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From Kent "Dr Deco" Hirsch . . .
ATTENTION DIVERS FLYING WITH SCUBA GEAR IN YOUR LUGGAGE. LEARN FROM MY ADVENTURES. GET TO THE AIRPORT EXTRA EARLY.
I decided to expand my diving knowledge and headed to cave country this weekend to learn sidemount gear configuration. In sidemount, your scuba tanks are positioned on your sides, under your arms. This gives a flatter profile, allowing penetration into shallower crevices in the cave system. Sounds like fun, doesn't it? Curt Bowen, publisher of Advanced Diver Magazine, designed a sidemount harness, the Armadillo. It must be custom fabricated to fit the tanks close to the body to maintain a streamline configuration. So I needed to have Curt tailor the harness to my manly physique :-(
I made the trip solo, as my cave diving buddy is in Paris for the finish of the Tour de Lance. I arrived in Jacksonville at 7:30 after an uneventful flight. Unfortunately, the baggage Nazis kept my dive gear in Philly. I guess the xray machine showed too many bomb-like items in the bags. Both my drysuit bag and my large bag with all my dive gear and my clothes failed to show up. So I met up with the gang from ADM Saturday morning at Ginnie Springs without equipment. We spent the morning tailoring the rigs, then I went up the road to Cave Excursions and my buddy Wayne. What a guy. He closed his dive shop, drove me to his home and outfitted me from head to toe in dive gear. Mask to fins and everything in between- dive lights, hood, computer, wetsuit, reels. I was ready to try this sidemount stuff.
Curt had a bunch of staff from the magazine learning the Armadillo, too. Two guys were adventure racers- you know, three days in the jungle of Costa Rica on mountain bikes, kayaks, and on foot; getting lost for 15 hours in a swamp. There was a guy who told about kayaking down the Zambezi River in Africa. 30 ft standing waves! Couldn't pull over to shore because of killer aligators and hippos. Other stories were told about crawling through caves so tight and full of mud and bat dung, that the only way to move forward was to wriggle your toes and turn your head to the side to get through. 100 yds in three hours. Then I heard about surfing and being circled by sharks. Hmmm, maybe I'm in over my head. Nevertheless, this group was really nice and fun to dive with. We went out to dinner and breakfast together, 10 people splitting the check. You know what usually happens- the guy holding the check ends up $20.00 short before the tip. Not here- the pot was $20.00 heavy AFTER the tip.
The Armadillo BCD is easy to adapt to. Regulators had to be reconfigured with 6" spg hoses and short 2nd stage hoses. The tanks are clipped to your hips on the BCD and the tank valves are held in place with bungies.there's a back mounted floatation bladder, and lots of D-rings. Diving is neat, because areas that previously would be tight restrictions, we just blew by. Did two dives in Ginnie Springs Saturday, then one dive Sunday at Little River Spring. The dives were fun, seeing areas of the cave previously out of bounds to backmount. I dove Saturday with aluminum 80's and a wetsuit and Sunday with steel 85's and a drysuit. Both configurations were comfortable. The only adaptation was having to breathe each side independently to 1/3rds,and adding tank weights to the 80's to keep them negative. Check out www.advanceddivermagazine.com. Maybe you'll see me when they do an article on the Armadillo. I'll be the guy carrying the tangled wreck reel.
By the way, my clothes and gear finally showed up at my motel at 1:00AM Sunday morning; 36 hours late. Bang, bang, bang on the door in the middle of the night. No apology, no excuses- your government at work.
From Tom Pritchard . . .
Tom and Gerhard's Escort Service.
If it were that type of escort service, the logo on our door would read, "We can't give it away." No, this was our escort of Paul Bernhart from the cement dock to the lobster shack. In the interest of time, we dropped off Paul's car at the shack and then entered the water at the partially submerged cement dock. Our goal was to get a dive in AND get Paul to the shack in time for his Advanced Class night dive with Wild Bill. With viz about 1 ft near the surface, nobody had a buddy on our first descent. Paul, by accident, hooked up with Jess Zellers and Greg Culp for about 100 feet and then realized that he had the wrong buddy pair and ascended. With the great viz, Jess and Greg never knew they had an interloper. Reunited we left for the cement dock. Below 30 ft the viz opened up to about 5 feet. We put Paul in front so we wouldn't lose him again and used our Lights of God to blaze a path. As an aside, I always wondered if Jess called Paul "Speedy Gonzalez" because he 1) swam fast underwater; 2) drove his car fast; or 3) performed too quickly in the sack. After the dive I spoke with Jess. Did anybody else notice the similarity between this question and a certain PADI exam question (Hint: there is more than one correct answer.) Jess and I decided that choices A and B were correct and that we didn't have enough info to decide on the veracity of choice C. (Let's keep it that way). After Speedy got lost in front of us (honest), he stopped at the mixer, which was a wise decision. The leg from the mixer to the Quest was strictly "stay on the rope or get lost in the pea soup." Viz was better on the north side of the Quest where the night dive would take place. Despite burning 400 lbs of air at the start finding each other, Gerhard and I escorted Paul safe and sound to the lobster shack, and made the round trip none the worse for wear.
Just so that people don't get the idea that Willow has the worst viz in Central PA - the viz on the west end of Access B at BCS a week earlier was 6 inches to a foot. John Gross and I found two boats by literally bumping into them. Viz at the school bus at the other end was about 5 ft and, believe it or not, there was a backwater along the south wall where the viz was 35 feet. The 35 ft viz area was only about 35 ft across and most if not all of the fish were there basking in the warm, shallow water. Hard to believe that all of this was in the same puddle of water on the same day. And a good time was had by all.
From Jess Zellers . . .
Well first off I feel the need to congradulate the people of Annville... for over a year and half every thursday night my way through this town has been slowed by an immense construction project. But for two weeks now there has been smooth road, no construction vehicles of any kind and since things are looking great I assume they are finally done!! So there's one more little town I can speed through late thursday nights.
Thursday Greg Kulp and I went looking for a dark corner of the quarry.... well I had a new can light to go play with. As soon as we jumped in and got to the platform, we realized finding a dark corner would not be a problem. There's a well defined layer of something about 10-15ft, that in addition to having no viz within itself, blocks almost all light from the surface. So we went along the wall and messed around in the canyon... the viz was amazing!! Came back hit the habitat, took the line over to the shovel.... a line that I KNOW goes to the shovel, is tied off to some chain above a rod or pole of some sort. That defined layer with no viz I was talking about, well you can see an area about the surface area of your mask if you're that close. I didn't remember the shovel having chain on it. So moved along the rod, felt the shovel up and confirmed its identity. A good dive... viz in the canyon was great, it was dark, got to play with the new light, and oh and that light is awesome!! Instead of dinner at Palao's I decided to go harass Bill Seiwic who was doing a night dive at the lobster shack.
That lead to tagging along with Bill's advance class sunday at Bainbridge. They were headed down to the dozer and deep boat for a wreck dive. Which gave me a chance to, you guessed it... go play with my light! Now on that first dive.... don't believe what anyone else says, this is what actually happened! From the dozer I was to go find the deep boat and be a human light house (with my big light). I leave the dozer on the angle the deep boat is always on, and start running into debris from the blast shack. Damn, too shallow. So I drop a bit and turn around and go back along the rim. Then the wall starts to look like it does out by the concrete block. So I turn around again, come up to the depth the dozer is, figuring I'll start over and try again. But when I got back to the general area I couldn't see a dozer.... although I did see perhaps the biggest cloud of silt in my life!!! Come to think of it, it was probably big enough to hide a dozer! But that would mean there was someone there kicking the crap out of the bottom. But the only people that were there (yep, I'm gonna name em) was the Bill's Seiwic and Hocley (those two probably didn't do that much silting), Speedy aka Paul Berhert, and Cindi &Patrick Seitz. During the mandatory post dive BS session more than one person asked me how the deep boat was. So I decided to have some fun with it. But when I told John Gross that the deep boat was absolutely beautiful, 100ft viz, 80F temp, and that Steve had made a small addition to it amounting to a few hundred feet of negotiable passageway John said something about my body content being extremely high in a particular variety of lunchmeat. So I didn't find the deep boat. But still ain't doing bad, cause I can't remember the last time I was mislocated in the hole. And hey, I got to play with my big light!!
From Bob Hanna . . .
7/19: Smokey Dive Masters Ralph, Pete, and Bob dove at Dutch Spring along with Si and Rob. The Viz has been somewhere between 35 and 50 feet, sometimes greater. We did two dives. The second dive was a compass course South off the Peninsula to the Trolley. I helps to be able to see the entire Trolley from the side.
7/26 Rob and Maria live in Groton, Conn. They came back and Rob and Bob dove again. We did two compass courses from the East side of the Peninsula to the Helicopter. We missed the Helicopter but hit the tanker dead center. On the second dive we hit the helicopter dead center. The viz was so good we could see the entire helicopter as we approached it swimming in the 50 foot range. Afterward we went N East, found the ridge and a very large un marked wooden cabin cruiser.
Tips for managing the heat: Dress at the waters edge, get wet ASAP, put gear on in water, relax for several minutes and have lots of fun. The air temperature hit 97.
7/27 Bob and Chris Rosing teamed up at Bainbridge. Also present was John Gross (rumor has it that he lives there) and Dive Master Bill, John's class, and Dive Master Pete, Mary, Tim and Vince. Pete and Mary swam all the way around the quarry---great fish dive. Chris wanted a Deep dive in addition to a fish dive (we saw lots of Cat Fish) so we went to the Bull Dozer and points down to 100+. (It is still 40 degrees but Chris was happy.)
My next report will be from Blue Mt Lake, New York which is located in the Center of the Adirondack State Park.
From Darth Vern. . .
Well I learned a good lesson this past week - even when you think you know alot about a specific subject, you don't. I had the priveledge of joining Dennie Leese's Photography Class this past week. Also in my class were Jim Brown and Ian Swisher! I learned a ton of things! A great class for even the most basic beginners. We covered everything and he even added info about our digital cameras, which I found helpful. Me, Jim and Ian headed to Wabank Saturday morning to make our two dives to use our new found wisdom. An absolutely fabulous day to dive! We made both our dives and I am now preparing myself mentally for the thorough verbal lashing I will surely get tomorrow nite from Dennie when we review and critque our new images. It is inevitable that he will abuse me, in fact if he didn't I would demand a refund, on the basis I was missing something from the class.
So anyway, we will be out this Thursday Evening at Wabank, we show up at 5:30-ISH and are out by 8:30!!! Come one out the VIZ is great and the BS is even greater!!!
Get Out and Dive and LIVE THE ADVENTURE
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