sting Ray's buzzed over us like prehistoric birds of prey. I saw my first Green Sea Turtle underwater. It had to weigh 500 pounds. It had two remora's clinging to it's underside. We boarded the boat, flooded in a sea of raw emotion. Everybody talking at once, adrenaline literally running from our pours. We headed back to Lac bay for a surface interval and to change tanks. Our second dive was at a site called "Blue Hole." How to describe it........................ There were so many fish. No Aquarium on the planet could be stocked with so many fish. Inside this arena sized depression there had to be no less than 100 Tarpon. I will never again go to BONAIRE and not do a dive with Larry!!!! But, you have to be a little bit crazy. Like Larry. One day I said to Bryan, "You pick the dive sites." The forth dive of the day, it's about 4 o'clock in the afternoon and we do this dive he picked. Honestly it sucked. We had a 2 or 3 hundred yard swim over empty sand to a so so reef/wall. The vis. was barely one hundred feet. On the way back in, over this empty sand field, all of a sudden, we start to see Spotted Eagle Rays. Over the course of several more dives we learn that dozens of them come here every night right before sunset to feed. At one time I counted almost a dozen in my field of view............ at the same time. You have to see the video Bryan shot. One of my last dives of the trip. I encounter a school of baitfish. Surrounding them is three distinct schools of predators. Horse-eyed Jacks, Bar Jacks, and Palometa. Each species keep to them selves. If I got right in the center of the school of baitfish the exhaust bubbles would create a hole void of fish. It was like being in a living donut of fish. So thick I couldn't see the outside edge of the fish. Sometimes I would be surrounded by just the jacks. For 45 minutes myself, Bryan and Jodi floated in this cacophony of fish, this living wall of amazing colorful fish. All in all it was a fantastic trip, except for a troop of howler monkeys that lived in a tree outside my window. Next year, we're going to run two one week trips to BONAIRE. 10 people per trip. Come with us if you dare. ~j~
