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From Cindy Lu Who . . .
Upon exiting the water from our final dive of the day, I assured my dive buddy there would not be a dive report telling the perils of our navigationless dives this Sunday morning. However, the more I thought about it .....
This is not the traditional dive report, telling of sights that divers set out to see and then actually SEE THEM. No, that would be blas`e. We 'chose' to live it up a little. Our day started out as an East Coast practice dive. Nate, 'Topher' and myself were successful in finding the boat. Notice I did not say which of the six boats in the quarry we were aiming for. We found a boat to use as a platform from which to shoot our lift bags/sausgages from. This practice run went off without a hitch. After collecting our bags and reels, we descended a second time to actually dive.
There was not much of a dive plan, other than to hang out in the bowl area. However, I think there must be a difference between, not actually aiming for a location and the bee 'waggle' dance that the three of us completed under water. For those of you whom are not familiar with the bee 'waggle' dance, to put it simply, scout bees complete the reconnaissance in search of food, return to the nest and conduct an elaborate dance to give 'directions' to the other bees to find the food source. The only thing I could think of at the end of the dive, while my head was still spinning from all the u-turns and contorting circles we swam in was..... Nate was showing us the way to the exit point and where the small fry were if we were hungry at the end of the dive.
Nate and I were gluts for punishment when we decided to try a second dive. Nate wanted to try and find some 'box' that he and Chris came across on a previous dive. The plan.... go to the boats, pass the Pensey, pass the dozer, pass the deep boat and find the line that leads to the step van. That is where we decided to just swim around and uhhh.... do a relaxing "see what there is to see dive". The Grand Puba himself taught me that was the best dive you could do. No worries, just swim around.
From Tom Pritchard . . .
Wed June 9 - Despite accusations of infidelity by the TNI divers, I dove with the BSC Hump Divers this week. Quite a turnout! Wild Bill and Paul "Speedy" Burnhart were practicing wreck reels. John Gross and Pete Bohling were running a wreck class. Nate, Mayo, and Chris Thompson did a tour. There were a host of other divers there whose names I never knew or just plain forgot. (Remember, the mind is the second thing to go). Even Cindy Pie was there, diving and driving backwards. Vern, Donna and her daughter Stephanie were helping Jim celebrate his 40th birthday. We'll see if Jim is as bubbly when he turns 50. When I turned 50 my son sent me a card that read, "Happy Birthday Dad. You're half way home!" The Palm and I wanted viz on our dive, so we went deep. The quarry begins to open up below 60 ft and by the time you get to the 90 ft boat, the viz pushes 40 ft - dark, but truly breathtaking. We swam down to the rim and peered into the hole as we made our way to the step van and tanker. By hugging the rim and shunning the rope from the tanker to the barn, - you guessed it - we missed the broad side of the barn. No problem. We turned the dive and retreated along the south wall. As we ascended, the viz got worse until at one point it was about 10 ft. 98 ft, 53 min., 43 degrees at depth. Great dive! I'm back at Willow next week, if they'll take me back. Rumor has it that Wild Bill will be at Willow next week too. I'll believe that when Huck shows up!
The Wallflower Dive.
Sun June 13 - Gerhard Maree, Liz Zyla, and I showed up at BSC Sunday just as CindyPie and Nate were finishing their second dive of the day. Gerhard was eager to show off his teeth since he had spent most of Saturday brushing them. Apparently his teeth were so grungy, they had critters growing on them. Talk about stains! And don't forget the mineral deposits! But this what is you get when you rescue a couple of dozen megalodon (prehistoric shark) teeth from the ocean floor after 10 million years. These fossilized teeth were the fruit of his trip to North Carolina last week. There may be another trip this Fall to dive this virtually untouched ocean site (105 fsw) where 3-6 inch specimens are the norm.
Under threatening skies we decided to do a shallow wall dive around the quarry so that Liz wouldn't freeze her whatchamacallitz off in her wetsuit. When I think about a wall dive, I think of crystal clear water and spectacular thousand foot drop offs to the ocean floor. But this was Bainbridge where the silt, algae, and daphnia rule. My challenge in this dive report is to make Sunday's wall dive sound spectacular. (Gerhard says that my dive reports are more interesting than the dives themselves. Obviously I'm more interesting in print than in person). We started out along the wall, kept close the wall, and never lost sight of the wall. The wall went up, the wall went down, the wall went all around the quarry. At a depth of 20 ft you could see about 10 feet of the wall; below 30 feet you could see about 15-20 feet of wall. After 66 thrilling minutes, we got out. That just about sums it up. As Liz put it, we were like quarry wallflowers. Seriously, it was a nice, long relaxing dive - the key word bring "long." Making this dive report more interesting than the dive itself wasn't that hard after all.
From Darth Vern . . .
Sun June 13 - We had our first team dive for the Columbia No.1 Dive Team this past Sunday at Lake Grubb in West Hempfield. This was an exploration and familiarization dive of an old iron ore quarry. The exploration part was to just see what is in it, since no one has dove it in a decade. The familiarization part is to get our new team acquainted and to dive some "very bad" water so the newer members get used to this sort of [blackwater] diviing, it was also to get some depths.
The day started off at 8am at the quarry with myself and James Zimmerman joining some of the boat operators and launching their Boston Whaler and getting some depth reading and a rough map of the quarry. The remainder of the team showed at the predetermined time of 9am. Out team was my friend Rob Overfield from Baltimore and our own Bryan Palmer, Chris Mayo, Scott Steinbacher, James Zimmerman, Mark Myers and myself with Jim Brown MIA due to starting his AI course. We devised a good team dive plan and set our rules for diving and we were headed to the water around 10am. After getting aquainted with the blackwater we finished our first round of diving and devised a plan for dive #2. Most of the day was pretty uneventful. The only thing that was found was what appeared to be an old coal bin. With viz being around 1-2ft at best, diving was not that much fun. The water was a very cold 37-38 degrees at depth [75ffw] due to the quarry being spring-fed. But this is the world of search and recovery diving.
Come out this Wed Nite to get wet and also this weekend, no excuses to stay home and sit on your butt!!!!!!!!!
Keep on diving and LIVE THE ADVENTURE!!!
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