NOAA was pretty much on target with today's forecast, 10-15 kt winds and 3-4 ft seas. We decided to stay closer to shore so we'd reach a site quicker and get into the water quicker in case conditions worsened. First stop was the Northeast Sailor, an old unknown wooden wreck in 75 ft of water.
Everyone wanted to stay for a second dive on the Sailor because the viz was so good and there was so much life on the wreck. I put viz at 15 ft, but it was very light, not dark from particulate like we've been seeing the past few weeks. I got a bottom temp of 59. Also, a bit of bottom current. The NE Sailor has a sandy bottom, so you could really get down on your belly and shove your arm into those holes trying to grab the lobsters without stirring up a lot of muck. Tons of sea bass, a few nice fluke (although no door mats) and more than a few lobsters. There's still quite a few bugs in that chain pile. 3rd stop was a low lying rock pile that we tied in to a couple of miles off-shore. Lots of fish and lobsters were taken, including a 3-1/2 pounder that yours truly brought home. Nothing makes your wife support your diving addiction more than fresh lobster and a bottle of Pouilly Fuisse.
Hurricane Cristobal stayed well out to sea on its trip up the Atlantic coastline, but the storm surge did a great job of stirring up the water column, as we were to find out on our dive trip out from Belmar last Friday. In Central Jersey, small craft warnings were announced two days before we went out, and 6 foot seas with swells 12 seconds apart pretty much insured the bottom would be dark and murky.
Hurricane Cristobal August 2014
Our first stop was a small wreck in 90 feet of water that some of our divers were hoping to do some digging on, looking for artifacts. Unfortunately, the bottom was pretty churned up, making it difficult to see too much. It was close to what we call a "braille dive." When I reached the bottom, I tied in my wreck reel and went the opposite direction of all the other lines I saw. I never saw anything besides sand, an occasional rock, and a few little fish. Visibility was less than a foot, and I had to use a flashlight to see the sand from 6 inches away. After ten minutes, I gave up and went up. Nobody spent more than 10 minutes down there.
Our dive boat was clearly visible from 40 feet, so the upper water column was clear.
Our second stop was a site known locally as "The Photography Wreck." Nobody would be taking photos today. I followed the line down to the sand and couldn't even see the strobe light flashing on the line. Dark and cloudy. Another braille dive. I aborted the dive and decided the gas in my tank could be better spent somewhere else. Most of the other divers did likewise.
Our third stop was the "Northeast Sailor." The NE Sailor has a sandy bottom and we hoped that we might at least have some some viz. Luck was with us, and we had what could only be called "NJ okay," which means 3-4 feet of viz. Most of us had been on the site before and since it is a well defined shipwreck, navigation was possible even with the visibility as bad as it was. I found a nice 3 pound lobster, and a few other lobsters and sea bass were caught as well.
Captain Paul said we weren't likely to find better viz anywhere else, and we decided to stay on site for a second dive.
Not the best day diving, but I don't think any of the divers on the boat regretted missing work.
Just thought I'd share the local conditions, since this has been a colder than normal winter and the ocean hasn't warmed up as much as you'd normally expect.
NOAA had predicted 15 - 20 kt winds and 2-3 foot seas. The air was calm and the ocean was like glass. Maybe a 1 foot swell rolling through every 20 seconds. The winds never picked up, which NOAA has also forecasted for the afternoon.
A group of us chartered the Venture 3 in Belmar, NJ. We did 3 dives and 3 different sites. Depending who you talked to, bottom temp at 80 ft was either 42 or 44. During safety hang at 15 feet, water temp was 54 degrees. Because of the cold, most of us kept our bottom times between 20 - 30 minutes.
Visibility was about 7 feet on all dives. Our first stop was the remnants of an old wooden wreck in 70 feet, not one of the well known wrecks. Bottom was very dark and there was a bit of current.
Second stop was a man-made reef. Same conditions.
Our third stop was a natural rock pile, and it was much brighter, although the same 7 or 8 feet of vis.
Being my first dive of the year, I didn't bring my pole spear, figuring I just wanted to relax and get acclimated (I haven't been in the ocean since November). There was a ton of sea bass all over the wrecks, and some nice sized ones as well. It would have been easy to fill up a game bag with them. Fortunately, there were also a ton of lobsters, which we did fill our game bags with.
If anyone out there is in the area and is familiar with the Venture 3, we may have a few spots open for next Friday, May 30th.
Can anyone remember Christopher Columbus's 3 ships?
The Nina, the Pinta and the ............?
The Santa Maria sank after running onto a reef in Haiti in 1492. Now, archeologists are pretty sure they've found it. For the full article, click here.
Wreck of the Santa Maria
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MyScubaStuff is now an authorized Ikelite dealer. We're offering the Ikelite PCm flashlights in both Halogen and LED at discount prices.
The PCm flashlights are designed as a primary light for clear water diving, such as on your next trip to the Caribbean or Mexico. It provides pointed illumination for looking in holes and under ledges, as well as providing extra illumination to bring out the beautiful colors on reefs once you start getting below 30 feet and the sunlight is filtering out the natural light.
Many divers (myself included) always carry a backup flashlight, and the PCm is the perfect size for a backup. It fits in a BC pocket, where it is always accessible if your primary light fails.
The PCm comes in 2 different light source choices. The Halogen bulb (MSRP $30.00, but discounted on our web site) uses 4 AA batteries to provide an hour and a half of light. The LED version (MSRP $66.00 but also discounted on our web site) gets about 5 hours on the same 4 batteries.
Available in Yellow, Black or Blue, there is a different color PCm underwater flashlight for every diver. Check them out at our website by clicking here.
Ikelite is one of the oldest brands, it's made in the USA and it comes with a lifetime limited warranty. It's worth checking out an Ikelite flashlight before buying your next dive flashlight.
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Do you dive on shipwrecks that are sunken military ships? Here is a posting from the Federal Register covering some new guidelines being issued by the US Navy regarding diving on shipwrecks. It's quite a long article with quite a bit of legalese, and some in the diving industry are grumbling about how vague some of the language is.
I'll leave it up to you to decide for yourselves. The article is here:
US Navy regualations on Shipwreck diving
Aside from disturbing human remains, which I think is totally wrong and should both be prohibited by law and respected by divers, my opinion is that a ship that's been laying on the bottom of the ocean for 100 years is going to continue to disintegrate until it's no more. A diver visiting it and even (gasp) grabbing a souvenir like a porthole or a piece of pottery no way harms the wreck, nor would leaving those "treasures" in place cause the ship to be preserved any longer. Divers taking artifacts makes those artifacts available to the public to see, which is of far greater value then having them rot away on the ocean floor.
What's your opinion? Leave a comment and let us know.
Here's a video I shot in Long Branch a few years ago. It was shot using a point-n-shoot digital camera, a Canon SD1100.
The half minute clip shows the lightening strike 4 times. First, as the camera recorded it (which would be 30 frames per second). Then, I slowed it down to half speed. Then I slowed it down to 1/4 speed. Finally, I froze the image on the frame where the lightning hits the ground.
For any New Jersey divers out there, the video is looking over Saint Alfonso's retreat in Long Branch, which is where the "Dual Wrecks" are in 30 feet of water, about 150 feet from the beach. I don't know if the iron in the wrecks has anything to do with the lightning strike, perhaps someone more knowledgeable about the wrecks or lightning will post an opinion:
We've just started a Facebook page, and while it may be a while until it's really up and running, for now we will be announcing special offers, sales and discounts through it. Visitwww.facebook.com/myscubastuffand like us to make sure you get all the announcements. Thanks for sharing! - DSAO!
I don't often have the time to write long dive reports here, but this trip was as interesting as our trip to the New Amsterdam Hotel several years ago so I just knew I had to share it.
Monday night I got a call from my friend Billy, who was part of a private dive club going to visit some "interesting numbers" that one of the dredgers working the NJ coastline had found.
Okay, let me start with a little bit of background:
First of all, there is a small fleet of dredgers pounding back and forth across the shoreline on the NJ coast, sucking up sand to replenish the beachesthat have been eroded by years of surf, storms, and finally a major hit by Hurricane Sandy two years ago.
According to Billy, one dredger in particular, the "San Vincente Turgid," had been re-directed here from Boston where it had been working on cleaning out the shipping lanes going into and out of the harbor. According to Billy, the San Vincente Turgid came around Montauk and headed in a direct line to Point Pleasant, NJ. About 45 miles off shore of Asbury Park, it picked up an unusual blip in about 155 feet of water. As luck would have it, the Turgid was testing its new trailing suction hopper dredge when several large pieces of debris got caught in its suction pipe.
Sailors had to bring the suction pipe up to the deck to clear it, and what they found surprised them all. What are the chances of finding a brass name plate mounted onto an old rotten piece of wood? The crew of the San Vincente Turgid, however, was interested in sand, not name plates, so they threw it aside, continued cleaning the dredge of some wood debris, cork and glass which they put into a barrel, and went back to work. Botswain Artudo Smith made a quick phone call to his fiance in South Beach Miami as the crew put the suction pipe back into the water.
Finally, the dredger arrived on site in Point Pleasant, and the crew received some mail, fresh food and liquor, meanwhile unloading the three barrels of trash collected over their 3 day trip from Boston. The trash barrels sat on the edge of a construction site in Point Pleasant for several weeks.
About two weeks ago, Captain Tim of the dive boat "Le Petomaine" which normally sails from Freeport, Long Island, was dumpster diving, looking for scraps of rope, latex tubing, stainless steel snap bolts, double edge clips- anything he could get for free for his scuba diving pursuits. Captain Tim found the blue barrel, and immediately recognized the broken bottle tops, stuffed with rotten corks, as being liquor bottles. Hoping he might find some intact liquor bottles in the barrel, he unceremoniously dumped it over on the banks of the Manasquan river.
Like the crew of the San Vincente Turgid, Captain Tim was also amazed at what he found. A ships brass plaque with the words "Black _uck" in raised green letters. The "_" was not an "F", it was a blob of concretia. Captain Tim quickly put the name plate under his arm, ready to bring it home to put with his collection of marble doorknobs, broken steam valves, brass spikes, the inside half of a porthole, a 1963 "Coca-Cola" bottle with barnacle encrustation and other treasures found in his scuba diving adventures.
A week later, my friend Billy and a third diver friend who goes by the name of "Orlando" were in Captain Tim's man cave, aka his basement, where his wife had banished him with his dive gear, treasure collection, 60" LED Samsung and Sony PS2. Working on their third case of Rolling Rock, the conversation turned to dumpster diving and Captain Tim eagerly searched beneath the pile that was his collection of 1960's Playboy magazines for the name plaque he had found.
Finishing his 3rd six pack of the night, Billy already had his car keys in his hand but couldn't remember which car was his. However, he had his new iPad Air in his other hand and the intrepid diver decided to google "Black _uck ship." When the results of the google search came up, the three men looked at each other in amazement. They had found a ship called the Black Duck. It was a rum runner, purportedly owned by Joseph Kennedy himself, through his prohibition era associate Danny Walsh.
The three men immediately began to ask questions. Where did this name plaque come from? As Captain Tim explained how he found it in a garbage barrel in Point Pleasant, Billy was immediately on his iPad Air, viewing the activity in the area. They were quick to realize it was somehow related to the beach replenishment. "It must have been sucked up by a dredger," Billy said. "All we have to do is find what dredgers are working the area and we can figure out where this came from.
I'll spare the reader the details and just give a quick overview. A few days of phone calls and a few well-shared $50 dollar bills with the right people determined the garbage barrel was from the San Vincente Turgid. Now, to figure out where the dredge had found the items.
Billy and Orlando waited until the San Vincente Turgid was at station off the beach in Point Pleasant, emptying its sand cargo through the pipes, and immediately set out with their Zebco inflatable from Walmart. As expected, the inflatable sprang a leak about a quarter mile off the beach, and was sinking fast by the time they reached the San Vincente Turgid. In keeping with the maritime custom of aiding vessels in distress, Billy and Orlando were taken aboard the San Vincente Turgid as their inflatable joined Big Pussy Bonpensiero on the bottom of the NJ coastline.
Big Pussy Bonpensiero
The crew of the San Vincente Turgid was quite happy to have some visitors to help break up the monotony of the day, and invited them into the galley for their home made dogfish fin soup and some lively talk of the sea. Deftly manipulating the conversation to the garbage barrel and the Black Duck name plaque, the crew was quite amused to hear the story of Captain Tim digging through their garbage.
"Where did your suction pipe get clogged?" Billy innocently asked. "Who knows?" answered Botswain Smith. "We're deckhands, not navigators."
Billy decided to try a different tact. "How far from shore were you?" Now, I don't know how many of you readers are familiar with the local waters and able to find a location using imprecise instructions, but the answer Billy received wasn't much help. "About 6 hours."
"What time of day?" Billy asked, hoping maybe some other ship in the area could be found.
"That I can tell you exactly," the burly botswain answered as he pulled out his cell phone. "I called my wife right when we found it."
Orlando lit up like a lightbulb. In addition to being an experienced east coast diver, he had a second career as the "Electric Wolf" from his mother's attic where his collection of computers,electronic doo dads, thing-a-mabobs and who-ha's would make any NSA spy envious. Once again, to save some time and spare you the details, by 8PM that night, Orlando had hacked into the phone company records, found the botswain's phone records and retreived the GPS location the phone call was made from.
Armed with the new information, the decision was made to visit the site the following Tuesday to look for Joe Kennedy's Rum Runner.
March 31st arrived with a dying cold rainy front from the east, quickly being pushed out to sea by a high pressure front pulling clear skies from the west that brought the prospect of calm seas for our trip the next day. Billy had invited me along, not so much for my skill as a diver but because I knew some good jokes and could be easily cajoled into paying for 1/4 of the fuel for the boat. My major reason for going was that I hadn't been in the water since December and was jumping out of my skin, hoping to get wet. My drysuit had just come back from DUI where they had replaced all the seals and repaired over 80% of the seams, which explained my past season of not-so-dry suit diving. They had even repaired the self-installed duct tape patches on the knees and elbows which I wore as a badge of pride as to the medieval age of my drysuit.
The next day, my drysuit underwear freshly laundered for the new season, we met at the dock in South Amboy where "Le Petomaine" was waiting for us. Following a lengthy argument with Captain Tim about why he couldn't have brought the boat to Perth Amboy so we didn't have to pay the Driscoll Bridge toll, we loaded our gear onto the boat and left the Marina, heading into the calm Atlantic.
Diveboat Le Petomaine
Le Petomaine was a dual outboard fiberglass boat, but the starboard engine hadn't worked for years, so we were slow getting on-site. Captain Tim began the search a mile behind where the phone calls GPS signal was recorded, to account for the the length of the suction dredge and the movement of the ship. He ran an expanded square search, moving a quarter mile from the starting point, turning 90 degrees starboard, and continuing in this manner as our search square expanded. The rest of us sat in the cabin, drinking coffee and listening to Captain Tim's singing coming from the wheelhouse above. Captain Tim liked to drink beer when he worked, as it calmed him down, He was a good driver, you just don't want to be in the boat with him during bad weather because he can't tell if he's in the basement with his PS2 or on the ocean and can sometimes be a little reckless, content with "Rebooting" if the boat sinks. When he started to sing, it usually meant that he was on the third six-pack.
About 2 PM in the afternoon, Captain Tim began to scream the lyrics to his favorite song.
"Here we come, walking down the street. We get the funniest looks from everyone one we meet."
Bill, Orlando and I looked at each other, our eyes opening wide. Captain Tim always sang that song when he found something on the sonar.
"Hey Hey we're the Monkees! And people say we Monkee around...."
We ran out to the deck and began to jump into our dive gear. Our plan was simple. The first dive would be to attach a rope and buoy to the wreckage to make our subsequent dives quicker. The three of us would enter the water together. Billy carried the flashlight, Orlando the lift bag and I had a mesh bag to collect some evidence. All we wanted to do was locate the wreckage and get our bearings. We each wore a GoPro camera on our heads to help record the wreck which we could study during our surface interval. We also attached illuminated Chemical light sticks to our tanks to help keep an eye on each other.
We dropped a shot line to the wreck on Captain Tim's signal and he deftly maneuvered the boat as we prepared to enter the water. He walked across the deck, checking our air tanks and turning on our GoPro cameras. He stopped at Orlando's gear and a puzzled frown ran across his face. "You've got so much crap on this regulator, I can't tell what the hell's going on," he grumbled. Orlando, ever the hacker, had used a vast collection of air conditioner and refrigerator valves and parts to make his own regulator, and the mass of copper and brass hardware attached to the top of his tank looked more like a radiator than a regulator. No wonder he was always getting bent.
"I see something at 15 feet," Captain Tim said. Orlando and I looked at other, perplexed, but Billy explained. "Tim divides everything by 10, so when he says 15 feet, he means 150."
"So we're in 150 feet of water?" I asked.
"More like 15 and a half with the profile."
Before I could say "Billy, you've got an idiot friend for a boat driver" Billy was in the water and Orlando splashed in right behind him. I double checked my regulators and gauges, and as Captain Tim said "Let me make sure your valve's open," I grabbed the railing and hopped over sideways. I wanted to keep that nut away from my tank.
Once in the water, I found Orlando struggling at 20 feet with his regulators. A steady stream of bubbles was flowing from a 3" long copper tube that stuck out of the second stage like a straw. He took a pair of EMT dive shearsand used them to bend the tube.
Orlando on the line, messing with his home-made regulator
The bubbles continued to dribble out, and he began using the hammer end of his dive knive, smacking himself in the chin with it to try to crimp the tubing closed. I waited for him, ready to offer assistance, although I have to admit I couldn't begin to guess what kind of assistance I could offer. He noticed me floating nearby and waved me off, making the "OK" sign with his thumb and index finger.
He didn't look okay to me, and I begin to lean in towards him and he pulled his regulator out of his mouth and put it against a lead weight on his belt. He began to hammer the tube again with his dive knife, and started yelling at me through the water. "Nooooooo Prooooooo Blaaaaaaa Mooooooo" I heard in his bubbly rhymical voice as he happily hammered away, so I continued my descent.
Although a little dark, it was easy to follow Billy's bubbles and I found him on the bottom at 120 feet. I guess neither Tim's division or sonar wasn't so good either, but as I was going to find out later, he has problem's reading any number or letter that is round. We found the sash weight that Captain Tim had sent down, lying on top of some muddy debris. I could see fine without a flashlight, but Billy's PC2m did a nice job of bringing out the silty colors of brown and grey muck.
I fanned the pile as Billy directed the LED light, and within moments we found several bottle necks, as well as some fairly well preserved wood. The wood had irregular ends, indicating it had been broken, not cut, and there was no real sign of any marine animal infestation, like worm holes. The glass on the bottle necks was sharp, as if it had been broken yesterday, although the amount of silt on everything indicated they had been on the bottom for a while.
I might mention that we were all diving using 21% air as our breathing gas because of the depth. I sometimes got a little light headed when I hit 140 feet or so, but figured I was good to our intended depth of 150, and Billy was so goofy that he didn't need to get narced to act drunk. As it was, my head remained clear throughout the dive.
We examined the bottles, taking turns holding the flashlight and digging through the pile, looking for the bottom of the bottles, in hopes of finding some type of identification number. I looked from the bottle neck in my fingers to Billy's face, and could see a wild grin behind his mask as he looked past me. I turned around and saw Orlando, his drysuit removed, wearing just a pair of boxer shorts with his rubikesque breathing apparatus dangling from his mouth. Obviously suffering the effects of nitrogen narcosis, he was sitting on top of his tank and was using his inflator hose as a rocket jet to propel himself around.
Billy handed me his slate. "No worys, he's a arsehole," it said.
It took us a few seconds to calm Orlando down and within a minute the three of us were swiming along some five feet above the bottom, perfectly bouyant. Since I was in the middle, I checked everyone's gauges. Billy and I each had about 2200 pounds of air, but Orlando was down to 900, so I waved my hand in front of his face to attract his attention. He waved back and shot his inflator hose again, propelling himself another ten feet in front of us.
I swam fast to catch up with him, this time holding my air pressure gauge in front of me and pointing at his with my other hand. He finally looked at his gauge and saw that it was now down to 700 pounds. He gave us the OK sign and setteled down onto the debris pile on the bottom, kicking up a large cloud of silt. The mass was about 5 feet high, and Orlando began picking through it.
With the cloud of mud, it was hard to see anything, but I could see some sharp reflections in Billy's flashlight as Orlando picked up broken pieces of glass, which he put into his BC pocket,
Billy checked Orlando's gauges which were now down to 500 PSI, which he showed to Orlando. Orlando waved us off and connected his inflator hose to the BC and put some air into it. As soon as he hit the inflate button, a steady stream of bubbles flowed out of the BC around the pocket, meaning Orlando had punctured it with the broken glass. He was still smiling as he put the inflator hose into his mouth and began to inhale at a rate several times beyond what his regulator could provide. His cheeks and chest puffed up and he begin to rise above the silt cloud, gaining speed as he used his lungs as a lift bag.
Before any readers question my sanity in writing this, I'd just like to point out that Orlando has gotten bent so many times that his capillaries had stretched to ten times normal diameter, allowing nitrogen bubbles to pass through them undeterred. In effect, he was unbendable. Orlando had 138 dives in his logbook, and excepting the four checkout dives he did in a quarry to get certified, he had gotten decompression sickness from rapid accents on every single dive. In fact, several medical schools had pooled together a tidy little sum of money in the seven digit realm and bought the rights to his body upon his death. Orlando doesn't need to ever work again, and will probably spend the next 30 or 40 years doing rapid ascents several times a month. Of course, his behavior would kill any of us, and I certainly don't recommend anyone diving beyond their skill level, training capability or taking any risky actions to try to match Orlando's unique phsiological situation.
So, here are Billy and I, 120 feet under the surface of the Atlantic, looking at a pile of silt and broken glass that might have been the remains of the Black Duck Rumrunner. We moved about 15 feet apart to opposite sides of the wreckage; out of sight due to the darkness but we could still see each other's chemical sticks and flashlights.
I fanned the debris and saw a lot of broken glass, many of it necks but also bottoms, middles and other large pieces of broken bottles. I finally found an intact bottle without a cork in the neck. It had a shiny edge around the lip which might have been aluminum or stainless. Then I saw the metal strap around the middle of the bottle and the wire hook looping from side to side. It looked like a glass IV bottle.
I shined my flashlight into the pile and was greeted by a lot of reflections, and it became quickly obvious that we had found a medical waste dump, complete with some old glass syringes, broken bottles, porcelean bed pans and electrodes of the type used in the 40's and 50's to give shock treatments to mental patients and uncooperative wards of the state.
I became aware of Billy waving his flashlight to attract my attention, and I swam over to him. He had found a wooden box, replete with badly decomposed cloth wrapped hoses and several electric leads. A small brass label announced "Black Buck Phlegm Discharge Collector." Our subsequent research would find that Black Buck was a failed medical startup in the 1940's that designed electrical contraptions to remove mucus from the nasal cavaties. In other words, an electric nose blowing device. The government had purchased several, and after testing them on mental patients, decided it was a dumb investment, even for the federal government.
As our breathing gas was reaching our predetermined limit, we began our ascent, albeit a little dissapointed. We had come looking for the remains of a rum runner and instead found a pile of medical waste and electric booger collectors. We followed our buoy marker, and after doing our decompression stops, reached the surface where we found ourselves alone. There was a about a three foot swell, and as we rolled over the top of the swell, we could see Le Petomaine about a mile away, heading towards. Billy and I chatted for a few moments as the next swell come by us, and to our surprise, we saw Le Petomaine turning left.
"That idiot," Billy exclaimed. "With one engine out, the boat's going in circles and Tim doesn't realize it."
The water was very chilly, but it was a full sunny day, and I pumped some air into my drysuit and let it work its way down to my feet so I could float on my back comfortably and take advantage of the warming sun, as we waited for Captain Tim to finally reach us. He had been cruising in ever larger circles for about two hours until his circles finally intercepted our location.
"Geeze, I didn't realize I had drifted so far away," he drunkenly snorted as we climbed up the ladder. There was no point in arguing or yelling at him, because he was incapable of offense or remediation.
Orlando was sitting on the deck, sunning himself, his head swollen to about twice its normal size, and his chest inflated like some giant terrestrial puffer fish. "There's some beers in the red cooler if you want," he gestured, tempting us to join him in the "Hall of fame of bad things stupid divers do that will probably kill them."
"How was the dive?" Tim hiccuped. "Want to come back here tommorrow?"
"No thanks, I'll pass on that one," I said as I booted up my computer to type this log entry for my 2014 April Fool's Day dive report to the Black Duck garbage dump.
Thanks to the generosity of the Federal Government, and the courtesy of the US Army Corp of Engineers, beach replenishment projects are ongoing all along the New Jersey coast.
I've been filming the work for the past few months, and have put together this short minute long video showing how the process works. It's really quite amazing, they are actually moving the coastline further out into the sea. Of course, the sea will push it right back, but it's still quite a project to view.
I hope you enjoy the video, and forgive my bad jokes.
I don't know how you feel about it, but the air's warming up, Weather Underground reports Sandy Hookwater temperature at 39 degrees (just six degrees below my limit), Lobster season opens on April 1st, my dry suit just went for a trip to DUI, and I can't wait to get back into the water.
Thank for reading my blog and sharing with your friends -- and DSAO!
I've been following a shipwreck exploration company for about ten years now. I organically heard about them from an article in INC or FORTUNE or MONEY magazine, I really don't remember which it was. The company is Odyssey Marine Exploration, ticker symbol OMEX.
I bought a couple hundred shares: it was something like 25 cents a share, so it's not like I'm a big investor or anything. I figured, it's less than most people drop at a casino on a Saturday night trip.
Image my surprise when a year later, the stock hit $10 a share. I sold my stock quicker than you could say "fill it with 32% please" and continued following the news. OMEX had found a Spanish galleon off the coast of Europe and recovered about $100 million in silver, which they quietly put on a private jet and flew back to Tampa.
Over the next two years, the company was in court and eventually ended up giving all the money back to the Spanish government. I put my small gains into my "diving" account and gave it to dive shops and dive boats for the next few years.
The stock fell back into the 1-2 dollar range, and has been hovering there for years. Every once in a while, usually after the stock price has been pummeled for a few weeks, I'll pick up a hundred or so shares, figuring they'll find another treasure wreck and the market will go nuts and I can get some more diving money.
The company has now started a new division to look for undersea mineral deposits. It sounds like instead of speculating on treasure, they've decided to try to become an industry leader in undersea mineral exploration. Maybe it's a good idea, maybe it isn't, I'm not sure. I originally bought the stock and promised to give up on trips to the casino, which I have faithfully adhered to. So this is definitely gambling, not investing. Click here for a report from Bloomberg.com that will give anyone interested a little background. Click here for an article by a guy who says the company is a sham, just to give balanced information.
Just to be upfront, I'm not a stock broker, I own less than a thousand shares of OMEX stock, and I'm not giving out investment advice or suggesting anyone buy the company. All the prices I mention above are from memory, and while "in the ballpark" may be off by a few years or a few million dollars. My reason for buying the stock is that the next time they find a big treasure, the stock market will go insane like it did ten years ago and the stock will soar as idiots buy high thinking they're getting in on something. After all, everybody wants to discover treasure.
If you don't get why this post is being put in a scuba blog, then you're spending too much time looking at fish.
Thanks for reading my blog and sharing with your friends -- and DSAO!
If you dive at night, you know how easy it is to get separated from your buddy. That's why almost all divers use chemical glow sticks on their tanks as a marker.
This is a basic video for the new diver or the experienced diver who is new to night diving In this short video, we show you how to attach the glow stick to your gear so it won't get lost:
We have assorted colors available here at our website so you and your buddy can tell yourselves apart from other divers on the same dive site.
One of my favorite foods is lobster. There are basically two types of lobsters commercially caught and served up in restaurants, fish-markets and supermarkets.
When you buy "lobster tail," you are generally getting what's known as a warm water lobster. As you'd probably guess, these lobsters are generally caught in warmer climates. Called "Spiny Lobsters," these are found in the waters off of California, Florida, throughout the Caribbean Sea and along the coast of South America. Africa and the Middle East have their own spiny lobsters as well.
The tails tend to be brownish with reddish hues. The tails often have spots as well:
Spiny lobster, ready for cooking
The most obvious thing you'll note about the spiny lobster is that it has no claws:
Spiny lobster, just caught
When you buy the whole lobster, you are generally getting a "North American Lobster," often called a "Maine Lobster:"
The North American lobster is a much redder color, and it turns bright red when cooked. Nature did a kind thing for the color blind, by adding a pair of claws to the North American lobster, just in case you couldn't see the color.
The biggest difference between the two lobsters, from a epicurean vantage point, is that for the spiny lobster, most of the meat is in the tail, while the North American lobster has a lot of meat distributed in its claws.
So why the discussion of lobsters on a scuba diving web site? Because after getting their basic open water experience, many divers develop underwater interests. Here on the east coast, a common scuba diving activity is catching lobsters. Or, as some of us sardonically say, "rescuing them from the ocean."
Lobsters tend to live in shipwrecks, hiding under wreckage, in pipes, in "caves" formed by debris and any other place where they can take refuge from predators. Since the eastern coastline is littered with shipwrecks, it's a great place to find lobsters.
I've been diving for about 25 years, but I'm still a baby when it comes to catching lobsters. However, let me share this link to a "how to guide" for scuba diving lobster fisherman, courtesy of Dan Berg, one of our Pinterest followers. Thanks for following us Dan, and thanks for sharing your knowledge and expertise:
http://www.aquaexplorers.com/lobster_diving.htm
The full article to Dan's Lobster Diving Guide can be found by clicking here.
A quick parting word about lobstering: the cold Atlantic coast isn't' the only place where scuba divers find lobsters. Coming up in a future post, catching Spiny Lobsters.
Thanks for reading -DSAO! (Dive safe and often)
Thursday, February 20, 2014
How do you mount your flashlight?
If you carry your dive light in your BC pocket, you know it's only a matter of time until it disappears. The best place for a flashlight is snapped to a D-ring on your harness or BC. We've just uploaded our first video that shows how to make a short lanyard for that flashlight, wreck reel or any other piece of equipment you take into the water with you.
Using a stainless steel snap-bolt you can make the perfect lanyard using a scrap of nylon line. Check it out and let me know what you think.
Thanks for watching -DSAO! (Dive safe and often)
Tuesday, February 18, 2014
When you see the ice, do you still slip into your dive gear?
As I sit in my warm house, looking out the window at the neighbors shoveling snow, two dive trips come to mind from my younger years. The first was about ten years ago, on the "Dina Dee" out of Point Pleasant, NJ. It was late December. The air temperature was 29 degrees, the ocean in the low 40's.
As I arrived at the dive boat, the mate was there early, prepping the boat. It had snowed the night before, and he was shoveling about 3 inches of snow off of the deck. He greeted me: "So, what kind of mental problems do you have that bring you out here today?"
You couldn't have blamed him, how many other people go swimming in the Atlantic in the winter?
We were vising the "Delaware," a frequently dove wreck very close to the NJ coast. We enjoyed two very nice dives, the ocean was calm and the water clear. Not a lot of sea life this time of year, but a wreck is always fun to visit.
Fast forward about a month. Now it's late January. The air temperature was in the mid twenties. The ocean was a balmy 39 degrees. I was on The Outlaw diveboat, from Belmar NJ, visiting a wreck called the IdaK.
Swimming along on the cold bottom, I thought I saw an antenna sticking out of a dugout hole under some wreckage. I quickly stuck my hand into the hole, hoping to grab a lobster. I couldn't feel it though - was something pinching my fingers, or was I shoving my mittens under a piece of wreckage? To be honest, it was so darn cold, I couldn't tell.
Because the water was so cold, I decided to do a 5 minute safety hang at 15 feet, just to give whatever nitrogen was dissolved in me a few more minutes to bleed out. After only a minute, I was shivering. Five minutes was pretty close to torture, but safety first, I don't want to get bent.
My safety degassing obligation met, I let go of the grapple line to surface. Wait a second - my fingers were still holding onto the line. I tried to move them, but they wouldn't listen to me. I had to use my right hand to peel my left hand free of the rope.
Climbing up the ladder to the boat was a bit challenging - my hands didn't want to bend around the ladder. Removing my BC was difficult because my hands didn't want to listen to me when I told them to squeeze the clips. A kind, much warmer dive buddy helped me.
This isn't a story that ends with frostbite, or any permanent damage. But after I finally struggled out of my gear, I slipped into my parka and sat down next to the heater. I turned to another diver and told him, "This is insane. I'm not going in for a second dive."
And somehow this was supposed to be fun?
"M...M...MM...ee.ee E..e...e...th..th..e...r" he muttered through chattering teeth. As a matter of fact, none of the divers on the boat went in for that second dive.
I know there are lots of more hearty guys that don't think twice about going diving in the cold. Since I'm now over 55, I've decided to avoid diving once the water gets below 50 degrees. Okay, maybe 49. Well, 48's doable. Okay, I'll go in at 45, but only if the air temperature's warm.
Does anyone have any cold water diving stories they'd like to share? It would be nice to know that I'm not the only one suffering from Nitrogen cravings in the winter.
On this blog, we will be posting informative "how-to" information about diving, plus we will share links to other websites where we find interesting articles that would appeal to divers.
My first warm water dive,
Islamorada 1987
Let me share a few notes about myself. My name is Dave. I've been scuba diving over 27 years. I live in the northeastern United States, so most of my diving is up here. In a good year, I'll get into the ocean every other week between March and December, although I have to admit, as I get older I'm a little less tolerant of the cold. Since I turned 55, I've decided that when the water temperature gets below 45F, I'll keep my butt in the boat. After all, this is supposed to be fun.
I'm what you'd call a rec diver. That's rec; short for recreational. Not wreck, as in shipwreck. I dive for the fun of it. There's no where else where it's as quiet and calm as in the ocean.
I'm not a "macho" guy, I'm a very conservative diver. I have a family and I want to come home to them after every dive, so I'm not above aborting a dive if I'm not feeling 100% good about it. I do my safety stops religiously, I exercise to keep myself in shape, I watch my weight (mostly I watch it go up) and I stay hydrated when diving. I don't buy cheap dive gear because when I'm 90 feet deep, my life depends on it.
Up here in the northeast, we have hundreds of diveable ship wrecks. Between bad weather, bad maps, bad captains and quite a few wars, the eastern coast of the USA is littered with wrecks. I've had the opportunity to visit wooden schooners that sank 200 years ago, cargo ships and crise ships that have only been on the bottom for 70 or 80 years, a few war ships that were sunk in WW1 and WW2, plus dozens of "artificial reefs" sunk by the government to create homes for fish and destinations for divers and fishermen.
One of the reasons I enjoy diving so much, aside from my love and appreciation of the ocean, is that I've had the honor to meet so many other great divers in my area. From the boat captains that told their mates to keep an eye on me on my first trips as a young diver, to the "old salts" whose dive gear seems to be held together by duct-tape, I've learned many tricks and techniques that they don't teach you in dive class. I try to share some of what I've learned with other new divers when I meet them, and I still look forward to diving with my old friends because I continue to learn something new every day.
I look forward to writing this column and hope that others who have something interesting to add will leave their comments as well.
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