Alrighty, caught your eyes there, didn’t we?  No, we are not manatee wrestling, but we are here in Homasassa Florida to go diving with them this weekend.  That, plus visit a few of our favorite rivers, caverns & caves that Northern Florida is known for!

The trip started off on a great start, with me getting to the Philadelphia airport with plenty of time to spare.  That pretty much summarizes the great start portion of the journey for me!  I check my three big bags of gear at the curb, pass through security with no issues, and start down the terminal to my gate.  Hmmmm, it seems a little busy here today….what’s up with that? 

Well here’s what’s up - seems that a teenage airplane passenger using a “Jewish prayer object” caused a misunderstanding that led the captain to divert a Kentucky-bound plane to Philadelphia and prompted a visit from a bomb squad.

According to the Philadelphia Police, a 17-year-old boy on US Airways Express Flight from New York to Louisville was using tefillin, a set of small black boxes containing biblical passages that are attached to leather straps. 

When used in prayer, one box is strapped to the arm while the other box is placed on the head.

“It’s something that the average person is not going to see very often, if ever,” said the FBI spokesman. 

Friggin’ amazing, I guess no one aboard the flight had the Chutzpah to actually ask the young man what he was doing, assuming they are not familiar with this Hebrew practice.  But noooooooooo, we have to sneak around to the crew and they need to pass the word up to the cockpit and the captain needs to get his flight plans diverted to make an emergency landing and a rendesvouz with the Philadelphia Bomb Squad just cause of one religious American citizen.  Cheeeeesh!

OK, so all is good, and we reset Gov. Tom Ridge’s famous Homeland Security Threat Level Status light pole from ‘Red’ back to ‘Orange’ and get on with our lives.  That makes me wonder….do they even have bulbs in the blue and green lenses?  Will we ever see them lit? But I digress………….

By now of course, my flight is late as it gets caught in the queue of delayed flights from Philadelphia. So of course I miss my connection in Atlanta, which on it’s own would not be such a bad thing, except for the fact that I am picking up Dan Leone in Orlando and driving him to the resort!  Our plans were for him to arrive about a half hour before my flight, and come meet me when I landed.  Well I hope he packed a book or two, cause that is clearly not in the cards today!  When I get to Atlanta, the next flight to Orlando is oversold, so no sneaking onto that one.  And, the one after that is also!  Finally I am confirmed on the third flight to Orlando, and scheduled to land at 9:30, only four hours after my original plans.  So, I take a peek out of the big window at the gate, and realize I can see all the way to the next gate…….hmmmm…let’s look again, cause I am sure my view should be blocked by a big ol’ Boeing jet that I should be boarding in a few minutes.  Well no, my first glance was correct…..there is no jet there, cause it hasn’t even arrived yet!  Not looking good for Dan in Orlando, that is for sure!  Finally, an hour later, our plane arrives, we go through the unloading/cleaning/boarding  ritual, and we are off, heading southbound towards the land of Disney.

When I de-plane in Orlando it is after 11:00 and Dan is looking a bit haggard from his extended wait in the airport tavern!  Let’s get my bags and roll I say, and sure enough, there are my bags, heck they have been here and waiting for me for close to 4 hours!  So much for that official airline mantra about no checked bags flying without the passenger who owns them…just more rhetoric designed to appease the public.   We check in to EZ Car Rental, pick up our nice new Ford F-150 pick-em-up truck, and head west to the Homasassa Riverside Resort, our base of operations for the weekend’s activity. 

I pull into the resort and Bubba, the night clerk, hands me my stack of keys for the four rooms we have reserved.  “Hold them horses, pardner” I say, “we are four divers not four rooms!”  Oh no, he says, as he points it out in the reservation book, I have four rooms.  I can see that this argument is not going to go any place positive here at 2:00 a.m., so I say “how about we start small, and I only take one room tonight?”.  OK he says we can do that….I shake my head, collect our keys, and Dan and I go and move in.   Like a good daddy, I spend a couple hours nervously pacing until finally Dave & Natalie McLoughlan safely arrive, and by 3:30 a.m. I have everyone tucked in for the night, power-napping away in preparation for our first full day of diving.

Friday morning comes way too early, but there is no rush (can you imagine me saying that?) case we “own the boat” today, and Carl & Dave, owners of Adventure Dive Center in Crystal River, are as laid back as us!  So we get our gear together, pile into the van, and head up the road to connect with the Adventure Dive Center crew.  We arrive and the banter and joking begins immediately, if I did not know better, I’d swear we were in Indian Valley Scuba-Crystal River!  I love these guys!

So after the introductions, initial sarcasm & general abuse that is part of the IVS tough-diver-love program, we get to the ‘meat’ of the matter (what…did someone mention something about manatee’s tasting just like chicken?).  Whoa, whoa….let’s keep it politically correct here!  Remember Rule #1 of Scuba Diving? Of course we all do - Fill out the waiver!

So, paperwork completed, it’s time to watch the manatee movie, sponsored by the Florida Fish & Wildlife Commission.  Actually a pretty informative flick, and with some great videography, it prepares our crew for what we are about to see - 1,000 pound sea cows frolicking amongst us, as we dodge the kayak-based manatee nazi’s who’s sole purpose in life is to keep the manatees separated from those that love them the most! 

A short hop over to the boat, and we load up, hear the Cliff Notes version of the Coast Guard safety talk, and motor out into the Crystal River to our first location - Kings Spring.  This site is a little different, as it is a nice deep cavern very well camouflaged in the middle of an otherwise flat and lo-visibility river.  The bottom of the river in this area is 5 to 8 feet deep, and usually murky.  Today was no exception and the viz was around five feet or so in the river.  Two manatee refuge zones are located here, separated by a narrow gap where you can dive or swim to access the cavern entrances.  It’s really, really important to NOT swim into the manatee refuge areas, as they pointed out in the video.  So, I turn around to find the crew, and hmmmmmm…..I am alone here, let me surface and see where they have gotten off to!  Well, is that a manatee over there blowing those bubbles I see on the surface?  Nooooooo, it’s Team IVS, off the beaten path and smack dab in the middle of the refuge!   Psssst!  Hey - get over here!  Hurry!!!  Note to self -navigation might be good thing to emphasize this weekend!

OK, we re-regrouped and swam right over the top of the cavern area. Once you are there, the bottom drops into a rocky hole about 30 ft deep, and then you slide down the side, squeeze between a couple of rocks into a very dark slot, turn left, and viola!  you are inside the cavern!  That wasn’t too scary now, was it? 

Once inside, the cavern opens up a bit and by all standards, while the cavern is not deep, you clearly cannot see natural light from most vantage points once you are inside.  But oh well, who are we to point this discrepancy out?  The hole goes back about 100 ft, dropping to a depth of 48 ft inside.  Water clarity is phenomenal as this is entirely fed by crystal clear spring water.  It’s just dark!  And OK, maybe a little tight, especially if you follow me into some of the side shoots and little holes to see the catfish that like to hang out there!  But that’s all part of a good adventure!

So after our first initial drop into the cavern, we come out and ascend, and let everyone’s heartbeat fall back into a more normal range.  Breathing slows down, and I ask if we’re ready to go back in and actually see the cavern this time?  All answers are ‘Yes’ so we drop down, squeeze back in, and this time everyone is relaxed, and we enjoy cruising around inside, looking at the rock formations, wondering when it actually was that the big rocks we are swimming over fell from the ceiling, and even crawl into some of the catfish holes.  There’s a nice halocline at about 46 ft, where the salt water is mixing with the fresh, and it’s cool to stick your head into it and realize that no matter how hard you try, you can’t focus on anything!

After another half hour of play in and around the cavern, and we swim back out to the boat, taking the official path between the refuge areas this time!   Once there, we spend a little time searching for Dave M’s light in the silty murky bottom, but that official DIR-color black light isn’t giving away it’s position, so after a thorough search, we decide Dave needs a new light from Indian Valley Scuba (preferably yellow or some other bright color!). Cha-ching! “Oooops!  Was that my outside voice?”

Our second location is Three Sisters Springs, and as we motor up to the site, we can see where all the manatees have been hiding!  The water is thick with them, and there are manatees swimming, and resting, and nuzzling the snorkelers, and getting tickled and scratched - all cool!!  Of course, there are quite a few manatee-huggers, under the guise of “informational guides” crusing among us in thier kayaks, ready to give you a quick swat on the head with their paddle should you look menacing in the direction of any of the manatees.  We slip/fall into the water (it’s only four feet deep!) and walk over to the manatees.  A few of the local rocket scientists share their observation with us that our scuba gear might be a bit of an overkill for this depth, but we soldier on.  Everyone gets some great manatee photos, and some nuzzling and tickling, and finally it’s time to head up into the spring.  So we drop into the water, and swim through the narrow entrance to the springs themselves.  It is a very pretty swim, water depth varies from 5 to 8 ft, and the clarity is maybe, oh, 100 ft plus! As we swim we can start to see the sand boils, where the springwater is coming in from below, and the sand above is literally boiling as it tumbles and churns with the force of the water stream passing up from below - pretty darn cool! 

The springs branch off into three offshoots once inside (hmmmm…..maybe there was a reason to call it Three Sisters!) and although relatively small, they are beautiful, with white sandy bottoms, tree lined shores, a sunny day overhead, and lots of little fish and critters to amuse and entertain us.  And as we start to get a little bored with all that, here come the manatees - the union meeting must be over, cause they are starting to pile in!  First one, perhaps a scout, then here comes mom and a baby!  Very cool, very tolerant of us, very photogenic! Our morning is complete!

So back on board, we motor back to the dock, unload, and prepare for this afternoons dive on the Rainbow River.  But we have time for lunch, and the boys at Adventure Dive Center recommend the Taste of Philly Sub & Cheesesteak Shop across the street.  OK…..we are 1,000 miles from home, and all our zip codes start with 19xxx, so we are quite skeptical as to the authenticity of our sandwich experience.  Well one step inside the shop, and we think we have been transported right back to 9th & Passyunk in South Philly!  The owners fit the mold to a “T”, including the look, accent and mannerisms that you’ll experience at Pat’s or Geno’s - not to mention understanding what “wit” and witout” mean!  Needless to say, our sandwiches are absoutely delicious, and we have a new spot to recommend to everyone passing through Crystal River, FL!  

So we say our goodbyes, snap a few memory photos outside the shop, and drive up to meet Dave and the boat at K. P. Hole, the launching site for our Rainbow River drift dive.  Heading upstream towards the headwaters, the river is just beautiful, with lush woods, a few nice homes, and water as clear as can be flowing from the springs - as you might imagine when you get 400-600 million gallons a day of spring water coming up from deep inside the earth!  We stop just short of the end of navigable waters, and drop in at 5:30 p.m. for what is about to quickly become a night drift dive!  Gotta love the adventure - let’s do a first time drift dive for some of our party, in a new location they have never dove before, at night!  Like they say in the Guiness commercials - Brilliant!

 Well the dive turns out to be just fantastic and we see all sorts of cool things, including alligator gar, turtles, bass, catfish, even a couple of wild otters swimming with us - an hour and 10 minutes of drifting, cruising, up, down, around, just all great - OK, maybe almost all great, as this body of water has somehow managed to snatch another one of Dave M’s dive lights - those things must have magnets in them, set for the bottom of Florida’s waterways!  What a way to wrap up our first day of diving!  By the time we get back to the condo, Dan crashes for the night, Dave & Natalie head out for a quick snack at the restaurant, and I sit down to type this blog!  Such dedication, yes, I know!

Now it’s Saturday, and we have a surprise for our divers! In lieu of heading up to one of the springs today, we are going to have an opportunity to drift dive down the Silver River.  This river is totally primitive, completely surrounded by untouched forest preserves, and chock full of really cool critters above and below the water!  No one except Adventure Dive Center dives this river, and they only got the idea after years of running bird watching and nature lover tours on this untouched piece of Florida’s natural beauty.  The river can only be dove in January and February, cause during these two cooler months, most of the alligators and water snakes are in some state of hibernation, and unwanted underwater animal encounters are less likely!  How’s that for Indian Valley Scuba taking our divers safety and well being to heart?

So we head up, and it’s almost a two hour run to Ocala where we’ll launch for the river dive.  We load up the boat with gear, supplies, food, and beverages, and start the journey upstream against some really strong current.  The river is full of sunken logs and half-submerged logs and other hazards to navigation, and our captain is still learning the ropes, as he demonstrates with a few unintended 180 degree turns as a result of putting the boat a little too far into a turn for the current we are running against.  Oh well, we manage to get ourselves turned around each time, and the trip upriver is a photographers dream come true, with Anhinga, Cormorants, Great Blue Herons, Great Egrets, and Ibis birds out and about, wild Rhesus monkeys hanging from the trees, turtles of all sorts, and some really nice large American alligators sunning themselves on some of the half-submerged logs in the river - wait…did these guys not get the memo about it being hibernation season until February???

Our two dives there are great, with the current varying from mild to ripping as we go along, and some really cool buried underwater tree entanglement/death traps that we manage to avoid as we cruise along.  Armored catfish up to 30″ long are all over (those are Plecostomus to our aquarists), and the alligator gar and pickerel really added some nice new sightings to our fish list.  Lunch on board included Cheetoh’s and canned sardines, either packed in soybean oil or cajun style ( those who know me will be able to pick the flavor I chose!), beverages, and some good joke telling with our new friends Shane Rickman and Keith Fisher, a couple of good ol’ boys from Arkansas, and a local cracker, Capt. Jason Scott.  After that we pulled the boat, and headed over to Ken’s Winghouse, a Florida version of Hooters, complete with scantily clad waitstaff and icy cold brewskies - I’m thinking what more could we ask for?  (Natalie was rolling her eyes when I brought that up - go figure!)

And talk about small worlds..while I am eating my cell rings and it is none other than our Vandenberg connection, Joe Weatherby!  And he’s calling cause he just got to Crystal River and wanted to know who we would recommend going out to see Manatees with!  Well how much easier can this get, I hand the phone to Dave Mittelstadt, and Adventure Dive Center suddenly has a charter for Sunday! 

Sunday we opted to visit two of the more unique springs from our original itinerary - Blue Grotto and Devlis Den.  Blue Grotto is our first stop, and we check in, fill out waivers, and watch the informative (but frightening) video about diving the site.  Needless to say, this sorta freaks out part of our party, so by the time we are waterside,  it is touch and go whether to dive or not.  Thankfully we all agree to go in and check it out (liek the hundred or so other lemmings there that day) and turns out that it is not as scary as it was made to sound.  So we do the shallow loop, then the deep one, and work on our buoyancy skills, and have a nice dive.  After our first loop around the bottom, we head back towards the entry area, and Dan signals to me that he is low on air, so he is going up.  OK I signal back, and continue to work with Natalie on her hovering and bubble management, which is going great!  So we pop up and I see Dan hightailing up the stairs back to our staging area - strange, I think!  So I spend another ten minutes or so in the water with Dave as he is looking for a dive knife that he found (if you’re keeping score that is two lights lost, one knife found, for a minus one score so far for the weekend) but that he somehow dropped out of his BC pocket (making the score minus three).  So we look around, come up empty handed, and I take one last loop around the bottom of the cavern, and we surface.  Well there’s our friend Dan, standing at the dock, ready to go diving with a fresh new tank!  ’Sup, I ask, and he says he’s ready to see the rest of the cavern.  Uhhhhh Dan, sorry to diappoint, but that was it - in spite of the video and the owner’s long explanation about the deep dark place, we have just seen it all.  Talk about disappointed, he was sure there saw more to see down there, and didn’t want to be low on air while exploring it!  Sorry!   And to add salt to the collective wounds, while Dave and I were down searching for Dave’s newly found (and newly lost) knife, Natalie reports that some kid taking a class came up and was proud as a peacock ’cause on his checkout dive he found a really cool knife!   

So anyhow, we got over all that, and we throw the gear in the car, jump in, still wearing our wetsuits, and drive about a mile down the road and across the street to Devils Den.  This is a really cool place if you have never dove it, with a subterranean chamber that is spring fed, and only accessible by your choice of either rappeling down through a small hole in the ceiling, or taking the more conventional approach, walking down the stairs.  We opted for the conventional approach today, and geared up and walked on down into the cavern.  The water is of course perfectly crystal clear, with depths to about 50 ft.  The entry point is a platform set on a pile of rocks that fell from the ceiling (making one wonder if more are due to fall today!) and the dive is a complete circle around the perimeter, with swim-thru’s, crawl-thru’s and just lots of neat things to explore and see.  A couple of large catfish patrol the place, there are some nice signs complete with the Grim Reaper and “DANGER OF DEATH IF YOU PASS THIS SIGN” messages - good guidelines to follow!  A few turtles, some smaller fish living in fear of the big catfish, and some barred-off entrances to the back cave areas that are really tight to squeeze through (whoops…was that my outside voice again?).  All in all a neat dive, and we spent another hour and twenty minutes there enjoying it and wrapping up a nice weekend of very different diving.

Driving home we stopped at Cody’s Steakhouse, and what a fine time we enjoyed over a great steak dinner and a super waitress.  Jokes were flowing, the laughter never stopped, and boy were those 32 oz beers all around good!  We ended with a great chocolate brownie sundae that fed four - talk about size matters!  Great cap on a great day with great friends!  From there it was back, a few hours for the gear to drip dry, pack up and head to the airport for our respective rides home.  Great trip, we’ll be back next year!  

If it’s December it must be time for Indian Valley Scuba to invade the Florida Keys one more time.

Twenty four of us headed down Thursday to one of our favorite dive destinations, Key Largo, for a long weekend of diving, fun and laughter.  Some of the gang headed down a day early, and by tonights night dive we had 5 divers and 3 riders on the boat.  We headed out at 6 o’clock for a very nice dark night dive and tied up to the Benwood wreck.  Meredith Bernardo and I enjoyed a nice hour-long dive on this wreck, running right into a turtle to kick it off, then a big southern stingray, lots of lobsters, crabs, basket stars, spiny urchins, shrimp, sleeping parrot fish, spotted drums, feeding tube anemones, puffer fish and more.  At the same time, Pam Schools, Chris Muller, and Andy McConaghie, representing Dive NY, enjoyed a nice dive on the reef adjacent to the wreck…tell me again, what was that part in the briefing about going down the mooring line to make sure you find the wreck?  Hmmmm….looks like we’ll be helping them out  with a few navigation pointers over the weekend.  None the less, everyone had a great time, and the trip is off to a good start!  We followed that up with a nice snack at the Paradise Pub, joined by Katie Chin, Steph Skelton, and Jesica & Sheril Tyre.  Dave Hartman joined us along with his friend Seth, an independent film maker in town to work with our friend Ken Nedimyer and the Coral Restoration Foundation - amazing small world!  Even cooler, our group represented the far and wide reaches of the IVS family, with Ohio, California, Florida, New Jersey & New York divers in attendance on this trip. 

Ruh-Roh!  Friday morning came and so did the rain!  It was absolutely pouring this morning - so unlike the weather we had ordered!  Oh well, we’re here to dive, so dive we must!  The rest of the gang had showed up during the night, including Brian, Mary & Dan Young, Kim Luisi, Dave McLaughlin, Alex Cajkovich, Nikolina Cejvan, Luke Miller, Rick Jurewicz, David & Katie Manninen, and Felix Gryn.  Most of us had managed to arrive uneventfully, but Luke & Rick had the pleasure of meeting one of the locals on the way down from the airport, as she nailed the back of their rental car, ripping the whole rear bumer off!  That’ll make for some ’splaining to do at the Rental Return counter!  After introductions and hugs, the boat headed out with most of the gang, while Sue and her students, accompanied by Meredith and I, headed over to Jules Undersea Lodge.  Our dives there were great, all skills completed with panache, and we were greeted with lobster everywhere, and even a sleeping nurse shark, right there in the lagoon.  This team is ready to take on the ocean!  Meanwhile, the guys on the boat were hammered by the rain, but still managed to get two decent dives in.  

Friday afternoon we headed back out, with the Speigel and Benwood our wrecks of choice and in spite of the snotty seas, the dives were quite nice.  Decent viz and no current on the Spiegel, so the trip was definately worth it - and most of us were graced with a visit from one of the huge Goliath Groupers that call the Speigel Grove home.  Our second drop was the Benwood, and although the vis was down a little, still a really nice dive to wrap up our first full day of diving in Key Largo. 

Time for a short dinner and we head out for a Friday night dive, moved up a night because the boat parade is Saturday night.  As we load the boat the trees are sorta whistling overhead, so it is not a good sign.   Not ones to give up easily, we head out to sea, hoping for the best.  The whitecaps in the bay might be a bad sign, but we soldier on, eternal optomists that we be!  We pass thru Adam’s Cut, and head out into the open sea.  The whitecaps grow a little but it’s still OK, we keep a positive attitude!  The waves are sorta breaking over the front of the boat…OK….maybe this is getting worse…..OK…we have to slow down even further…..OK…..finally prudence overcomes the desire to dive, and we decide to turn around and call it a (diveless) night. Funny thing was that somehow Katie lost her underwear on this non-dive, and there were reports that Andy had some ’splaining to do with his laundry the next morning……

Saturday morning came upon us and so did the rain.  The winds have been blowing all night at 25 knots plus, so the conditions on the reefs and the sea reflect all that energy that nature has been throwing at us all night long.  Early reports indicate that it sucks out there, so we decide to hold off on the morning trip.  Finally the winds are down to about 18 knots, so we decide to head out at noon for a three tank trip.  We are diving in standard IVS reverse profile mode, doing two reef dives followed by a deep one to the Speigel Grove.  We head out to French Reef, the deepest of the local reefs,  and hope for the best.  As it turns out the vis is under 20 ft, so keeping the group intact is quite the challenge.  We manage none the less, and our open water candidates truly shine in the less-than-optimal conditions.  Two nice reef dives, and then a Nitrox-enhanced dip onto the Speigel Grove, with conditions approaching perfect - what a pleasant surprise indeed!  It is truly amazing what a difference of a mile or two can make with regards to the conditions on and under the water.

Finally it is time for the big holiday celebration, and our token house mother Stephanie has been busy all day shopping and prepping for tonights bayside feast.  Seth steps up to the role of grillmaster, and he does a splendid job preparing the meats to everyone’s liking.  Burgers, dogs, fixin’s, sides, salads - Steph has outdone herself making this a special holiday treat!  And no holiday celebration would be complete with a visit from the big man himself, and we were not disappointed at all, as Santa (aka yours truly), assisted by his lovely elf Meredith, joined the party and helped spread the holiday cheer.  And we were joined by DiveNY’s own Chris Muller, who was fully dressed in his holiday pixie (or was that elf?) smock.  Amy Slate joined our party with a group of her friends, so it was a great evening for all.  We were even joined by former astronaut Scott Carpenter, who is a fellow member of the Explorers Club and shared some of his amazing stories with us.  And in keeping with the international flavor that IVS embraces, we had cerveza’s from many nations oveflowing from our coolers to celebrate the holiday event.  Some of those libations might be behind the rumored theft (or as they call it in New York, a ‘relocation’) of one of the Amoray golf carts - we’re not naming names here, but how it ended parked in front of Katie’s door that night might be a good place for CSI-Key Largo to start the investigation. 

Finally Sunday morning dawned, and so did that fantastic weather we had ordered.  Clear skies, beautiful sun, and flat seas were the order of the day!  We headed out to two nice dives on the Elbow, starting with the City of Washington, where we got to crash another Creature Feature feed being conducted by our friends at Slates Atlantis Dive Center.  Huge grouper interaction, but alas, no sharks today.  We also ran a little Fish ID class on this great wreck, but it’t tough to focus when the 300 lb grouper keeps bumping into you.  We then motored over to the Train Wheel Wreck, where conditions were a little snottier and the surge a little stronger.  Still a good dive, viz was great, and we all enjoyed another 60 minute dive in Key Largo.

After a brief lunch and a quick turnaround at the dock, we sailed out for our final afternoon of diving, which was a double deep adventure to the Duane and the Speigel Grove.  Conditions on the Duane were fantastic, with the exception of the current, which was absolutely ripping!   Talk about a baptism of fire for our newest divers - what a ride it was indeed!  A good briefing prepared everyone for the worse, and without exception the group had a fantastic dive, even enjoying some precautionary air sharing to ensure that ample gas supplies were available for the ascent and return to the Amoray Diver.  The viz was forever, and the fish life abundant, so all in all a great dive - but the descent and ascent were a rush!   The best part was the ’spider man crawl’ down the front of the Duane’s wheelhouse.  Of course, after Dave jumped over the rail and headed down, Katie Chin was trying to figure out how to follow, with her significantly shorter arms not quite reaching like Dave’s did - but the rest of the group enjoyed watching her crawl over the rail, one leg at a time, and finally make it down to the main deck where Dave was patiently waiting.  All good, everyone ascended without incident, while experiencing diving in some real serious current conditions, and another great dive under our belts.

Our second location was the Speigel Grove, and again, what an amazing difference a couple of miles can make.  Nearly no current, great viz, a huge turtle putting on a show at the surface for us, and another fantastic dive.  Again, our newest divers performed fantastically, with lots of nice comfortable planned penetrations into the wreck - welcome to the world of IVS!  And, never to overlook a break-thru moment, Sheril Tyre was finally comfortable enough in her diving on this second visit to the Speigel to relax and pee in her wetsuit - amazing how the little things come together!  Thank goodness it was an Amoray rental!     

We wrapped up the trip with dinner at the Conch House, and our guest of honor was Sue who was celebrating her birthday today in perfect style - underwater and surrounded by friends!  And talk about making it an even more perfect birthday party, we had the Eagles on the big screen and watched as they kicked NY butt (sorry Dive NY’ers!) and cemented undisputed first place in the NFC East conference!  On top of that San Diego put the Cowboys in their place, and the Browns even embarrassed the Steelers with a win - great day for the IVS football fans in attendance (again, sorry Dive NY!).  And of course it was time for the graduation ceremony, as we congratulated our newest PADI National Geographic Open Water Divers Jesica & Sheril Tyre, and Luke Miller, our newest PADI Deep Divers Dave & Katie Manninen, and our newest PADI Enriched Air Diver Alex Cajkovich.  Finally, we announced the winners of the coveted ADD (All Dives with Dave) Award - Meredith Bernardo &  Andy McConaghie - way to go guys! 

Monday saw most of the group head home, while Felix, Pam, Chris, Andy, Dave Hartman and Dave V took a scenic ride to Key West, with the destination being the wreck of the Vandenberg.  We met up with Chris Norwood, owner of Florida Straits Diving, and one of the significant players in the actual sinking of the Vandenberg.  Our first stop was our newest Keys lodging choice, a waterfront condo on Stock Island, from where we’ll be basing our Key West op’s for 2010.  The condo is first class, and located right next to the Hogfish Bar & Grille, a great local hangout.  We settle in and then head downtown to get this diving started!

As it turns out the wind has been kicking pretty strong all morning, so rather than beat ourselves up on Chris’s boat, we all jump onto the Lost Reef Adventures boat for the double dip on the Vandie.  I had arranged for our good friend and Vandenberg project manager Joe Weatherby to be our tour guide for some deep and dark journeys through the wreck and he was ready to show off his baby.  We dropped in as two groups, with Andy, Felix, Chris M and Pam enjoying a self-guided tour, and Joe, Chris N, Dave H and myself set for some serious ‘learning the lay of the land’ touring.  Down we went, with 80 ft or better visibility, 80 degree water, and zero current for our first dive.  We dropped in the forward cargo hatch shaftway, dropping down to the 4th deck at 134 ft, then beginning our tour towards the stern.  We passed through room after room, zigging left and right, around equipment, shelving, and furniture, finally exiting at the beginning of the engine rooms.  We move up to the main deck, and Joe and Chris head for the ascent.  Dave H and I are fine with our gas and deco obligations, so we head aft, circling the stern, and then work our way forward, circling the bow also - that 540 ft of wreck - you can tell there is no current when you can do that on a dive!  We work our way back towards the moring line, and finally surface after a 50 minute, 134 ft deep dive - first class!  And my personal thanks to Mike Cochran and his team for developing the algorithm that makes dives like this possible!

We enjoy a brief surface interval, which was not brief enough, if you ask Chris Muller  - cause the entire time we got to enjoy local divemaster-candidate (and Speedo wearing) Tom ogling Chris’s manly physique.  Hey, we’re in Key West, and if this thing with Pam doesn’t work out, at least Chris knows he has options!  Finally, enough of that, we descend again, this time dropping right down onto the wreck, and touring the weather balloon storage garage, complete with basketball backboard, then down into the hydraulic steering room, out and under the rudder, hitting the sand at 144 ft, popping into the engine room and winding our way through the myriad of catwalks, piping and ductwork there, through the tank room, and finally out the side, then up into the berthing area.  Another great dive, 40 minutes of bottom time, and back on the boat with nearly 1500 psi left in my 120 - almost sacriligous, if not for that deco obligation part!   As we head back to port we enjoy a beautiful sunset, two cruise ships leaving port, lobster boats heading out to check their traps, sail boats all over the harbor - almost a Norman Rockwell scene, with an IVS twist of course! 

Back to the condo, we gussie up a bit, and head over to the Hogfish for a bite to eat, then some of the crew head back into town for dessert while Felix and I decide to crash at the condo for the evening and enjoy some Monday night football, another great surprise as the Niner’s kick butt in Arizona.

Tuesday morning Pam, Andy, and “Tom-bait” Chris head back up to Miami to catch their flights home, and Felix and I have one more day of diving.  Our mission today is to visit the USS Curb, a WWII naval salvage tug that sits in 220 feet of water off Key West.  This is another exploratory dive for our IVS tech trip schedule for next year, and we’re excited about getting our first chance to dive this intact and upright wreck.  Our second destination will be back at the Vandenberg to wrap up a great weekend of diving.  The winds have dropped down to 10 knots, and the seas are relatively flat, helping to ensure a great afternoon of diving.

It’s going to be a late start as our dive buddy and local celebrity Joe Weatherby is being honored by the local chamber of commerce this morning for his work in the Vandenberg project.  Finally we head over to fil tanks, choosing mixes of 24% and 32% nitrox for our two dives.  Load the boat, prepare the rigging with 300 ft of down line, a heavy grapple hook, and a big poly ball float, and we’re ready to head out.  It’s about a  40 minute run to the Curb, and we run right over the wreck, watching it pop up from the bottom on the sonar.  We make three passes over it before our hook finally grabs the wreck, and we gear up and head down.  Conditions are great, but the sun is quickly setting, so it’s a bit dark as we approach the wreck.  The deck sits at 170 ft, so by the time we have dropped in, explored the engine rooms and lower chambers we are pushing 180 ft on this dive.  There are scores of big black groupers on this wreck, huge horse eye jacks, and a school of really large bar jacks working a silverside bait ball at the bow.  The wreck is covered with monofilament and fishing nets, so it’s an entanglement nightmare, but we’re careful and avoid snagging ourselves.  With the depth, our planned run time is 20 minutes, and it passes all too quickly.  Felix has already started to head up, and Joe is accumulating major deco obligations, so it’s up to me to run down and untangle the grapple hook from the lines it is caught in.  Joe motions to just cut the line, but I can’t do that, heck, I love a challenge at depth!  So I drop down to the grapple, and carefully untangle the lines, netting, and ropes it is fouled in, finally achieving success and tieing the hook back on itself to avoid snagging something else.  I start up the line, with a 13 minute deco obligation, and my first stop at 50 ft.  Felix is well ahead of me, but Joe is using his ”pink” computer today, and so I get to spend an additional 27 minutes of run time hanging with Joe and waiting for his computer to clear. By the time I surface it has been a total of 60 minutes since my descent - thank goodness for efficient breathing!

Back on board, we motor over to the Vandenberg, and the sun has long set now.  Fifty minutes of surface interval is more than enough, and we drop down on the great wreck again.  Our mission this time is to visit one of the more dangerous areas of the wreck, the laundry room.  Access is limited to a shaftway from above and one set of winding stairs within the room.  We enter the weather balloon hanger, and drop straight down the shaftway, into 125 feet of darkness, in a space that is barely one diver wide - talk about a cool rush!  Finally I am in the room, and Joe & Felix follow me, being super careful not to silt ourselves out.  We tour the space, and then locate the stairs and work our way up to the 3rd deck, where we make a long 350 ft run through the crew berthing areas, ending up right under the bridge.  One last narrow passage and it is total siltout, as Felix loses sight of me.  Through the cloud I can see him turn, looking up one passageway, then another, not seeing me straight ahead due to the silt.  He turns around, and I follow, signaling to Joe that our plan has just been modified.  I chase Felix back out through the silt until I finally catch him, and we head out to exit the ship and begin our ascent.  It’s so easy to get fouled up in a wreck, and the Vandenberg has more than it’s share of tight passageways and lots of Key West silt throughout the interior.  We end up with a 43 minute total run time on the wreck, and I manage to score a brass light fixture complete with an intact frosted lens!  Finally we reboard, and enjoy a pitch black ride back to port to wrap up a fantastic weekend of diving and adventure.

Now a quick rinse of the gear, and Felix and I make the 4 hour drive to Miami where we’ll spend the night and catch our flights home in the a.m.  We can’t wait to get back here and explore these wrecks again - February seems so far away!

11/28 Friday

Travel day to the Enchanted Isle, as Puerto Rico is known, for a liveaboard dive adventure on the Nekton Rorqual.  Team IVS, consisting of Bob Stitzinger, John Glodowski, Bill Zyzskowski, Tom Rebbie, Bob Adami, our soul female adventurer Joyce Kichman, and yours truly, were set for a week of fun, laughter, adventure and maybe even a little diving, while living large on one of the most stable boats in the Caribbean liveaboard fleet.  Packing carefully, I found myself with seven bags, 4 of them pushing the scales at 70 pounds.  There’s a certain reward in my loyalty to Delta, and one of those is a checked bag limit of 3 bags @ 70# each.  Unfortunately, on this trip I have one more than the three I am allowed, so I’m dinged $125 for my gear.  Tom offered to take my video camera case, so that left me checking four and carrying two.  I am sure glad I got this rebreather cause it really lightens my load when travelling – NOT.  One machine, eight cartridges of CO2 absorbent, six 19 CF bottles for oxygen, another for diluent, and finally an eighth bottle for a bailout bottle.  Not to mention eight valves, bailout regulator, dive gear, backplate, wing & regulator (just in case rebreather didn’t want to play nice), a couple of t-shirts and changes of underwear, plus four Pelican cases, and I am checking 300# of bags and humping two more that weigh another 60# each.  Oh yeah, that rebreather is the cat’s meow for lightening up that diving load!  

So Stitz, Tom & I flew Philadelphia to San Juan, and from there we grabbed a rental car and enjoyed a nice ride across the top of the island to Aguadilla, home of Tony & Brenda Cerezo’s Puerto Rico Technical Dive Center.   Once there, we caught a late dinner and got first dibs on our beds at Casa Brenda, the three bedroom upper half of their home. Joyce, John, Bob & Bill took a more direct flight from Newark right to Aguadilla, and they caught a taxi from the airport to the house.  As we unloaded their gear in the front yard, Brenda’s Yorkshire Terriers were inspecting everything to make sure it passed muster, and like the TSA, they needed to single something out for a closer look.  It turned out to be Stitz’s dive bag, and they gave it a thorough once over, and once it passed, they marked it for him, taking turns peeing on the corner of his bag.  Welcome to PR Bob!  After that, everyone was too tired to get too much else done, so we hosed down Bob’s bag and settled in for the night.

11/29 Saturday

Everyone got up from our overnight at Casa Brenda, stretching and yawning and starting the whole bonding process for the week.  Our plan today was to get our gear organized, and then head over to Puerto Rico Technical Dive Center, where we would get in a shore dive or two.  With Tom’s rented Explorer, it took two trips to shuttle the team from the house to the dive center, but eventually we all got there.  J-Glo and I went with the first group, as we needed to re-assemble 8 tanks each for our rebreathers and bailout bottles, then began the slow process of getting all our oxygen fills that we’d need on board for the week, as the boat had no capability to refill O2.

Everyone grabbed a couple of tanks and we borrowed Tony’s pick-em-up truck and headed over to Naturals, a nice shore entry on the western shore of PR.  One of the highlights of the site is an abandoned boat, left by refugees (or illegal aliens, depending on your point of view) from the  Dominican Republic, which lies about 60 miles west of PR.  Everyone geared up and I attempted to fire up my Poseidon rebreather, only to be greeted with error code after error code, finally consistently settling on error code 55, which translated into “It is time for your two year mandatory service on your machine”.  That’s cool except my machine had a “born on” date of March of this year, so it was only at most 7 months old.  After going round and round, and collaborating with a local Poseidon expert …………………., it was determined that this was another quirk in the Swedish software, where the 104 week countdown timer suddenly resets itself to zero, meaning you have no weeks left before service is required – friggin’ amazing, but true.   I need to check my notes, but I think if my Poseidon was a Yatzee game, I have filled in just about every single possible combination of error codes, start-up failures, and in-water abort dive alarms.  So while I wave goodbye to the rest of the team as they slip beneath the waves, I head back up to the dive center to see what we can manage to do for my week of planned rebreather diving.

Once there, we decide that the error code is in the battery portion of the processor, so we switch batteries with one of Tony’s.  OK, that was a nice try, except that Tony is running version 41 of the software and I am running version 42, so the battery and machine are incompatible.  OK, so now we swap out my head with Tony’s head, and use his battery, and of course will it start?  No, cause Tony’s battery is only charged up about 40% and that is below the minimum value allowed to start the machine and dive.  Jiminy friggin’ Crickets, this is a challenge!

So I just throw everything in the bag to load on the boat and wish for the best.  Enough time lost, and the missed dive this afternoon almost voided the “ADD – All Dives with Dave” award for this trip - but we’ll make up for it!!

The rest of the crew finishes their dive and we head back to the dive shop and turn in our tanks.  Looking at the clock, and realizing what we still needed to get done, we opt to blow off the second dive, and head out to grab some lunch.  We hit Brenda up for some choices, and she offers us our choice of cold beer/decent food/great view/terrible service, or, cold beer/good food/great service/no view.  Since we’re on some sort of vacation, we opt for the former, choosing great view over great service, and head over to Happy Belly’s on the beach.  Our table is on the porch and hangs right over the beach with a great view of the local surf community and breaking waves over the rocks. Our waitress, a natural Puerto Rican redhead (you figure that out) saunters over, and within two or three verbal exchanges we are convinced we can fix that poor service issue with her.  The cervezas start to flow, and the laughter grows progressively louder as the team really starts to gel.  This is going to be a great week with a great team of IVS divers!  Sure enough, service is great, food is good (except J-Glo, who’s burger “smelled bad” and he had to return it!) and we bonded well with the locals.  We even ended up buying hand-woven palm frond beer coozies from a beach vendor, with him tossing them up from the beach to our table. 

So back to the house, no time for showers now, so we load up the remaining gear and head back to the shop to get what we left there and I put on my best ‘puppy dog eyes’ to get Brenda to drive half of us down to Mayaguez in her pick up – and hey, it worked!

Gear loaded, we head down, stopping at Sam’s Club to stock up on provisions and drinks as the boat offers no canned or bottled beverages, only juices.  Three massive shopping carts later, we are ready to roll, and the amount of food, drinks and snacks we have has us looking like we are in training for the next Biggest Loser show!

Once in the Port of Mayaguez, you would think finding a 100 ft long, 4 story high white boat would be a cinch, but no, it is not. A couple of cell calls later and we finally pull up alongside this very different looking boat.  It is almost a cube on the water, length=width=height, not exactly boat-like in it’s appearance but this is what the SWATH technology is all about.  The boat is designed to minimize sway and eliminate side-to-side rolling, so we’ll see if it works!  We board, pack our goods away, and get our pre-trip briefing out of the way.  We meet the crew, including Captain Jonathan, and his team: Kendal, Kris, Bobby, Dave, Neil, Scarlett, Ryan, Mercedes, Melissa, and the queen of the galley, Beth.  And joining us for the trip were fellow divers Jeff McKee of Macungie, Jake Galioto of South Amboy, Chris Bain of Somerset, and Joe & Nancy Shook of Fort Lauderdale rounded out the guest list, making a total of 12 divers and 11 crew to take care of us – not a bad ratio at all!

Our first on-board dinner is served up in the salon.  Nothing fancy, but it gives everyone a chance to talk, break the ice and get to know each other a bit.  We settle in to our bunks and the engines fire up as we begin to head to our first location, Desecho Island.  Each night the boat selects an anchorage that provides a relative assurity of calmness in case of winds or bad weather during the night, and to make for a short hop to the first dive site of the day.

11/30 Sunday

Our first morning aboard and the day started off with a nice breakfast and a glorious panaramic view of uninhabited Desecheo Island.  While we were eating the boat headed from our overnight anchoring site to our first dive site, Bomb Anchor Alley.  This was a nice site with scattered coral formations and good vertical relief.  The chosen site has purpose as it a great place for checkout dives, making sure everyone (and their gear) is up to the task of a week of great diving.  There is some scattered practice armament around, dummy rounds and bombs, as we dive, but nothing live or dangerous.  Still, adds a neat and somewhat surreal sense to the site.  Colorful and lively reefs with healthy fish populations set the tone for a good week!

Before diving today we had two briefings, the first a general “how we do things on the Nekton Rorqual talk” by the captain, which was well done and informative.  Then it was time for our first dive site briefing.

Well one of the instructors, Melissa, had made a nice drawing of the dive site on the white board, complete with the various coral structures and sand channels, and the point where the boat was moored.  But it turns out that there are actually two mooring pins at this site, located about 60 feet apart.  She had drawn the boat tied to one of the pins, and just as she started her briefing, one of the crew pointed out that we were actually tied to the other pin.  Well it was an Emmy winning meltdown on her part, and she was so challenged by the boat being 60 feet from where it should have been, that she could not finish the briefing and left us to study the site map on our own.  Great start!

The plan was to make two dives here this morning, and viola, the rebreather starts up nearly flawlessly, and I am treated to a few hours of silent bubble-free diving with our group.  How cool when the hardware is in sync with the operator! 

After the second dive lunch is served, and Beth is starting to show her skills and talent in the tiny kitchen.  Following lunch, the boat moves a few miles and anchors at a site called Hobbitts House, basically a field of tall individual coral pillars separated by sand.  The site briefing was a slight improvement over the first, and we are lowering our expectations in that regard.  This site was really different but offered some great diving as the huge coral covered rock structures rose from the sea bed about 30 to 50 ft, making some really dramatic walls and swim thru’s.  We had some monster lobsters in one of the swim throughs that probably tipped the scales at 8 to 10 pounds minimum.  So big I really had to think about how on earth I would grab and hold get one of these buggers – not to mention getting it into the lobster hotel!

We did two dives here, and a night dive, and I saw four octo on that dive, making it pretty darn cool.  Great site selection so far!  Back on board they untied from the mooring, and we headed to our sleeping spot.

11/31 Monday

We awoke this morning at anchor in a sheltered cove along the southwest shore of Mona Island, and enjoyed a great breakfast served up by the crew – we are eating well here for sure.  The boat fired up and we enjoyed a nice one hour cruise to our first dive site, “Yuletide”.  This was a nice site with the mooring in about 60 feet of water along a ridge of coral, with some dramatic erosion cuts in the coral that led down to a really nice sloping dropoff.  Lots of healthy reef structure and good fish populations of all sorts.  Couple of nice morays of various flavors, more nudibranchs, and channel crabs.  We did two dives at this site, and I got a third one in, finally starting to realize a little return on investment on the Poseidon rebreather, which has proven to be such a challenge so far.

After lunch we sailed to our second dive site, “Bubbles & Blossoms”, named that for no particular reason that we could tell. Along the way Tom Rebbie pointed out some rock structures that to him (and him alone) looked like dead cats skulls, and yeah, if you squinted really hard, and turned your head, and closed one eye, and let your imagination run wild, maybe, just maybe, it was a cat skull- maybe.  But supportive group that we are, everyone could agree that they could “see” that, and from there we began to embellish on what else we could see in the rock structures, until it sounded like a Rorschach ink blot designers convention.  Tom quickly learned that some things are best not shared with this group!  If he ever forgets, all he needs to do is ask Randy Rudd, our favorite former ice dancer, about sharing some of life’s secrets with us!

This dive site was great, with a series of coral fingers with sand channels in between, that started about 40 ft and sloped gradually to about 60 ft where they abruptly dropped off straight down to about 200 ft – very dramatic, very cool.  We did three dives here (OK I did four), ending with a really nice night dive full of playful octopus and other denizens of the deep and dark.  On that dive I was able to figure out exactly when the rebreather would run out of oxygen, and also exactly how long you can breath off that 19 CF diluent bottle and 12 CF pony – ask me if you want to know!  Let’s just say I approached the boat like a carp on a warm summer evening, my mouth open and skimming the surface for breaths, cause there wasn’t a whole lot left to breathe in the three tanks I was wearing – all part of a good science experiment!

It was also later this afternoon that someone querried about the overall route of the boat, and the captain brought out his charts, and showed us how we started at Myagquez, on the west cost of PR, sailed westward 18 miles to Desecheo, then another 30 miles or so to Mona, and then how we’d head back, dive off the southwest corner of PR, and finally sail on and disembark in Fajarta, on the east coast.  WHOA NELLIE!  We have a car in Mayaguez, and airplane tickets home from Aguadilla Airport, no where near the east coast of PR.  “‘Sup with that, dog?” I inquire, and the captain says they have a charter in St. Croix next week and need to position themselves on the east coast of PR in order to make the crossing in time to pick up the passengers.  Well shiver me timbers, that was hardly the plan in our charter!!  So, one thing leads to another, and it all gets worked out, with the boat dropping us ashore in Guanico on the way east, and shuttling us back to our car in Mayaguez.  Thank goodness for little discussions like this!

12/1 Tuesday

Another spectacular sunrise as we awoke to the sound of the boat motoring over to Monita Island, a small pillar of rock about two miles off the northwest corner of Mona Island.  Strikingly similar to Wolf Island in the Galapagos, it hinted of spectacular diving along deep sheer walls.  The captain’s briefing teased us with 400+ feet of vertical descent along the shoreline and we were pumped.  Breakfast was served in the galley, and we looked forward to the first dive of the day.

The pre-dive briefing covered the procedures for exit and re-entry to the Rorqual, along with the dive plan.  Splitting into two groups, we were to enter with the DM, gather on the surface, descend together, and swim as a group enjoying a leisurely drift dive.  OK on the first three points……..

We dropped down and DM Neil takes off in the lead, never once missing a kick stroke on this dive.  So much for the leisure part – it was huff & puff as we fought our way into the current for much of the dive.  There was so much to see, and we swam right by every bit of it – swim thru’s, sleeping turtles, resting sharks, fish, coral, sponges, never stopping to see any of it – it was like a drive-by dive experience, and the sad part is we were the ones that were driving, led by our DM.  On top of that, there was no checking of gas or tank pressures, leading one of our group to exit prematurely and surface with under 200 psi in his tank – not cool.  Finally it was time to end the madness and deploy the safety sausage.  Out came the DM’s sausage, a 3 inch x 48 inch model that IVS sells practically as a novelty, hardly as an open water surface signaling device.  On top of that, the reel that he carried was full of ½” rope, perfect for anchoring a small to mid size boat, but hardly appropriate for a small sausage.

We finally surfaced, and I swam over to Neil and made it clear we needed to have a good surface interval chat to work out some of the bugs and make it a good dive for our divers.  Thankfully he welcomed that suggestion and we agreed to talk once back on board.

The boat sailed over to pick us up, backwards, and then through the tag line, backwards.   Hmmmm ….. it seems to have made more sense to drive the boat say, forward, where it could move faster and more efficiently, then toss the tag line as it went by, so it naturally unfurled behind the boat, rather than us having to catch it and then swim away from the boat to stretch it out – but who am I to make such silly suggestions?

Finally back on board, Neil and I got together and shared some ideas for the next dive – let’s see how they play out.

Well lo and behold, the next dive, on the very same site, turned out just fantastic.  Neil, along with Captain Jonathan, led a great dive, and we commend them on their willingness to listen to the guests and work to ensure a great experience for all.  Nice work guys!

Lunch and a motor back to the coast of Mona for our next dive site, ‘X Marks the Spot’.  Well this morning’s dive conditions would be a tough act to follow, and this site didn’t even try at all.  Murky, surgy, sandy, thirty minutes into it and I called my dive for the afternoon.  Gotta have some positive feedback from your diving experience and it wasn’t quite happening here!

Well the general sense of “this site sucks” felt by the divers made it through the ranks of the crew, and Captain Jonathan gathered us for a meeting and discussed options.  We selected a new site for the second afternoon and evening dive, and with no further ado, he agreed to move the boat and make for a better dive experience for us – twice in one day, I really need to complimate the captain, the crew and the folks at Nekton for running a first class operation.

So we headed off to the dive site known as Southern Pride, in hopes of finding visibility and nice conditions.  We scored on both counts!  Viz was good, conditions were great, and it was a nice site indeed. A good late afternoon dive, followed by dinner, then one more night dive, with the group getting smaller as the week goes by – tonight was J-Glo, Bill Z, Joyce, Bob A and me.  Going in on the night dive was a challenge as the current and wind had picked up substantially.  Coming back out was even more exciting, but we all managed to make it aboard with no loss.  Great job team!

12/2 Wednesday

How many ways can you describe waking up to perfect conditions and unbelievable views?  This trip certainly has been batting 100% in that department for sure.  This morning finds us off the northwest coast of Mona Island, where sheer cliffs head straight down into the sea.  Very dramatic dive site, with the vertical walls heading down to almost 100 ft, and a collection of collosal rocks and boulders that tumbled down over the ages, all covered in colorful algaes, hard corals, and some sponges.  Landscape here would be easily confused with some of the dive sites off southern California, where similar conditions abound.  We started the day off with a nice drift dive, led by DM Dave, 80 ft for 40 minutes, lots of life, great photo opportunities – great way to start the day!

So it’s surface interval time and the second dive will be in essentially the same location, so what do we do?  Fire up the diesels and take a 3 mile run offshore, only to turn around and return to the dive site.  Madness you ask?  No, U.S. Maritime Laws, that say we can’t empty the holding tanks within three miles of the coast!  That accomplished, we are free to use the facilities to our hearts content.

We splash again for dive #2, and it’s a repeat of the first dive – superb, easy and spectacular.  Three years of traveling to Puerto Rico to dive Mona on local charters and three years of not having it happen due to every local excuse you can imagine, and finally, we are here – this was definitely worth the effort.

So as they are analyzing the Nitrox tanks, I notice one of the crew members test one Nitrox tank, then go to a cylinder of air, recalibrate the analyzer, then go to another Nitrox tank, back to the air cylinder, etc.  I ask what’s up with that, and Melissa (the Instructor doing the testing) tells me that “they have to calibrate the Analox tester after every tank”.  They know this cause if they don’t they will get readings that don’t match another sensor that some guest brought on board recently.  Well, with that scientific explanation shared, I ask if they considered the fact that the sensor operates via a galvanic cell, and it should be inherantly stable all day long, and should only require periodic verification, and not necessarily calibration, against a known gas, such as air.  Well “this is how you need to do it” I am told in no uncertain terms.  Well riddle me this, Batman – if that sensor is so dang unstable from one test to the next, that you can’t trust it to test two Nitrox cylinders in a row, then what is to suggest that it is still stable from the time it goes from the air cylinder to the first Nitrox cylinder?  “Why don’t you stick with the diving and let us do our work”, is the response from Bobby, who, coincidently, happens to be married to our gas analysis expert Melissa – go figure.  Hey, silly me, it’s only life support equipment, and the testing of the cylinder gas is only to ensure that we don’t, say, die, but you’re right, the crew definitely knows science and they know what they are doing – NOT.  The blind leading the blind is more like it.

After that it’s lunch again, and then we motor back over to Monito for another set of drift dives here along the rocky shore.  More beauty, more great critter sightings, more good diving – we are loving it!  Two great dives along these rocky shores, averaging 100 ft depth, about 40 minute runs.  Amazing amount of life, both in variety and abundance, on every dive site we have visited this week

Finally we head back over to Mona Island to moor for the night in a location known as ‘One Particular Harbor’.   After dinner we do our night dive here, and see more octopus, a couple of slipper lobsters, more nudi’s, sharks, sleeping groupers, a big pufferfish (that of course I couldn’t resist giving a little loving to, and got a nice big inflation in return – excellent photo op!) and the rest of the usual cast of characters.  Excellent dive, and after John & Dave managed to get involved in a serious underwater macrame’ project with John’s reel, Joyce got to practice some real air sharing as she nearly managed to suck her tank dry as we headed back to the boat!  Cross that off the list of things to do while diving, Joyce! [Note: no actual divers were hurt during this experience, the conditions were near perfect, and there was plenty of support in the water]

12/3 Thursday

Another morning in paradise as we have collectively decided to repeat yesterdays dive plans, and do drift diving all day.  Of course no morning is complete without starting up the Poseidon rebreathers, and today we are one for two, as my machine comes up nicely and John’s continually fails on start up.  That sucks, and John is sad, so we give him a little (very little) hug and tell him to suck it up, put on a tank and let’s go diving!   After yesterdays somewhat short dives (ok, well at least short for us) we have asked that our group gets to stay down on the drift a little longer, as the diving is so spectacular.  So we head up to the Northwest corner of Mona, and drop in for our first dive.  Thirty minutes into an awesome drift dive, our DM Neil signals to start the ascent out and away from the island.  I signal back that we’d prefer to put the kabosh on that idea for the moment and enjoy some more of this great dive.  He signals OK and we resume our drift.  A little while later he begins his ascent, taking Bill and J-Glo with him, but somehow failing to pass that message along to Joyce, Bob A and myself, who are truly enjoying all this great site has to offer.  So we motor along for another ten minutes, and finally decide it is time to ascend, only to realize we are alone.  Hmmmmmm…..so we start our swim up and away from the island, and look up and see the skiff overhead, so the crew certainly knows where we are.  Then we look over and there are the other three on the surface, so we complete our safety stop, swim over to them and surface.  It’s pretty snotty up here now, with choppy waves everywhere, and the boat is close by to pick us up.  Once we’re aboard, then they head over to get the other group, who evidently had been bobbing on the surface for the last 15 minutes while we finished our dive.  Now you may ask, why didn’t you just get them first, but of course the answer is long and confusing, so the bottom line is that we didn’t make a good impression on our five new friends on board.  Sorry!

So, before dive two, I pow-wow with the captain and we get our plans straight.  We are planning to dive a long dive, so please, pick the other group up first!  To his credit he points out that some of the Team IVS divers have been coming back to the boat with extremely low readings on their pressure gauges, so we need to address that.  I convene the team and we go over the plans- first, pony bottles will be used to extend bottom time, and leave sufficient gas in our main tanks to re-board the boat with 500 psi or better.  Second, we are planning a one hour run time on this dive, so please choose your depth appropriately to budget your gas consumption and not be the one that drives us to the surface early.  Finally, we’ll ascend as a team.  OK, agreed.  Now let’s dive.

So we drop in for dive #2, and descend to almost 100 ft.  The drift starts, the diving is fantastic, and the team switches over to pony bottles like a well oiled machine – almost made me cry seeing it!  So as the auxiliary tanks were exhausted, everyone switched back to the mains, and we ended up with a great sixty minute dive, and no gas management issues at all.  Nice work team!  And even better, the boat had picked up the other group already so no one was waiting on us.  Perfect.

Lunch is served as we sail across to Monito Island for our drift dives there.  As we gear up the captain announces that some of the folks had requested some moored diving on the reefs, so we are saddened, but it’s ok, we’re team players.  I change my CO2 absorbent canister in my machine, and attempt to restart, but again, it’s one failure after another, this time for bad solenoids, or an audible alarm that is calling for too much current – the bottom line is that there is nothing really wrong, but this fershluggin software is just so damn sensitive that it defaults to various failures.  So now we are down two rebreathers!  Thank goodness neither of us had enough faith in our machines to count on them 100%, and we had packed regulators and backplates to go with open circuit in case of this finding ourselves in this exact situation.  Sad, but a fact of life so far for the Poseidons.

In we splash for one last great drift dive.  The boat is within 100 ft of the cliffs as we giant stride off the deck to the sound of ‘Dive! Dive! Dive!” over the loudspeaker.  As we drop down the viz is forever, and the walls and rocks are covered with life large and small.  The dive is nothing short of spectacular, and we enjoy it to no end (OK to 45 minutes at least).  Finally, sadly, it is time to surface so we head away from the island and being a gradual ascent to our safety stop.  The surface marker is deployed, and we hang out for our three minute stop and then rise to the surface.  The boat is heading towards us, yes it is, backing right towards us, yeppers, right towards us….Holy Shit…….this boat is about to be the worlds biggest Veg-o-matic as we get sucked into the props!!!   Finally as we are about to become chum, the pilot throws it into forward and we are tumbled ass over teacups backwards, driven by the propwash.  Then they toss us the tag line, and once we are all hanging on, as if to further the madness, they hit forward again, dragging us through the ocean as the boat gets a little further away from the island.  OK…..enough of Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, it is time to get back on board, and we do so without further ado.  Again, the other team is already on board, so all is well.  We tie the gear down and sail back to Mona Island to moor up for the second afternoon dive.

Our mooring site is back at One Particular Harbor, and as we tie up it is obvious the current is ripping and the viz is poor.  Let me sum it up…..I logged a twelve minute dive here – enough said!  We get back on board, and the captain wisely decides to relocate for our night dive, back to Bubbles & Blossoms, a decent site.  We’ll make our night dive here and moor until we begin the trek back to the island of Puerto Rico.

The night dive is uneventful, nothing new or spectacular but still a few nice Southern Stingrays milling about and the usual critters, conditions are far better than they were at the previous site, so all is good.

During the night they fire up the diesels and we race (OK, at 6 knots more of a jog than a race) back across the open ocean to Puerto Rico.  Our trip is slowed by some rough weather and high seas, so we end up missing our pre-breakfast dive that we had carefully arranged.  Oh well.

Once moored, we splash in for dives # 29 & 30 for the week, at a site known as the Isthmus.  Nothing spectacular but the conditions are perfect so who are we to complain.  After all, our job is to “pay attention to the diving and let the crew do their work”.  So we dive!

Finally it’s the last lunch and a chance to settle up the bill with the boat, buy your commemorative T-shirts, and pack up for the disembarking.  We tip the crew well as they took good care of us, and Nitrox analysis aside, they are a pretty good bunch.  Captain Jonathan is first class and an asset to the Nekton Corp. and I’d recommend a Nekton cruise to anyone.   

As mentioned earlier, the plan is to discharge the IVS crew in Guanico so we don’t have to sail to the east coast of PR with the boat.  So we head in to the sleepy harbor, and upon realizing there is no dock large enough to tie the Rorqual up to, we begin the task of transfering to shore via the ships tenders.  Our first group of four heads over on the first tender, and as the rest of us watch, we can see the flashing lights of the police approaching the dock.  The tender driver comes back and says the authorities need to speak to the captain and see the ships documentation, so Jonathan grabs the paperwork and heads over in that direction.  It is like something out of the B-movies, with our English-only speaking captain and three Spanish-only speaking authorities, one being the harbor master and the other two cops complete with all the necessary SWAT team hardware, as they flip through the paperwork and wave arms and use whatever means of communication to try to get our point across that “hey, it’s OK, we’re Americans too!”.  Geeesh…..you’d think we were heading in Canada or something!  So without anything really understood or documented, it’s finally determined that we’re OK, and the cops leave, and the harbor master’s day is complete as he has shown us he is truly the king of this little acre of land.  So much to do over nothing.

Once on shore we meet our shuttle driver, a lovely woman who was raised in Jersey City, NJ, by Puerto Rican parents, and who spoke perfect English – cool to find here!  We load the van, and I mean load, with gear and provisions under every seat and stacked to the ceiling, and the seven of us, along with our driver, her husband and her assistant who was there to help load the van, and begin our journey to Mayaguez.  Bob S, John G and Tom R, having had a week of rocking and rolling at sea, opt for a hotel room for the last two nights, so we drop them off at the Myaguez Holiday Inn.  The rest of us have an appointment to dive tonight, so we continue north to Aguadilla, where Brenda has brought home a stack of tanks for us to use this evening.  Once there, we quickly unload, and then jump back in our car and head down to Crashboat Beach, which got it’s name from it’s original use as a base for the rescue boats that would be docked there in anticipation of one of our stratgeic bombers crashing into the ocean on takeoff from the Aguadilla Air Force base (now the airport). We drop in at 9:00 and head out to the bases of some of the old landing light structures, and are greeted with some fantastic finds – three seahorses, eels, the largest barrel sponges we have seen all week, squid, crabs, feather dusters, scores of carpet anenomes, and more.  What a fantastic dive and a great way to get back ashore.  And no shore diving would be complete without topside adventure, as Bob A and one of our females ( I promised not to mention Joyce’s name in the blog) learned how difficult it is to discretely change your clothes in a somewhat busy parking lot at night after diving.  After that it was dinner at a local establishment and back to Casa Brenda for the night.

12/5 Saturday

Bill and Joyce headed over to the airport and secured a second rental car and we headed out for breakfast and a quick run down to Mayaguez to give the second car to the other guys for the day.  We have some diving to do, and that is our plan for the day!

Our first dive was back at Crashboat Beach, where we planned to take it a little deeper than usual.  We surface swam out to one of the old navigation light pillars, and dropped down, OK, after I actually turned my air on we dropped down (Oooops!), and we picked up the trail, going from our pillar to a second submerged one, then following some lines to some submerged items including a nice large steel pot-like structure, that served as the home for a very large green moray, as well as a school of glassy sweepers.  We continued down, and realized what a mess the lines were, with every sort of combination of lines, strings and ropes crossing and knotted and mixed together.  Someone should take the initiative and clean this up, but hey, that would take initiative, and that is not in abundance here.  Oh well, we suffered through, and managed to make it to our planned depth of 150 ft.  At that point we compared computers for depth, and amazing, with two Cochrans, one Aeris, and a Suunto, they were all within a foot of the depth.  Cool to see.  At that point it was prudent not to descend any further as we were diving with single 80’s, so we turned and headed back up.  The Cochrans, which had picked up some deco beginning at 20 ft, managed to clear themselves on the way up; however at the 15 ft stop the Suunto still had five minutes of deco obligation to satisfy – does that unit come in pink?  Cause it sure is a sissy computer!

So here we are, in a bit of a pickle - we had planned this dive based on our air consumption rates for the time and depth we went.  We had plenty of gas when we returned to our safety stop, and as we were diving in near perfect conditions 100 yards off the beach, there was no safety issue with minimum gas reserves in our tanks - we could see our car from where we descended.  However, due to the ultra-conservative algorithm of the Suunto computer, one of our group is required to complete an excessive pseudo-deco stop at 10 ft to avoid a computer violation.  So I share air with Bob as we hang, and hang, and hang, and by now I am wrestling with my own gas management issues, so I realize the prudent thing to do is to tap into Joyce’s excessive surplus air supplies (what a great breather she is!) in order to avoid Bob A surfacing in violation of his computer.  So, as I grab the one of the tower’s legs to pass Joyce’s octo to Bob, I manage to star in yet another DAN medical diving experiment, as I impale myself on a bristle worm, wrapping it around my wrist and the back of my hand. It looked like I worked in a cotton candy factory as the fuzzy white barbs were sticking out of my skin from one side of my wrist to the other.   Since children often read this blog, I will refrain from sharing my true comments, but let it suffice to know I pulled no verbal punches in expressing myself through my regulator at this member of the segmented worm family.  I carefully plucked the barbs from my skin, wincing at the pain, and then wincing again at the pain in my fingers that were doing the plucking!   OK…..Bob is set, Joyce is good, I am low on air, and so I can now quietly go to the surface and sob in my mask as I examine my wounds.  Finally Joyce and Bob surface to join Bill Z and me and we swim in to the beach.

It is family day at Crashboat, and the food and drink vendors are everywhere, and I can’t resist taking a few photos.  My favorite is a half a cow on a spit, being rotated slowly over hot coals by  a small electric motor hooked up via a v-belt to a bicycle rim that is chained to a couple of smaller sprockets to achieve the desired speed of rotation – Gilligan and the Professor would be proud!

For our second dive of the day and the last dive of the week, we head over to Naturales, and get in one last dive along the reef.  Lots of eels, crabs, a cooperative puffer fish, sea pens, a snake eel, flying gunards, peacock flounders, basket stars all curled up for the day, and the usual cast of characters rounded out a great farewell dive to Puerto Rico, truly the Enchanted Isle.

After that it was goodbyes and hugs to Brenda & Tony, along with our friend Carlos from NJ, and then dinner on the waterfront at Rompeolas Bar & Grill.  Now some final packing and organizing, and the crew hits the sack for the last time here before we all head to the airports in the morning.  

12/6 Sunday

Joyce, Bob A, John and Bill head back to the Aguadilla airport, and Tom, Bob Stitz and I take a nice leisurely ride back across the island to San Juan.  We check in to our respective airlines, and then re-convene in Terminal H as Tom has a membership in the Admirals Club, American Airline’s airport club.  Nice, nice, way to end the trip, sitting back, sipping and munching, downloading pictures, and chilling out.  Finally it’s time for me to leave and catch the first leg of my flight to Atlanta.  No issues, no travel-drama stories, but my what a pleasant surprise - my plane has about a hundred Eagles fans going home celebrating the Bird’s win over Atlanta that afternoon - icing on the cake for sure!  Sure, many of them are still half-baked from the game, but we’re bonded by (green) blood.  Very cool.

Post-trip news:  While six out of the seven of us returned to our normal lives, families and work today, it turns out that the International Man of Leisure, Tom Rebbie, needed a whole additional 24 hours to recover from the weeks activites, spending the night at the Airport Marriott Hotel in Philadelphia, and didn’t rise until 1:00 this afternoon to finally head for home - what a life!

Well it’s that time of year again, time for Team IVS to make our annual pilgrimage north of the border, to link up with our Canadian counterparts for a fun weekend diving the wrecks of the St. Lawrence Seaway.

It was a long week of preparation, with American & Canadian passport information needing to be filed with U.S. Customs, boat manifests prepared and double-checked, nitrox fills all around, gear checked and packed, spares packed, and the final logistics of transportation and lodging figured out.

The carpool headed north from IVS on Friday afternoon, with Csaba Lorinczy leading the parade in his motor home.  Accompanying him was daughter Niki, Donna Raleigh, Mike Noble, and John “I can’t seem to stop falling off boats” Scott.  John Glodowski and Chris Perry followed, Mike & Jamie Petrochko, along with Brent Watts, were not far behind, and finally Dave Valaika was slated to bring up the rear, as he was still busy loading the truck and trailer and making sure all the “I’s” were dotted and “T’s” were crossed on his manifest for the Dueling Drysuits Demo trailer, since our friend Eric from Whites Drysuits told us how difficult it was to cross the border with any sort of products that may be considered “for sale”.  More on this exercise later……….

Still sensitive from the near fiasco of last year’s border intrusion, Csaba has studied for this years crossing, and knows exactly where we going, why we’re going, who is traveling with him, where they live, and all the other details that nearly tripped him up last year at the border.  Of course, just to keep you on your toes, the border agent threw a new question at our favorite Hungarian….”how do you know these people?” Yikes…just when you thought you had it figured out!  Never the less, he managed to muddle through the answers and get the first of Team IVS safely into the foreign land.

And to add to the stress of preparing for this little international journey, we needed to get some last minute temporary bodywork repairs completed on the IVS truckster so we could tow the trailer with us.  Why bodywork, you may ask?  Well, let me share the story with you……it starts back in March, with a troubled young girl named Britney, and a concert called her Circus Tour.  Seems that Dad taking daughter #2 Alex and one of her friends to Ms. Spears’ concert made daughter #3 Anna Rose feeling a wee bit left out.  So, the ever-resourceful Alex came up with a brilliant idea…..up and coming country/pop star Taylor Swift is putting a tour together, and Anna loves her music, so we should go see her and take Anna this time!  Brilliant!

So, the weekend before St. Lawrence, we head out to State College for Ms. Swift’s concert, and let me just say it was a fantastic show……different than Britney but even more entertaining!  Of course being that far from home we overnighted, and decided to head to Hershey Park for a day of play on the way home.  Every single roller coaster at least once, the best ones twice……but, wait, I digress…….

So, speaking as we were about Pennsylvania wildlife, one of the most beautiful animals we often see are whitetail deer.  From a distance they are fun to watch, and up close, they are even more beautiful.  But up real close, at say, 70 miles per hour, that beauty is truly a fleeting thing as the animal wraps itself around the front bumper of Dave’s truck….indeed we have passed the up close and beautiful stage.   Well tenderized venison, a somewhat modified Dodge pick-em-up truck, and two traumatized daughters – what a way to start the day!

So, we just added one more little thing to the list of “to do’s” for this week – get the fender cut off and put a headlight back in so we can drive!   OK, that got done, and the American crew gathered at IVS Friday morning to load up and start the journey north.  Of course Dave, never being one to let that many hands sit idle, had a short laundry list of fun projects to do before we headed out….what a card that guy is!  So, at 1:00, the gang finally headed out for their scheduled 10:00 departure.  Pretty close, in Dave time.  In fact, knowing where we were heading, it was probably the closest to being on time we’d be for the next three days.

So, back to international business and NAFTA - One of the last things we needed to do before pulling out was to inventory the Dueling Drysuits Demo Tour trailer, which was joining us this weekend for its first international visit.  We have a bunch of folks in the great white north that wanted to try drysuits, so what better way than for us to haul a trailer load of them in with us.  But, rumor has it, there will be a huge hassle at the border, and according to our friends at Whites Manufacturing, it could take two to three days to get across, and you might need the services of a registered import broker to expedite the process – they know this cause they cross the border a few times each year with the Whites factory demo trailer.

Well, you know I like a challenge, but just to cover my derrierre, I opted to have a complete and accurate inventory on the trailer when I crossed.  But I had goals….no broker, no delay at the border…….that whole import thing is well, ‘guidelines’, in my somewhat twisted eyes.  I rolled the dice and headed up a few hours after the rest of the gang, ready for my border challenge.

Well Csaba, and his crew, daughter Niki, John Scott, Mike Noble, Donna Raleigh, crossed the border with no problem, thanks to Csaba’s careful preparation.  John Glodowski and Chris Perry had a similar experience, so the odds were looking good for the Dave-ster and his cargo of potential contraband. 

But before I got to the border, I had 400 miles of threading my way through Labor Day Holiday Weekend police speed traps to look forward to.  Things are looking good, and I am just 25 short miles from the border, when I decide to pull off in the small hamlet of Watertown, NY for a fuel stop.  As I roll down Main Street looking for an open diesel-dispensing gas station, the night explodes in a fury of flashing red and white lights behind me.  Yikes, cheese it, the fuzz!  They must be onto someone…wait, no…they’re onto moi!  “What the heck…..” I drive a little further down the road, just wanting to make really sure it’s me they want, and yep, it’s me they want, so I pull over and jump out of the truck, only to be greeted by not one but two of Watertown’s finest.  Seems I was clocked at 51 mph (with the conversion rate, that’s 95 for our Canadian readers) in a 30 mph zone – geeeeez!  Hmmmm…..need to think fast here…….well, one thing leads to another, turns out they are just starting a public safety dive team here, so we get into talking tactics and training, yadda yadda, you know the drill….bottom line, it ends with slaps on the backs, handshakes, and a stern “Don’t do that again!” “Yes Sir”, I say….and I’m back on my way, this time with directions to the local diesel dealer, courtesy of my new friends.

So I fuel up, and head for my border “encounter”.  I wait my turn and then pull up to the guard shack, shut down the noisy diesel, and engage the suspicious border patroller in some lively banter, using my best Canadian inflection and plenty of “eh’s” at the end of my sentences.  His questions are intense….”Where are you going?”…”What are you going to do?”….”What’s in the truck?”….you get the point.  Of course, it is one guy, heading north for two days of diving, hauling $50,000 worth of Drysuits and 40 scuba tanks in the back of the truck…yep….that math works!  Well viola, it all comes together, and I am “in”….no issues at all with the entire truckload of scuba gear, all those tanks in the back, the Rebreathers, and the trailer full of gear….all for one diver!  This guy clearly needs a refresher in his training, but who am I to suggest that at this point!  Time to boogie onward!  Next stop, Caigers Resort.

So I’m in-country, but there is still one key ceremonial border-crossing task to complete….anyone recall Kevin Costner in Dances with Wolves?   Yep, gotta go about marking yet another corner of the IVS universe!  That completed, it’s an easy roll to Caigers and my room for the night.  Csaba has nicely seeded my refrigerator with a couple of icy cold Coors Lights, so I am good for the night!

Saturday morning blossoms as a beautiful sunny day, and Team IVS is ready to do some diving.  Today we are diving purely Canadian wrecks, so we pedal up the road to Brockville, where Wayne has positioned two of his boats for the day.  OK…let me clarify…we are in Canada, and there are rules!  Wayne is only allowed to dock one boat at a time, so one needs to putter just offshore while one loads, and after the first one leaves, only then can the second boat toss a line onto the dock!    Geeeesh!    However, in any case, the folks at 1000 Island Pleasure Diving can’t figure out how to put our group of 25 divers on one boat, so once again we dive as two separate groups – come on Wayne! 

We head out, and our first stop is the wreck of the Daryaw, an inverted steel freighter, 219 ft long, and sunk in 1941 when it struck the shoals and punched a nice hole right through her steel plating.  The wreck is penetrable, but upside down, making it a little dis-orienting.  Depth is about 90 ft. and the current is ripping!  Second stop was the Lillie Parsons, an old wooden schooner, sunk carrying a cargo of coal which is still there tumbling out of the upside down hull.  Depth is 80 ft, and we hot-dropped in on this wreck from upstream, sailing along until we hit the anchor chain which runs from the point of Sparrow Island to the wreck.  A tour of the wreck, and then it’s a head-over-heels drift-tumbling down the wall until you get to a marker rope that lets you know you are approaching a cove.  Quick right turn into the cove, and then it’s a gentle swim in the protected area to get picked up by our dive boat.

Back to dock and we find the Canadian half of our party has disappeared.  Oh well, time to haul tanks, and then a run to Dive Tech for fills.  While the gas is being pumped, we motor on down the road and enjoy a leisurely lunch at the Rapid Valley Restaurant, famous for their buns & delicious poutine, a Canadian delicacy of French fries, smothered in gravy, and piled high with cheese curds (and absolutely not recommended by the American Heart Association!). OK, digestive system properly abused, we pick up our tanks, analyze gas, and head back to the boat for two more dives.  First stop the Muscallonge, an old tug that burned and sunk, sitting upright but fairly wrecked at 99 ft.  Lots of machinery, but not much boat left.  Last stop of the day was the Robert Gaskin, a 132 ft long sailing barque converted to a work barge, which holds the distinction of being one of the only ships on the St. Lawrence River that actually managed to torpedo itself to death.  Seems it was involved in a salvage operation, lifting another sunken ship using steam-filled steel salvage pontoons when one broke free underwater and shot right up through the Gaskin’s hull.  So it sank right there, on top of its work.  No problem, they managed to raise it, only to have it sink, again, same place.  OK, back to the drawing board, raise it again, get it under tow, move about 600 feet, and it sinks a third and final time, coming to rest upright at 70 ft of depth.

Finally we head back in, unload, and make one stop at Dive Tech to drop off our tanks for fills early in the morning.  Dan Humble, the owner, is still there waiting for us, and we know we’re in good hands with this group.  Now, back to Caigers, hoping against hope that there is some food waiting for us there. 

Alas, we arrive, and Mark, the owner & resort manager introduces us to his son, Tyler.  They break the bad news…the food is gone…but the beer is flowing, so OK, we’ll hang, and we spend the next few hours helping educate the young man in all the wrong areas – I hope he was taking notes!  We learned some new Canuck terms, like ‘cougar’ and ‘gilf’, but we’re probably safer not trying to explain them here.

So finally we call it a night, and as we’re heading off to hit the sack, a fellow pops out of one of the rooms and says, in a heavy European accent “hey, do you like to play poker?”  Well gosh, does this sound like something right out of a life lesson?  So Donna, Chris, and our new friend (and Donna-admirer) Christopher from Cleveland decide what the heck….how can this go wrong? Seems the two Ukrainian immigrants are here for the night on a fishing trip, and are looking for some entertainment, so they thought a card game might be fun.  They don’t play seriously, they tell us, so we agree, let’s play.  As we pull up some chairs, one of the guys pulls out an aluminum briefcase, pops it open, and there’s a casino-quality setup of chips, and brand new unopened decks of cards – yeah, they definitely don’t play seriously!  We ante up with a variety of US and Canadian currencies, distribute chips, and start to play.  Donna’s budding beau Christopher sits next to me, and he is truly a babe in the woods with regards to, well at a minimum, late night poker games.  The bidding is fast and furious and in multiple languages, so the excitement is high, and you really need to pay attention!  Never-the-less, we manage to get through an hour or more of Texas Hold’em, and finally only Chris, myself and one of the Ukrainians are still sitting on any chips.  Enough I say, time to re-visit the money, we argue, and finally the pot is divided, and we head off to bed, none the worse (and none the poorer) for the experience.

Finally it’s Sunday morning, and after a quick stop at confession (we won’t name names), we head over to Dive Tech to pick up our tanks from last night and head out for our “8:30 a.m.” trip. Of course, U.S. Customs doesn’t open til 10:00, so the scheduled timing of the trip is a tad optimistic.  John Glow is busy working the Dueling Drysuits Demo Tour, and he has quite a few of our northern friends diving in White’s Fusions that morning.

We load up and find out what some of the noisy activities we heard last night from around the dock were…it was the crew banging the propeller back into shape after the River Diver, our infamous one-engined cruiser from last year, managed to hit a submerged floating log on the way back in last night.  This vessel is truly not blessed!  Is that a bad sign?

But in any case, eternal optimists that we are, we load up, chit chat with the crew for a while, and finally motor over to Boldt Island to present ourselves for re-entry into our homeland.  A big change this year – the customs guy actually gets up out of his chair and comes to visit the boat!  Must be part of Obama’s Health Care Reform, eh?  Woo hoo!!  So we hang out til Officer O’Keefe strolls down, and makes sure each of us have a matching passport that helps ensure the manifest is correct, and we get the big green “Welcome to America” light.  We begin the seven knot, one hour ride against the current towards the Vickery, so it’s a chance to rest, chat and goof off a bit more.  We finally approach the mooring, and this year, everyone, including John Scott, manages to stay on board until we tie up!  We opt for the downstream ball, avoiding the infamous Sherwood ball from last years visit.

So splash we go, and we head down to this intact wooden sailing wreck, 136 ft long, sitting in 120 ft of water.  My plan is to visit the top of the masts, which broke off, and are now hanging upside down at 160 ft of depth.  I am breathing 30% EAN in my back gas, but packing a 40 CF cylinder of air for the deeper portion of the dive.  I leave the wreck, and head down deeper into the channel, exploring the rigging, dead-eyes and hardware still hanging from the top of the masts in the current.  All good, and I am starting to accumulate a bit of a deco obligation, so I head back towards the wreck, explore a bit longer, and now, with almost a 40 minute deco obligation, I begin my ascent.  I make my 80, 70, 60, & 50 foot stops, and I am halfway through my 40 foot deco stop when I decide to give my trusty Cochran dive computer a little tap and check out some of the info on the alternate screen. Bad, bad idea, as the screen goes insane, indicating a new current depth of 534 feet, and a new total ascent time of 4 hours and 13 minutes, and growing. Even worse, because my PO2 is now completely off scale according to the computer, I cannot even see my current depth displayed, making the balance of this lonely deco much more of a challenge!  So, I do my best estimating of depth, trying to visually remember some of the depths I passed through on the way down, and double my deco times to be extra sure.  So, 70 minutes after jumping in, I am finally back on the surface.  Running through the DCS symptoms checklist, I have no funny feelings anywhere, no noticeable slurring (at least without the assistance of Coors Light), no stumbling (again, without assistance) and I am thinking OK, I think I am good. 

We re-cross the border and stop at Canadian Customs to re-enter the country (what a hassle), finally make it to our second location, the Kingshorn (or King Horn, depending on your source of info).  We splash, and on this second dive, I am like a true DIR diver, armed with only a minimalistic set of instruments – a pressure gauge and a wristwatch.  My double 100’s a bit light after the first dive and extended deco, so I strap on my partially depleted 40 CF bottle – heck this dive is only 92 ft deep, how much gas can I need?  It’s a nice 40 minute dive, and I top off my tissues with some fresh nitrogen.  OK, maybe it’s time to head up, since we don’t really know how deep we are, relying on the computers of other divers that I take a peek at while I swim by them (is this in the manual?).  So I make it back to the mooring line, and start to head up.  Hmmm..is that stage bottle getting a little difficult to breath?   Let me peek……uh oh…..some number in front of that ‘zero’ would be better, however, it is what it is.  Switch back to back gas, and think about how long I might want to take to ascend, keeping in mind my earlier dive experience this morning.  I am putzing along, breathing very slowly, maximizing the remaining gas I have, and think OK, there’s not too many witnesses, and there’s Niki, just above me…..her octo teasing me right there……OK..maybe just a little…..she’s not looking…who’ll know…..so I sneak the octo and am quietly sitting there, sipping away, noting that she has plenty of gas left, when suddenly there is Donna, camera in hand, immortalizing this moment – me, wearing three tanks, and buddy-breathing.  Nice!  Thanks Donna……within an hour that photo is on Facebook, and the comments come flying in! 

And, for those of you familiar with the Key Largo ‘Z’ Ball, we now have a northern version, tagged the ‘C’ Ball, in honor of our lost little solo diver Csaba, who managed to select the wrong ascent line (from a choice of two!) from the King Horn.  Not to worry, another little secret we’ll keep among ourselves……uh oh…wait….is this blog on the world wide web?  Oooooops!  Sorry Csaba!

Back on board, the River Diver seems to be sitting a little lower in the water than when we boarded this morning, and it has become apparent that we’re running the bilge pumps a whole lot more than usual, so we’re thinking maybe we want to check that out a bit!

Back at the dock, we open up some of the deck hatches and it looks like someone forgot to turn off the garden hose down there, as a veritable stream of water is jetting in from one of the mounting holes for the propeller shaft support struts.  Seems like the excessive vibration we enjoyed all morning from the bent prop also managed to work the strut mounts loose and open up a nice hole right through the bottom of the hull!  Our next wreck dive might be taking place in a few minutes, right here at the dock!

Well, in any case, it’s 4:30 p.m., and we load the tanks back in the truck [again] and head over to Dive Tech for refills.  Today, however, we opt for a run down the interstate to Wendy’s for lunch/dinner, so our culinary turn-around time is a tad better than yesterdays.  Back to Dive Tech, pick up tanks, and back to Caigers for our “2:30 p.m.” afternoon boat trip.

But wait….the adventure continues, as the River Diver is NOT going back out, seeing as how it is trying it’s hardest to sink right at the dock.  OK…crank up the cell phone, get a hold of Wayne, and he is still on the river, thinking he is working his last dive of the day.  Well so much for that plan Wayne, Team IVS is ready to dive, so he and the lovely Chantal agree to come back and get us.

So now it’s actually 8:00 p.m., and we are heading out for our afternoon dives.  Yep, truly we are on Canadian time here!  Of course U.S. Customs closed a few hours ago, so there is no going back to America now.  We opt to head up to the Ash Island Barge, and do a fairly disorganized drift dive down the river from upstream, with our end point being the barge.  Well, here is where all that pre-dive safety check stuff comes into play.  We’re sitting along a steep wall, in almost 300 ft of water.  I drop down, and am at 100 ft on the wall, in the dark, when I see a diver literally tumbling down the wall towards me.  I reach out, and the combination of my hand and his grip on the wall finally stops Chris from dropping into the abyss.  Seems his BC inflator hose is not attached, and I am sensing he is over-weighted, so that can make for a deadly combo, especially when you add in the fact that it is 9:30 at night and pitch black, not to mention a pretty high current being present too!  You get the picture.   Well we manage to get him hooked up, and back in control, breathing back to normal, and ready to start the drift dive.  We sail along for about 40 minutes, and finally come upon the barge at 97 ft.  That’s our signal to ascend so we work our way up the line and back on board.  Donna and Niki had splashed first a few minutes ahead of me, and I am wondering, why are they already on board, undressed, and almost dry?  Hmmmmm…..seems the girls had managed to enjoy a higher level of anxiety on this dark, fast dive, and ended up holding hands the entire time as they kicked themselves to the end to get out of the water as quickly as possible, managing to cover the 40 minute dive in only 15 minutes!   

Back on board, we hold a little meeting and talk about how we are going to better plan our next dive, which is even later at night, on an even blacker river.  Not only that, this is another wall drift dive, and there is no distinct target, like the barge, to mark the end of the dive.  Safety is pretty important and a good plan will help maximize that.  The girls, still terrified from their first dive, and just getting the feeling back in their hands from gripping each other so tightly, opt to sit this one out, so the rest of us plan our dive - 40 ft for 40 minutes, starting with a coordinated hot drop into the river.  We splash, descend, and enjoy our most relaxing and organized dive of the weekend, all popping back up right there at the boat.  Great way to end the weekend! 

Monday and the crew is moving even slower than usual.  The Canadians are gone, and half of the remaining team can’t muster another dive.  No comment!  We head over to Dive Tech, top off a few cylinders, hugs & high fives for the guys there, and then caravan back across the border.  “Where are you coming from”, asks the America border agent. I’m sorry, but I can’t resist….”Canada”, I offer.  “What were you doing?”…….duh…….”Diving”.  “Who were you diving with?”…I lean out the window, re-read the name on the side of the truck…..and answer respectfully “Indian Valley Scuba”.  A few more minutes of this intense grilling, until he is satisfied he has gathered enough facts, and finally we pass the test!  Back in America! 

J-Glow, John Scott, Chris Perry and I roll into Alexandra Bay and set up camp, and the Dueling Drysuits Demo trailer, along the river at the A-Bay dive park.  We chat with the locals, make a few new friends, and gear up for a dive along the Islander, and old side-wheeler that burned and sunk here in 1909.  IT sits right next to shore, with a max depth of 60 ft, and lots of structure still intact.  Good final dive of the trip, and we finally pack the gear for the last time.  Of course, this is the big Labor Day Bash weekend in A-Bay, so we park the truck in town, and stroll down to see the bands performing along the water, while enjoying lunch at a local eatery on the dock.  Some more laughs, some more stories shared, and finally, we call it a weekend and complete the journey home.

This past week saw quite a variety in diving for Team IVS.  Wednesday we headed out on the Venture III to dive the wrecks of New Jersey.  Dave West, Keith Beaver, Matt & John Yaroch and I headed down to  Belmar and joined Paul & Ruth Hepler for a great mid-week day of diving.  Conditions heading our were clear and flat, with all the makings of a superb day on the ocean. 

Our first location was the Notheast Sailor, and we dropped in for about an hour of bottom time on this 75 ft. deep old wooden wreck.  Lobsters were everywhere, but pre-school must have been in session, as they were all too short to be legal.  Stiill a great dive with good conditions and decent viz, probably 30 ft or so.  The thermocline was right at 45 ft, with water temps in the high 60’s above and high 50’s below. 

Stop #2 was the Rockland County,  an old intact tug sunk as part of the artificial reef program.  Nice dive, good viz again, and Dave W and I managed to snag four legal bugs on this one!  Another 40 minutes of bottom time, and we headed up the line, only to find the weather deteriorating fast.  That ruled out a third stop for the day, as we headed in through the pouring rain and called it a day.

Saturday we headed up to Dutch to rinse the gear and enjoy a day with Donna Raleigh and the Buxmont Dive Club crew.  The day was perfect and we had about 30 IVS divers join us during the day.  This was also open water presentation day for our Instructor Candidates, and they did fantastic!  The class consists of Carlie & Leslie Adams, Rob Tennille, Bill Bobowicz and Sue Mendez.  Congratulations to each of them for completing the requirements for PADI Assistant Instructor today!  Next week we’ll be working to get each of them ready for the upcoming PADI Instructor Examination, and have them join the ranks of PADI instructors worldwide!

And now that the gear was clean, what better way to celebrate than to take it swimming in the ocean again!  Sunday morning we headed back out on the Venture III and joined the Buxmont Dive Club crew for a morning 2-tank charter to visit some intact wrecks offshore, including the Ventura and Travis Stevens, both part of the Shark River Artificial Reef system.  Another fantastic day of diving on the water, with clear skies, ultra flat seas, no current and decent viz once again.      

They came in droves, the spotters, the netters, the snarers, and the grabbers…….specialists all, with a common goal - to put as many tasty spiny lobsters into the pot for Friday nights annual Indian Valley Scuba Lobster Festival in Key Largo.  This event is held each year, to coincide with the Florida Lobster Sport Season, a two-day hunt held the last contiguous Wednesday & Thursday in July.  This mini-season precedes the opening of the regular hunting season, and is only open to divers, snorkelers, and netters - no commercial take is allowed. 

Team IVS arrived on site Tuesday evening, and set right to work prepping the gear for an oh’dark-thirty departure in the moming.  Final checks, calibrating the gauges, making sure the snares worked smoothly,  trying on the new gloves, installing new batteries in the lights, and the oh-so-important task of making sure the zipper on your lobster bag was nice and closed - all important tasks necessary to ensure our team would do it’s part for lobster population control on the reef.

It’s three thirty in the morning and the alarm is ringing……yikes!..time to get up and get ready!  Brush the teeth, grab a bagel and diet Coke, and start loading the boat at 4:15.  Capt. Joe and First Mate Lindsey delivered the safety briefing at 4:30 and we pushed off into the darkness, with an air of anticipation of what laid ahead.  Our team consisted of Ray Graff, Bev & Butch Loggins, Randy & Connie Rudd, Joyce & Charles Kichman, Tricia and Jeff Mento, Sue Douglass, Brian Laspino, Mike & Lin Gusenko, Terry Gibbons, Bob Benson, Wendy and Alex Lepore, and John Glodowski. For a few, this was not only their first ocean dive, but also their first boat dive, night dive, hunting dive and drift dive - what a way to get baptized in scuba, eh? 

We splashed at the legal opening minute of the lobster hunting season in Monroe County, 5:48 a.m.  Lights were shining back & forth, as the divers scurried about., looking to be the first to get a ”keeper” in the bag!  In order to take a lobster here, they need to be of a minimum length, which we measure with a gauge prior to bagging them, and they must also not be bearing eggs.  Thus it is important to exercise caution and catch them in a kind and loving fashion, in case they fail to pass one of those tests, and we need to set them free, to grow (or hatch their eggs) and hopefully visit us again next season!   This is also why we are careful not to damage the lobsters or break their spiny antennas, as they would have a difficult time defending themselves if they don’t end up qualifying for our dinner pot.  We completed three ninety-minute dives this morning, each one better than the previous, and ended up with 21 lobster tails in the freezer by noon.  Time for a quick lunch and siesta, and then we’ll head back out and do it again.  

Our new crew, Captain Dan and First Mate Andrew, arrived, and we loaded up and headed out at 3:30 for the afternoon three-tank trip.  Three great locations, three more hour-plus drift dives, and we were “on the meat” at every one!  36 more lobsters joined our growing collection in the freezer, making Friday’s night feast looking all that much better.  Last splash was at 8:00, allowing one last hour of night diving before the season closed for the day at 9:10 p.m.  We got back at 11:00, just in time to crash into our beds and get a few hours rest before the alarm clock rings again!

Just to keep things exciting, we decided to head out a little earlier this morning and try our luck up north a bit, around Carysfort Light. So we loaded up at 3:30 a.m., and cast the lines at 4:00 to make sure we didn’t miss a minute of hunting time.  Well today our luck was not with us, even with the efforts of the ‘Lobster Charmer’ Tricia Mento, giving her best effort.  Only 8 more bugs were added to the pot, so the pressure’s on for this afternoons team.  Lots of mouths to feed tomorrow night!  Maybe we should have them make some extra salad and dinner rolls at the restaurant!

Thursday afternoon found most of the rest of the gang showing up, including the rest of the Valaika clan, Brad Creveling, Rich Kessler, Keith Wallerman, Bill & John Zyskowski, Rob & Jen O’Donnell, Stephanie & Cynthia Shaeffer, Niki & Csaba Lorinczy, Steve Holak, Judy & Ron Monaco, June Malinowski, Beth Long and Alex Pulsilze. Local IVS-South instructor Dave Hartman joined the gang for the last lobster run this evening also.

Thursday afternoon also marked two very important milestones in the Indian Valley Scuba dive family - Tricia Mento celebrated her 100th dive this afternoon, and even cooler than that, she celebrated her fourth consecutive 29th birthday in the most wonderful way, diving for lobsters with Team IVS!

The boat returned at 10:30 and with 28 more bugs in the bag, the final lobster count ended up at 93, a few shy of last years record 106 bugs.   We need to work on this for sure!!!

Friday morning and the weekend officially starts, with most of the group boarding the Amoray Diver for a run out to the reef, while our newest divers joined Dave and some of the IVS staff for a ride over to do our first two open water dives at Jules Undersea Lodge.   The Amoray Diver headed enjoyed two reef dives in perfect conditions, and the group had a great morning.  Meanwhile the Jules gang enjoyed some cool dives getting all those necessary skills out of the way, and preparing us to head out on the open seas after lunch. 

The afternoon boat headed out at 1:00 and our first stop was the Coast Guard Cutter USS Duane. To say the current was “RIPPING” would be a gross understatement.  It was truly smoking all the down to the wreck at 105 ft.  Four teams of divers headed down and once on the wreck we had some great visibility and lots of large animals taking refuge in and around the wreck, so the sightseeing was great.  Major gathering of very large horse-eye jacks kept circling the wreck and buzzing us - where’s my speargun??

Once back on board, we headed over to the Winch Hole site on Molasses Reef, and enjoyed a great dive with minimal current and super visibility, and just loving that 87 degree water!  Back to the dock in time to freshen up, and head over the the Key Largo Conch House for our lobster dinner festival.  Reservations for 48 were made earlier this year and our friends at the Conch House did not let us down a bit!   From their award-winning lobster bisque, to broiled lobster tails, and all the fixin’s that go well with that, our group had a truly pleasant evening under the stars, chatting, dining, sharing dive tales, and generally enjoying the social interaction that is such a huge part of the dive life. 

Saturday morning brought us another dose of the weather that entitles Florida to be called the Sunshine State - absolutely perfect, sunny, with clear blue skies.  We laoded up and headed out to French Reef, the oldest of the reef systems that lay just offshore of the Keys.   Our first location was Christmas Tree Cave, an area chock full of swim throughs formed by the mature corals growing over hundreds of years and fusing together on top of the reef, forming large open archways along the sand.  These are great spots to find great numbers of smaller and mid-size reef fish taking refuge from the surge while enjoying protection from predators, and often you’ll also find some larger species also, such as groupers.  They were all out in force today, and our divers were treated with turtle sightings, actively feeding stingrays, sharks, eels and all the rest of the usual cast of characters.  Dive #2 of the day was just a few mooring balls down the reef, at the last dive site on French Reef, apropriately named North French Reef.  Similar to the first dive, conditions just as nice, and the sea life just as abundant.

Back to the dock for a quick bite to eat, change tanks, and the ride back out to sea.  Location #1 for the afternoon was the Spiegel Grove, and the seas were a’rolling, with waves breaking right across the deck of the Amoray Diver.  We were almost wet enough to start counting our bottom time before we even got hooked up to the wreck.  We tied into the port crane, and the current was as strong if not stronger than yesterday’s Duane experience.  We organized into teams on the boat, conducted our group briefings, and slipped into the water.  Pulling against the mooring line was something akin to swimming up a fire hose, with the water just about ripping our masks off and regulators out.  What a rush indeed!  Hand over hand, we made our way down the line to the wreck, hitting the top of the crane at 65 feet.  Once on the wreck , we were able to use the ship to shield ourselves from the current and the diving conditions were superb.  Every team was able to enjoy the dive to the level they planned, from simple sightseeing about the exterior to some of Dave Hartman’s fine deep, dark, interior tours.  By the end of our dive, 37 of our 40 divers made it back to the Amoray boat - we won’t mention any names, but let it be known the Spiegel has a newly named mooring ball now, called the “Z” ball, in honor of couple of navigationally challenged IVS diving brothers and their fellow Polski sidekick.

After that it was a short ride to the Benwood for a good chance to see the wreck before we re-visit it for our night dive.  It never ceases to amaze me how the sea life can change so greatly on a specific location, within just a few hours. And it does this every night of the year - amazing!  Another hour in the water, and it was time to head back in, re-fuel, and load for the night dive.

Nighttimes on the Benwood are always a blast, and 17 of us descended into the inky black waters to check out the night life on the reef.  Lots of cool critters, some octopus sightings, all the other great nocturnal attractions, and an 80 minute dive to boot!  Laughter, brewskis and fun all the way home, and everyone gathered at the Paradise Pub for a thorough debriefing afterwards!

Sunday morning brought another perfect sunny day, and we headed out to visit some spots on the Elbow Reef.  The ride out was a hoot, with 4 to 6 foot rollers breaking across the bow of the Amoray Diver and running down the decks - everyone grab your gear!   The seas calmed down as we got to the reef, but the slow progress on the way out cost us first dibs on a spot on the City of Washington, so we settled for her next door neighbor, Mike’s Wreck.  Final set of skills for our newest open water divers, with navigation patterns and bouyancy skills checked off to complete their National Geographic Open Water certifications.  Congratulations to Jen & Rob O’Donnell, Anna & Alexis Valaika, and IVS Instructor Rich Kessler’s first two Open Water divers, Stephanie & Cynthia Shaeffer!   We also managed to get our penetration reel work done, so congratulations to Todd Gibson and Brian LaSpina, our newest Wreck Specialty graduates.

Dive #2 was on the City of Washington, and wow was the sunlight and water clarity perfect, combining to make this picturesque wreck even more beautiful for this Sunday morning visit.  Supersize Goliath Groupers and some nurse sharks joined us on the dive, swimming in and out of our group, looking for a handout.  We completed a couple of REEF Fish Surveys on this dive, helping that great organization with their work on the fish population database programs.

Back at the dock, and I said my goodbyes to the gang as the family and I were headed down to Key West for some vacation and a visit to the Vandenberg, Florida’s newest major wreck.  As luck would have it, the seas had turned, for the better, and the group headed out to the Speigel Grove and enjoyed nearly current-free conditions and fantastic visibilty - what a change from the last two days!  After that, it was some deep reef exploring offshore from the Benwood, some swimming and cavorting on and off the boat, and a slow return to the dock as one engine had decided to take the rest of the day off - talk about timing, eh?

And speaking of milestones, this afternoon the face of IVS Key Largo, Dave Hartman, logged his 1,000th dive, of course doing it surrounded by the IVS gang!  He marked this special celebration with a personal signing of commenorative Spiegel Grove t-shirts for his Ultimate Speigel Grove Deep & Dark Dive Tour Team.

With the boat down for repairs, any Monday morning dive plans went by the wayside, and the group headed to the airports for their rides home.  Meanwhile, in Key West, I hooked up with Southpoint Divers, who had hosted Csaba, Niki, Bill & John earlier in the week, and set up a two-tank double dip on the Vandenberg for Tuesday morning.  Woo hoo! 

Tuesday morning came and I boarded the Southpoint boat at a nice late 8:30, for a 9:00 departure.  What a difference it was to not be with Team IVS divers - it is just an amazing contrast as divers were asking how their computers worked, how to set up gear, were clueless on weight requirements, didn’t know how to set up a weight belt “because I only dive integrated weights”….geeeeesh!

On top of that, we are scheduled to do two back-to-back deep dives on the Vandenberg, and the only gas they have on board is air.  Amazing.  None the less, the crew is friendly, so we listen to the briefing and fire up the nice fast Newton diesels and make the 35 minute run out to the wreck.  En-route, I get “insta-buddied” with Deb from Cherry Hill (the weight belt expert), and listen to her rant about the shop staff and how they would not refund her money for the trip since she work up with an ear ache and was not sure she could clear…..i am sensing an interesting dive ahead.  Finally we’re on site, and we splash.  Current is moderate so they had run a descent line down, and a tag line to the anchor.  Only problem is the boat is about 46 feet long, and the tag line they used is about 150 ft long, so it starts at the mooring line, passes under the boat, extends about 50 ft past the boat, circles back on itself, and finally ties back into the descent line.  What a mess of entanglement possibilities!  I drop down and begin my descent and thankfully my buddy du jour is keeping up with me - so much for that ear clearing issue I suppose.  As we approach the wreck the viz is terrible, maybe 20 ft at best, and we finally see the forward kingpost rising out of the murk.  We drop down to the deck, and cruise about, as I attempt to get some decent video despite the gloomy conditions.  The captain’s briefing, geared to the touristy crowd, was for a 20 minute dive, max depth 90 feet.  That’s exactly why I bought my Cochran dive computer, so I could do profiles like that…..NOT!  Forty minutes later I surfaced, and the crew was amazed - not in deco, still in excess of 500 psi in tank - geez, just a regular IVS dive!  Of course all the other divers were back on board, looking nearly dry, so I figured they had a 20 or more minute head start on their surface interval. 

During the break I am talking to some of the locals, and they are lamenting about this years lobster season, how they only got one dive in before getting “blown out’ by the weather.  Seas were rough, they said, and it was dangerous, so they called it early Wednesday morning and never attempted to go out on Thursday.  Wow, I say, where were you diving?   Key Largo, they tell me!   Hmmmmm….I guess that local perspective on sea conditions sure is different than ours! 

Finally our magic 45 minutes of surface interval has passed, so it’s time to head back down with my buddy Deb for a second dive.  During our break, however, the current had picked up and some wonderfully clear blue water had moved in, making the wreck visible from the surface.  Sweet!!  Of course, during that time, nothing was done about the excessive lengths of line in the water, so that mess of rope still had to be dealt with.  I dropped in, and as I started to make my way forward, one of the locals with a huge camera system smashes right down on top of me……good to see such a display of excellent dive skills & buoyancy control!  I firm up my grip on my own video system, brace for the rest of the divers to visit me, and pull myself down and out of the crash zone.  As I head down to the wreck it is obvious how the viz had improved, and I can see well down the wreck in both directions from the mooring line.  We drop down the kingpost again, and boogie down the port side of the wreck towards the stern, passing the one radar dish that had broken off during the sinking and is not tied in place with cables, past the one still attached, and past the rear stack.  The ship protected us from the current on this side, and when we decided to turn back, we simply swam over the the starboard side and enjoyed the full effect of the current as we sailed back towards the bow - nice ride indeed! I managed to score some decent footage and snap a few shots of the wreck along the way, and finally, after another 30 minutes of bottom time, it was time to head on up.  I enjoyed a leisurely ascent, clearing my 3 mintes of deco obligation along the way as I did my deep stops, and got up to the 20 foot mark for my final hang.  I feel a nibble on my leg, and look down, and there is a juvenile file fish, maybe 3 inches long, biting my leg and using me to hang on in the current - very cool!  He stayed with me during my entire hang, enjoying a break from fighting the current and some protection from predators at the same time. The DM is on the line, and she is indicating that she has 2 minutes of deco hang remaining, so I signal that I am OK and I’ll hang here.  She signals me again that she has two minutes of hang, and again I indicate no sweat, I’ll stay with her.  Well this goes on for another ten minutes, and I wonder exactly what kind of computer she is using.  Turns out that like many things in Key West, the signals are a little different too!  Her two fingers in the shape of a “v” meant nothing, just her way of saying “are you OK?”.  Yes, strange but true.  Reminds me of a certain instructor from Lake Sheridan, Wyoming…..but that’s another story all together!  We finally surfaced, after fifty minutes, and headed in.  Good dives, but I’d do it different next time for sure.

After that it’s another day or two of Key West, then up to South Beach for some more culture shock, before the Valaika clan head home Friday morning.  Great couple of weeks in the Keys for all!

Part I - The journey begins - Okinawa!

Eighteen years of nurturing, guiding and cajoling finally paid off as Kristen Valaika graduated this month from Gwynedd Mercy High School.  To celebrate this great event, she and dad are heading on a fly & drive & dive adventure to the Far East.  Our itinerary will find us visiting Okinawa, Tokyo, and Honolulu before we eventually head home.  We’ve got an agenda filled with places to visit that I can’t even start to pronounce, food to eat that I can’t describe, and more culture shock than I could ever envision! 

We kicked it off at 3:30 a.m. Tuesday morning, heading down to the Philadelphia airport for leg #1 of this epic adventure.  We flew Delta down to Atlanta, giving us a little breathing room for Dave to fire up the laptop, crank out about 50 emails, and grab breakfast, before we boarded another Delta jet for our 14 hour flight to Tokyo’s Narita International Airport.  Seating was excellent with about ten feet of legroom in our exit aisle, so we suffered through in relative style, being awakened to be fed or given something to drink every 2 hours or so!  We ended up arriving about a half hour early, and breezed through Japanese immigration and customs, while being scanned for body temperature, filling out all sorts of swine flu-ish questionaires, and answering all the key questions correctly.  With nothing to declare we cleared customs and had time to stroll about the very nice Narita airport for almost 3 hours, waiting for our continuation flight to Naha, Okinawa,  We finally boarded the All Nippon for the last leg of today’s adventure.  All Nippon Airways is a japanese domestic airline, and let’s say it compares to Comair back in the states. Never the less, the efficiency and work ethics of all the employees shined through and we boarded and left for the island of Okinawa.

We finally arrived, and had our first (and hopefully only) disappointment of the trip.  Our car rental agency was closed!  So here we were, in a strange land, 30 miles (or  48.2 kilometers for our Canadian readers) from our hotel, and no transportation.  Add a wee bit of exhaustion from thirty hours of traveling, and you have the recipe for a not-so-pretty scene!  Never-the-less, Kristen got a chance to witness Tijuana-style bargaining first-hand, as we attempted to negotiate with the taxi drivers to get a good deal.  We finally settled on $100 to drive us to our resort and we set off, beat but happy to be here.  Upon arrival at the very nice Marriott Okinawa Resort & Spa the staff greeted us and made us feel very welcome.  Of course, the taxi ordeal was not quite over, and suddenly he seemed to recall the negotiation was in Yen, not dollars, and of course I still owed him more when I handed him the previously-agreed upon $100 bill.  Wrong guy to try to play this game with, “homey”, so we exchanged heated words in various languages until the light of reality finally dawned for him, and he got in his cab and headed off into the night.  Geeesh! Now finally we get a chance to sleep in real beds and recharge the batteries for an exciting day tomorrow!

Our first full day in Okinawa started off with a beautiful sunrise, blue skies, and great views from our 11th floor room with a view of the South China Sea.  That lasted all of about a half hour, when the skies darkened and then opened up with a mother of a monsoon, pouring Chinese delicacies (cats & dogs) all morning!  An amazing amount of rain fell this morning, but it’s OK, we’re on vacation!  While dad took the time to answer some emails, Kristen headed down early to the Japanese-style breakfast buffet.  She came back up and told me she had a great breakfast, although she had no idea of what she ate!  That’s just my dining style, for sure!  I headed down and took the safer route, opting for the gringo-ish style buffet, which proved to be an interesting combination of salads, lunchmeats, eggs, and some very foreign vegetables.  Oh well.

We worked out the details of our next two days with the very helpful concierge staff, and bought our tickets for the bus down to Naha, the capital city and commerce center of the Okinawa prefecture.  We enjoyed a scenic shoreline drive all the way down, and as we approached the city, the rain stopped and the sun came out - perfect!  We disembarked at the Naha city bus terminal, and needed to head over to the monorail which we could see was  obviously right across the street.  So we started that way, only to be met with a cavalcade of whistles and waving batons from the local traffic cops, who evidently don’t look too favorably on jaywalkers!  Yikes…two minutes in town and we’re already admonished by the local authorities!  So we headed back into the bus terminal, took the stairs up, crossed the street on the pedestrian walkway (how boring) and entered the monorail station.  Of course, the very modern and efficient self service ticketing system is great, however, you need to have some idea of where you are going and then how to translate that into the menu options on the screen, written completely in, you guessed it, Japanese!  Well there were two friendly young ladies there buying tickets, and they walked us through the details and we were off!  To the platform, the monorail arrived moments later, and just that fast, we were at Kencho-Mau station, the start of our walking tour through the Kokusai Dori shopping district. This 1.6 km long street is absolutely packed with every type of store and market you can imagine, and every food vendor was offfering free samples of their wares.  Let’s just say I committed to a very open mind on this trip, so within the first hundred yards or so I had eaten smoked fish of some origin, seaweed of some sort, sweet red beans, several varieties of cakes and sweets.  I did score on a cool little fugu (that’s puffer fish to us caucasians) charm for my cell phone, so look for me to be sporting that when I get home!  

It was interesting to note - this place is waaaaay Japanese!  How much, you say?  How about Kristen and I being the only non-asians we saw all day long?  Amazing!   With over 60 years of U.S. military presence on the island, there was no english spoken or understood by about 99% of the people we met in the shops, on the streets, and elsewhere.  This side of Okinawa is definately still “old country” Japan. 

Our shopping adventure took us to Heina Dori, sort of a Las Vegas Fremont Street experience with a slant (pun intended), a covered shopping street with probably a thousand shops, ranging from high-end art & jewelry to the Japanese version of the Dollar Store, the 100 Yen Store!  I strolled into one shop that had some nice Hawaiian-ish shirts on display, and the two older sales ladies, who did not speak a lick of english, and I, equally handicapped in my command of Japanese, managed to spend the next half hour bickering over prices, finally arriving at a mutually acceptable conclusion - I left with some cool shirts, they ended up with a fistful of Yen, and we were all smiling.  I think my poor daughter was a bit shocked & embarrased that her old man would take on these savvy business owners in a game of price haggling, but hey, that’s an international event that has no borders!  We left, no closer to communicating but clearly with a better understanding of each other!  We ended up at the Tsubaya pottery district, and picked up some nice trinkets to add to the growing collection of “must-haves”.

Heading back, to the monorail we decided to try a little local cuisine, so we darted down a side alley and stepped into a dark little taproom that specialized in local Saki. The bar area is lined with a few hundred bottles of Saki, and huge pottery crocks are lined up on the floor behind the bar for them to ladle some of the local brew into your cup - very different indeed!   As might be expected, no one inside speaks any english but we communicate our desire for food and drink and they rise to the challenge.  The menu is offered, and once again, I cannot tell you what food group anything on it belongs to, nor what part of what animal may be involved in the meal!  Kristen orders Udon (ew-don) soup, and it arrives along with a pair of chopsticks.  OK,…..you tell me….soup & chopsticks?  I take a look at the soup and I am not sure of the animal/vegetable/mineral composition of the meal, but K pours some into a small bowl for me, and I go ahead and eat it…yes, amazing…..eating something I could not identify once again!  And I get a handle on eating noodle soup with chopsticks, improving my ratio of dropped-food to food-that-makes-it-to-my-mouth as the meal goes on.   

Finally it’s time to walk & monorail ourselves back to the bus terminal, and this time we don’t even attempt to get away with jaywalking; we’re quick learners!  Well that, and some inane fear Kristen has about rotting away in an Okinawan traffic prison!  I also learn that you need to start off most conversations with ”Wah….!” which means, roughly, ”the subject matter is”.  However, the cool part is how you get to say it - think Jackie Chan in Shanghai Nights!  In any case, we get back to the bus terminal and there are about 150 buses there for us to choose from, with the odds being approximately 1 in 150 of getting on the bus that will take us home!  So we step into the office, K is able to communicate to some extent with the helpful clerk, and she shows her our schedule, at which point the young lady jumps out from behind the counter, races out the door, beckoning us to follow, runs down the street around the corner, and halfway up the block to wave our departing bus down, allowing us to make it!  Talk about service plus!  You know you’re not in Kansas anymore when you see this level of customer service evident with every single person we’ve met here!  It is amazing how truly far into Japan we are here.  If you are going to visit the country, this should be a top destination for you to really see life as it is lived with a minimal amount of western influence.

Friday morning and the same teaser weather greeted us, with sunny skies at 7:00 a.m., followed by amazing amounts or rain pouring down from then on.  Today’s plan was to go diving, so that we did.  Of course, we were diving in a place that had more hazards to human life than can be imagined, but hey, what’s the odds of something biting / stinging / swallowing us, eh?  Our resort limo picked us up at 8:40, and we shot down the road all of about 4 minutes to the resort area, where we signed in for the diving.  C-cards necessary?  Not really, but hey, it’s only a guideline, eh?  We jumped in a shuttle with our english speaking dive guide & captain Takesha, and boogied down the road to his boat at the local marina.   Since this was primarily a touring trip, we had opted to not pack any dive gear; perhaps not the wisest move, but we suffered through.  Besides, who needs an octopus on a regulator anyway?  It’s only another guideline, I think!  So K and I reviewed real Buddy Breathing skills, just in case.  All morning long the rain varied, from heavy to torrential to insane, but the consistent thing was that it just kept raining!  The weather kept the others away, so it was just Kristen & I on board today.  We motored out to our first reef location, in the East China Sea, just outside of Nago Bay.  We moored in about 20 feet of water, geared up, and dropped down to explore.  Upon hitting the bottom we saw our first Lion or Zebra Fish (cousins that are too close to call for this amateur).  Immediately after that a small moray eel, of an unknown variety.  From there we encountered a few sea cucumbers as we swam out to the reef line, dotted still with craters as silent reminders of the battles that took place in this area just 65 years ago.  And then we encountered our first sea snake, coiled up on the bottom, watching us warily.  Very deadly, but the good news is his mouth is too small to effectively bite us, so the “bigger is better” policy worked well here.  From there we were on the reef, and the sightings of marine life were very cool indeed.  All the usual critters and many more variants typical of this area, including various butterfly fish, sharpnose puffers, sea stars, burrfish puffers, goatfish, damsels, lobsters, trumpet fish, parrot fish, and others that we were familiar enough with to ID as cousins of ones we knew well.  On top of that we saw some other less familiar faces, including more sea snakes, Crown of Thorns starfish, Lizard Fish, Dartfish, Anemone Fish (i.e. Nemo), Clown Triggerfish, many multi-colored starfish, colorful nudibranch’s, and more.  One of the notable finds was a mantis shrimp, said to have the ability to strike with it’s claws so hard it has the impact of a .22 caliber bullet!  Very, very cool diving, and I am truly kicking myself for not bringing the underwater camera to capture some of the images.  Oh well, one of many reasons to return! 

We got back to the hotel, and enjoyed a liesurely afternoon reading and Kristen took a short walk (in the still-pouring rain), while I stayed in, working on some emails (no surprises), and actually started to edit the pictures from the Australia trip (major surprise here!) so we can load them up to the soon-to-be-released IVS photo gallery site!    We spent the rest of the afternoon kicking back, while Kristen pondered tonights dinner options.  Since this is her trip, I defered the final selection to her, and figured “how bad can it be?”

Well talk about venturing far outside my ‘box’, K’s choice was Ryu-Bin-Ka, a Korean/Japanese restaurant.  We were ushered in and seated in a most beautiful dining roon, completely filled with a very loud and raucaus crowd (and my family yells at me for embarassing them with being loud!) laughing, joking and really enjoying themselves.  When the waitress brought the Saki menu over it was apparent why everyone was so loud - the average alcohol content of the wines was 25% and up!  Now that’s some kick-ass rice wine!  I passed, choosing instead a safer alternative, Orion draft beer, the Coors Light of Okinawa.  I opted for the “all-you-can-drink” choice, a local tradition I have noticed - now this is one idea that we need to bring back home and suggest at the Harleysville Hotel!

Our menus arrived, and I had a chance to scan the offerings, including such delicacies as Braised Sharks Head & Abalone (yum!), Sea Urchins, and many more which I cannot describe at all.  Not sure there’s anything here calling my name, so I defer to Kristen to order for us, and she selects Shabu Shabu, a Korean-based “set menu”, essentially a nine course meal.  Keep in mind that my daughter might be pushing 105 pounds, so I figured I’d get some identifiable scraps from this selection, and did not order anything for myself.  Good call!  Right after we ordered, the manager came to our table, and attempted to explain (in Japanese, or course) our need to move to a different table.  Hmmm…was it something we said?  No, not at all….”different table” meant much larger table, cause K’s dinner was not going to fit on our table for two!

Once relocated, the parade of dishes began, and the variety was truly amazing!  Tofu, seaweed, sashimi, fried prawn heads (crunchy, tasty, but no substance), various potato creations, yogurt, unidentified vegetables and sauces, dried fruit - and this was just the warm-up!  Then our server, Rin Higa, who thankfully had a decent command of english and an even greater sense of humor, brought out our own tabletop gas grill, fry pan, ladels, bucket of water, and seaweed bullion.  She set it up and fired up the grill to get our water boiling and the bullion kicking in.  A few more Orions, and finally our water was starting to boil.  Now out comes the main course, plate after plate of various cuts of pork and side dishes.  The basic idea here was to boil the meat and veggies in a sort of fondue-fashion, so that’s what we did.  Now I’m not sure that boiled bacon will catch on in the states, but it was pretty good here tonight.  Dipping meats and veggies in, getting better and better with my chopsticks (have not used a fork or spoon in four days now!) we enjoyed the flavors and textures of this cultural delight.  Finally, almost three hours (and many Orions) after we started, it was time for farewells to Rin and the rest of the very friendly staff, and we headed to bed and our last nights sleep on this delightul island.

Saturday morning it rained (surprise!) and we packed and headed down to the shuttle bus that would take us to the Naha airport for our flight back to Tokyo, and part II of this adventure.  Our departure from the hotel was a bit surreal, almost a scene from the Wizard of Oz, as Dorothy left the Emerald City, with the hotel staffers, dressed in all their various ornate uniforms, waving enthusiastically to us and inviting us to return soon!  Strange but wonderful place indeed!

Part II - Tokyo

Our three hour flight was uneventful and Miss Kristen Valaika had our travel all wonderfully mapped out (truly a compliment to her and the planning she put into this trip!) so we got on board the shuttle for the two hour ride from the airport to central Tokyo, and the Sheraton Miyako Hotel.  Clearly we’re not in Okinawa anymore, as this is a much more bustling and urban environment.  We checked in, freshened up, and headed out to test the comprehensive public transportation system that covers this city.  As we board our shuttle bus to the train station, an older Japanese fellow boards the bus wearing an old Yankees hat.  International diplomat that I am, I point to the hat and give him a hearty ‘thumbs down’, and that’s all we needed to get the conversation started.  Turns out he is a professional interpreter, as well as a major baseball fan, and when I explain we are Phillies fans, he jumps right into telling us all about Phillies manager Charlie Manuel and his years as one of the top sluggers in Japan’s professional baseball league!  Very cool connection, so when we get to our destination, the Meguro train station, he escorts us inside, shows us the in’s and out’s of purchasing the tickets, figuring out the route maps, and helps ensure we are off in the right direction.  Cool!  So, we jump on the JR Line train and head north to the Ebiso station, get our tickets and board the Hibiya subway line, past Hiro-o and disembark at Roppongi station.  The Roppongi area is kind of like combination of New York’s Times Square and Las Vegas - an amazing array of shops, restaurants, odd characters, and lights - a pretty cool place indeed!  We sauntered about, taking it all in, grabbing some more photo op’s with the locals (Kristen promised her friends at home a lot of photos) and finally grabbing a light dinner at the Havana Cafe. The walls are covered with posters of Che Guevara and hung with Cuban flags, but we are the only non-asians in the place.  Dinner is good and it’s time to retrace our steps back to the hotel.  More photo op’s, and more of dad embarrasing his daughter with his photo documentary of this expedition, but hey, that’s what dads are all about! 

Sunday now and dad decides to take the day off from touring and relax at the hotel, while Kristen heads off to meet one her friends from the Governors School, Mayuko, who lives about a half hour north of Tokyo.  She attended the academic program last summer, held at the University of Pittsburgh, and since then they have stayed in touch.  Now she’s excited about the chance to show off her ’hood to her American friend, so they have a day planned to visit the Harajuko area, the high-fashion district if Tokyo.  

A long afternoon of touring complete, the girls head back to the hotel to pick up dad and go out to dinner.  Kristen has the place selected, it is just one railway stop north of here (how come we can never eat where we are??) so K, Mayuko, and I get back on the bus and back on the train and back up to Meguro……to eat dinner.  We are somewhat clueless where this place is, although we have an address, so we stop in a local shop, where our token local Mayuko speaks to the shop keepers.  You know it’t not going well when the real locals are Googling the location and then our local is taking pictures of their computer screen showing the Google map, using her cell phone.  I am sensing the odds of making it to dinner tonite are way low.

Not to be the pessimist, we head out and begin our exploration, down one street, maybe another, ok, maybe turn here,,,,,,you are getting the jist of it.  Ask another local shopkeeper, and even without understanding the language, you can tell from the body expressions that we are no closer to dinner than we were yesterday!  So we push on, for a while at least, until the girls finally give it up.  So I say, let’s just pick a place along the way back that looks good and is not too expensive, and we go from there.  The ladies choose a restaurant with a name that I cannot describe, and we go inside, where we are seated, without shoes, in a pit sort of layout of a table.  Turns out this place is not so Japanese, so Mayuko really can’t interpret the menu, which is in Korean.  Who’d of thunk, eh?  So sensing our dilemna, the waitress brings out a translated version of the menu, and we go from there.  Well actually the two girls go, since I have read the menu like three times and still cannot find a single item I can eat on it.  I have to admit some of these Korean specialties really make me wonder, including such goodies, as cod entrails in firey cream sauce, pork entrails with noodles, and beef entrails with spicy rice…..stuff we tend to toss out at home are menu items here.  Even the girls pass on that, and finally dinner is brought out in two red-hot ceramic bowls, and our waitress mixes the one-pot specials up and basically fries them at our table due to the extreme temperature of the pots - interesting, to say the least.  Never the less, the girls dig in, and enjoy dinner, while dad enjoys a draft beer (or two).  Mayuko is interesting, in her senior year of high school, and we learn a lot about family life in Japan from her.  Finally desert is served, the ladies are happy, and it’t time to escort Mayuko back to her train, while K and I head back to ours, and a nights rest at the hotel.  And as we are walking into the hotel, I look out and getting on to the bus, there’s a guest wearing a Slate’s Dive Center t-shirt from Key Largo!  Small world.

Monday and it’s time to visit one of the most famous shrines in Tokyo, the Sensoji Temple in Asakusa.  One bus, one train, and one subway later, we arrive.  This area of Tokyo is beautiful and we encounter our first homeless folks here, camping out under the bridges along the river.  A few good photo op’s and we’re off to see the temple.  Entrance to the temple is through one of three huge gates, and the largest, Kaminarimon Gate, towers over a hundred feet above the crowd.  The original was destroyed in the air raids of 1945, so this is a reconstruction built in 1960. Just inside the gate are statues of the God of the Wind and the God of Thunder.  Once through the gate we were smack dab in the middle of the Nakamise Shopping Arcade. The street is lined with colourful, lively stalls selling traditional knick- knacks, festival foods, traditional sweets, and rice crackers of all sorts. Of course we dropped a few thousand yen here on trinkets to haul back home!  Hanzomon Gate marks the end of the street, and it is nearly as tall as the first, with the treasures of Sensoji stored safely inside.  There are a pair of woven straw sandles, about 30 feet high, hanging on the gate, that tradition says were woven by the villagers as a gift to the gods. 

Near the temple there were large incense burners. Traditionally, incense is wafted over the body as an act of purification, so many were lined up, waving their arms to direct the sweet aroma across their bodies.  One of the cool things were the large wooden fortune telling stands. To use it, you shake a large metal cylinder, then select a stick from inside.  Next you give the stick to one of the temple officials who directs you to one of the hundreds of wooden drawers, each containing various versions of your “fortune”.  Some are good, but some are not, and if you get a bad one, you need to counter it by then tying it to the branch of a tree or the special rack provided, it will apparently blow the bad fortune away.  Of course this costs 100 yen to experience - what a racket!

The Sensoji Temple dates back to 645, but with the original destroyed in the air raids of 1945, today’s building is a 1958 reconstruction. Before you enter the temple area, you need to cleanse yourself, and there are fountains with ladels to do so.  You dip a ladle in, pour a small amount of water on one hand, then on the other, and finally pour some water into your hand, use it to rinse your mouth, then spit it into the trough.  After that you walk to the top of the stairs, make a donation, and then, as a mark of respect, you clap twice and bow your head.   The temple itself was beautiful inside and out, and today’s trip was truly worth the effort to get here.

We stopped in one of the little market restaurants and some Brit’s eating there recommended the Lemon Bread, a local delicacy - very good call!  And a couple of Asahi’s to chase it down, and we were good to continue our shopping and exploring.  For lunch we visited a local eatery, and as soon as these two wide-eyes walked in the woman in charge came right up to us and told us that this was a traditional Japanese place.  Well what that translates to is this…..you figure out what you want to eat & drink, walk up to a large panel on the wall with about 50 buttons on it, make your selections, pay the amount shown, directly into the machine, and get a handful of tickets/receipts for your food.  Think an early Horn & Hardart Automat cafeteria, just without the food in the doors!  So we sit down and the same woman brings our food out and puts it in front of us.  So that sums up the traditional japanese style of eating - no customer interaction at all, and no one handles the money.  Interesting!  Well enough culture and shopping for one day, and lunch held us over through dinner, so time to rest up for a very early start tomorrow morning! 

Well Tuesday’s early start didn’t quite pan out as planned, as Ms Kristen needed a little more beauty rest before starting her day.  Dad was, amazingly up, showered and dressed, when her alarm rang, and she mumbled the infamous “ten more minutes”, before crashing back into a deep sleep.  That’s OK, we have tomorrow, so once she finally rises, we shift gears and decide to visit the museum area today.  We board the 8:05 bus to the Megeuro train station, get our tickets (we’re old pro’s at this now) and shuffle on down to the track.  The station is a lot busier than we’ve ever seen it, but this is the first time we’ve been here to experience rush hour, Tokyo-style.  Down to the platform, and the folks are lined up where the doors of the 11-car subway are expected to stop.  IT arrives, screams to a halt, the doors pop open, and it is literally a sea of humanity inside.  The people are packed like sardines, shmussed up against that doors and windows.  A whole bunch of folks jump off, but they get right back in line in front of us, and it takes us a minute to realize that this is part of the morning ritual, to allow the people behind them that wanted to get off access to the door.  So they jump back on, pushing a bit to fit, and K & I look at each other and say “we’ll wait for the next one”.  But we’re quick studies, so we adjust our position on the platform, and the next train follows in about two minutes.  This time, like riding a wave at the beach, we wait just till the outgoing tide of commuters has crested, then we shove right into the car, and are firmly sealed in by 40 or 50 folks behind us - whew!  I do a quick head count (with my 6′2″ height I can see over most of the heads in the car) and I estimate about 550 people are on our car with us!  With the 11 car train length, that makes like 6,000 riders on this morning run, every two minutes!!  The interesting thing though is how quickly it thins out, as we are clearly heading away from the business centers on our jaunt today.  Within about ten stations you could dance in the car, it was that empty.

We arrived at Ueno-Koen station, and head out to the museum park.  As we arrive in the museum area, the first thing we see is an assembly of sorts - turns out it is a high school class trip, and the students are aligned military style, squatting down in complete silence, listening to the group leader spell out the days plans.  American kids could learn a lot from the respect these kids were showing here and everywhere else we see them!  We wander along, and take in the beauty of the park.  A few more homeless folks live here, as might be expected, and again, their camps were as clean and neat as the ones we saw yesterday in Asakusa.  We’re a little early for the museum, so we stroll over to a local cemetary and are absolutely amazed at the memorials constructed to honor the dead.  Each plot is like a stone sanctuary, polished, clean, about 10 x 15 ft, with fresh flowers, incense, candles, and prayer sticks, like 6 ft long, standing everywhere.  We check out a few hundred plots, and peer over the fence into the “lower rent” district, where the plots are maybe 4 ft x 6 ft, but just as ornate, although on a reduced scale.  Nothing at all like a U.S. cemetary with plastic flowers and flat marker stones for the lawnmowers. 

Finally the museum opens and we buy our tickets and head in to see the Tokyo National Museum, the centerpiece of the Japanese cultural preservation.  With artifacts, artwork, and historical pieces dating back to 2,000 B.C., each room just left us in awe as we took in the entire two floors on the building.  We stopped for a light lunch at L’Accord restaurant, and then visited the Hyojin National Conservatory, chock full of more treasures and Buddhist religious items. Properly cultured, we were ready to check out the surrounding neighborhood, and that we did.  We visited the center of the Ueno park, and suddenly find ourselves on the Japanese version of Mallory Square, with street performers everywhere, plying their trade for tips from the crowd - pretty cool.  We take in a few more temples, watch the locals feed some huge black Koi in the lake, and then boogie on over to the Ameyoko shopping district.  This seemingly endless bazaar, located under the elevated train tracks and a few blocks out to either side, is the place to go if you want to buy….well anything!  First and foremost, food, with probably a hundred vendors hawking anything and everything that swims, crawls or floats in the sea.  Huge octopus, dried squid, fish I couldn’t begin to ID, crabs, tuna steaks, swordfish, snails, every flavor of seawood and sea cucumber imaginable, and more…..and the best part is that need to keep things refrigerated? - only a guideline!  I hope this stuff sells quickly!     

I did score on some grilled squid, split, cooked right there on a griddle, seasoned lightly then run through a tenderizer to make it just about melt in your mouth - yummy!  We walked up one street and down the next, never getting bored, and often being surprised, at what the next stall is selling.  We even stopped at a little coffee shop, and as I’m sitting there I notice the maple leaf motifs etched in the glass…..turns out we’re in the Canadian Coffee House, eh!  Lots of fun, and finally we head back on the train, getting back early enough to beat the evening rush hour crowd!

For dinner we decide to stay local and eat in the upscale Chinese restaurant in the hotel ‘Shi Sen;.  It’s amazing how popular other asian foods are here in Japan, with Chinese, Korean, and other asian eateries dotting just about every corner.  Well it’s real Chinese, so I expand my pallet once more, and decide to try the Shark Fin Soup with crabmeat (go ahead, shoot me Barb!) and the abalone with cream sauce.  K, the more eco-friendly of us, goes for the tofu & veggie soup, with rice.  I am glad I had the chance to try this most controversial soup, but honestly there was nothing there that set it apart from any other soup, and I remain convinced that shark finning should be abolished worldwide.  Consider it the price of good research, but that will be the last bowl of shark fin soup that crosses these lips.  For the record, there were probably a dozen shark fin items on the menu, including whole shark fin - I just hope someone ate the rest of the animal.   Now it’s early to bed for Kristen so we can make out 4:00 a.m. wake up call tomorrow!  

It’s Thursday night now, and as I sit here, munching on mochi, I’d like to share the events (and non-event) of the day, along with some personal observations and deep thoughts.  First, the non-event - K & I awoke at oh-dark-thirty, actually 4 a.m., and get dressed, out the door, about a mile walk to the train station, down fifteen flights of steps into the bowels of the Tokyo mass transit system, board our train, wolf down some dried squid strips for breakfast, head fifteen stations east, get out, wind our way back up to street level and the exit, and find a crowd gathered on the sidewalk, all lamenting that the Tsukigigi Fish Market, the worlds largest, decided to not open today!  All the info says it’s closed on Sundays, and irregular Wednesdays, and who would have thought today was an irregular sort of Wednesday???   So, we confirm the sad truth, head back in the station, repeat the earlier steps, and make our way back to bed, since nothing is open at this hour!  We’ll be back tomorrow!

Back to that mochi - there is nothing to quite describe the delicious taste and texture of this Japanese treat!  Rice cake, pounded into a paste, is molded into balls, wrapped around one of many choices of inner flavor.  Tonite I opted for white cheese, while K enjoyed a cranberry-honey version.  There are only about 50 or so flavors to choose from, and every single one is a winner!  If you thinking about opening a mochi drive-thru in Harleysville, you can count on your first two regular customers right here!

So with the day’s plans sorta in a state of re-work, we shifted gears, and Kristen headed off to the Harajuku market, an area teeming with department stores and specialty fashion shops of every sort.  Her mission: to turn her hard earned savings into a closet full of cool Japanese style for her first year in college when she heads there in September.  Lots of difficult choices and budgetary decisions but she manages to pull it off, and comes back with bags full of some pretty fashionable stuff!  Meanwhile I took advantage of the morning and plowed through more work that I had packed away in my bags for this trip.

Our plans for the afternoon included another rendesvous with Mayuko, K’s friend, and we met her at the Ikebukuro train station, and she was properly prepared to show her wide-eyed friends around her town!  We started off with more shopping (what’s with these young girls and shopping anyway??) stopped for some Takoyaki for lunch, and headed into more of the endless mall areas.  The Takoyaki was interesting, essentially a spoonful of various foodstuffs, including octopus, cut sausage, and veggies, ladeled into the center of a rice-bread based bowl, wrapped up like a crab cake, cooked in a mold, and then served in a typical Chinese take-out sort of container, with shredded dried Bonita tuna across the top - yum yum!  And, you get to eat this with chopsticks!  Actually it was pretty good, I know, amazing hearing that from me.  Then we ventured to the top of the Sunshine 60 tower, a sixty floor office and shopping center with a fantastic 360 degree observation deck on the top floor.  Talk about great views!   And while we are there, Mayuko shows K some photos of her house on her cell phone, and her screensaver photo comes up - it is Taylor Swift.  K laughs and M tells her what a fan she is of Taylor, and how she’d love to see her in concert.  I then tell her I have tickets to see Taylor in concert at the end of August, and M is floored that K’s dad is so cool!  I’m actually taking my other two daughters, but I’ll take “cool” points whenever I can get them!

After that, some more shopping (this never gets old to them!) and we dropped M off at the train station so she could get to ‘Cram School” on time.  She’s a senior, and the Japanese university system is not based on applications, but rather how you place in standardized tests that the government administers.  Her ambitions are to be a chemical engineer, and she knows she needs to score well for that, so she attends an evening school program five nights a week after her all day high school program - talk about personal commitment!  K and I head back , but it’s finally time for a dad treat, and we jump in a cab and head out to the local Outback Steakhouse, my favorite!  Great meal, and we get another early to bed evening with the alarms set for that fish market run in the morning!

Before I go, I thought I’d share a few observations.  This city, and society, is truly amazing to me as an American.  It starts with respect, both to yourself and others.  It is obvious in every person we see, they are dressed well, carry themselves with confidence, the politeness runneth over, and they can’t help you or each other nearly enough.  With that respect comes trust, and no better way to sum that up than the amazing number of kids, ages, 6, 7 or 8, that get on the subways and trains every morning, by themselves, and navigate their way to schools, with nary a concern that anyone would do any harm to them.  They sit there and do their homework on the train, are not afraid to say hello, and truly are just amazing.  You also see the respect in the lack of graffitti and the non-existence of any damage to public or private property that we are so used to seeing at home.  And another observation - Tokyo has the fewest numbers of waste recepticles that I have ever seen, but what is even more amazing, is that it has even less litter!  People just carry their trash or recyclabels until they get to an appropriate place and then they make sure everything goes in - there is nothing, and I mean nothing, on the streets, in the gutters, hallways, stairs, anyplace - this place is cleaner than Disneyland!   As you might sense, i have developed an entire different sense for the japanese people after my short time here.

The alarm rings at 4 a.m, and it’s time once again to attempt to visit the Tsukiji Fish Market, so we wipe the sleep from our eyes, wolf down a breakfast of mochi (I’m out of squid!) and grab a taxi to take us to the market!  Once there, we quickly find our way to the busiest, fishiest place on earth!   I am loving it, Kristen is wondering why she wore flats to walk through the endless stream of blood, fish guts and unidentifiable goo, that makes up the aisles. This place is pure insanity with a seafood scent - the staff at each stall is hawking their products, the forklift traffic is endless and does NOT STOP for anyone or anything.  There are more species of fish and other critters from the ocean than I could imagine - this would be the perfect place to run a Fish ID course!  We saw clams of every sort, octopus (alive & dead), eels (alive and being fileted alive), dolphin, tuna, scorpionfish (alive), spiny urchins, baby cuttlefish, squid, seawood, sea cucumbers, snappers, flounder, bonita…….you name it..it was there, and utimately edible.  The tuna auction was in full swing and we got a chance to watch that action, as bidders vied for the best fresh tuna carcasses.  Inspectors were everywhere, poking, probing and grading the fish.  It was not easy knowing how excited we get when we see an octopus or cuttlefish, to see them piled up for sale here.  Tough place to visit, very mixed emotions, but I am sure I would be doing plenty of time in the Tokyo big house if I had decided to act on my feelings and let all our little friends go free!!  End of story, I loved it, K was grossed out - go figure! 

After that we strolled about two miles, taking in the shops of Ginza (thankfully for dad, not open yet!) and on to the Imperial Palace, where we toured the magnificient palace gardens.  After this we headed to the Tokyo International Forum, and had lunch at one of the local eateries.  From there we toured the Tokyo Station, taking in all the history of this central facility Tokyo’s transportation system, including quite a bit of wartime history, such as the WWII incendiary bombing damage and repairs, troop movement, and wartime operations.  Finally we board our train, back to Meguro station, and one last chance to spend our remaining savings in Japan, with just enough time to get packed and leave the hotel.  

We check out, jump on the bus for the 20 km ride to Narita Airport, and board our flight for the seven hour, 3,800 mile ride to the last stop in our journey - Honolulu.  And for you Bill Murray fans, this is like something from Groundhog Day, after we have spent this seventeen hour Thursday in Tokyo, we get to repeat Thursday again tomorrow in Hawaii!!   Amazing how that international time line thing works!

Part III - Hawaii & home

It’s Thursday morning - again! - when we finally land in Honolulu.  Talk about your inner clock being confused!  I have to hand it to Kristen - she is one tough traveler, and has weathered these long flights and crazy hours without any whining at all!  So we head to immigration, it’s hugs and kisses from all the Homeland Security folks, welcoming us back to America, and we sail through without even a bag check.  From there to the rental car counter and K picks out a bright yellow Jeep for us to tool around in for the next three days.  A short ride to the hotel to check in, and we are good to go.

Now, riddle me this Batman…..if we are in the middle of such an economic recession, how is it that this Hilton Hawaiian Village property, with 3,900 guest rooms, is SOLD OUT through the end of August - yes, sold out!  Folks were at the counter trying to extend their stay a day and being told no - there is zero capacity.  Amazing to see this side of economic reality when you hear all the doom and gloom stories on the news and in the paper.

So we start off with a little tour about 30 miles north along the coast for some photo op’s, and stop for some lunch at P.F.Changs…like we have not eaten enough Asian cuisine this week!  More chopstick skill improvements, but now, with a more learned eye, I note a difference - this American chain restaurant uses non-stick white rice - what’s up with that??  You can’t eat that with chopsticks - you need the good old sticky variety.  Anyhows, after that we head down to the beach, soak a little in the beautiful clear blue water, and grab some dinner, before getting an early lights-out for tomorrow’s 6 a.m. rise to get out diving with our friends at Ocean Concepts.

Ocean Concepts is a PADI 5 Star IDC facility and the training director is my good friend Joanna Mikutowicz, a fellow PADI Course Director that was part of my team at the PADI CD program last summer.  They are located about an hour west of Honolulu, so we did the early thing again, and headed down the highway to find them.  Once we got there, met the other divers, and got all set up, we headed over to the boat in the marina.  This is a very labor intensive operation, as all the gear is on the boat, already set up, and each individuals rental gear is in a bag with your name on it, next to your pre-assigned seat on the boat’s seating chart….yeah, a little too organized, especially for the insta-buddy assignments handed our during the shop briefing - thank goodness I packed my own (Kristen!).

So we motored out a short 25 minutes to the first site, a ledge / wall of sorts, with the top around 50 feet and base at 100 ft.   Kinda surgy, bit of current, and kinda dark, as the bottom is brown so very little light reflection even though the water clarity was great, and it was 80 degrees.  I was using rental fins, and let me state clearly that I would not recommend this brand to anyone - it was like wearing nothing on my feet with regards to propulsion [make & model withheld to protect the innocent].   We did see some nice critters, although the area was devoid of any sizable sea life, except for one honkin’ huge moray that had Kristen screaming through her regulator!  Lot’s of cool stuff we don’t normally see, various butterfly fish, urchins, other eels, shellfish, razor fish, crown of thorns starfish (but no other starfish, interestingly), and some others….all in all, probably not 10% what you see on a Key Largo dive!  Hate to use that as a yardstick, but that is a healthy reef system with good (and enforced) protection, and that’s what a reef should look like, from a bio-mass point of view.  Anyway, we are diving with rental gear (kicking myself for not packing ours) and our Suunto computers are screaming at us to end the dive waaaaaaaaay early - thank goodness I am not using it, just taking it for a swim, as I actually am wearing and diving my Cochran EMC-20H.  Kristen and I log 45 minutes on this 95 foot dive, and the rest of the divers, including the DM, are back on the boat in 30.  We are fine with our profile and two more living DAN experiments are completed! 

So we head head up, grab some tasty sandwiches on the boat (nice touch, lunch is included on a 2-tank trip), and then slowly motor over to dive site #2.  Very slowly….so I ask…”what’s up” and am given the Suunto-based answer - we need an hour surface interval.   Geeesh, I thought I was in Cozumel or something!   So finally we get to descend on our second site, the Shallow LSU ( at 80 feet, that differentiates it from the Deep LSU).  This is an old naval utility landing craft (Landing Craft, Utility - hence LSU), and even though the briefing was inaccurate, refering to it as an old Landing Ship, Troop (LST), commonly referred to as a Higgins boat which many might know from “Saving Private Ryan” and other WWII actions.  These lighlty armed, lightly armored, under-powered boats had nicknames such as “Large Slow Target” and “Loaded for a Single Trip”, but none-the-less were important in helping shape the world to where it is today.  It’s OK, we just get in and enjoy it.  Well talk about an artifical reef that needed to be, this is one.  There is nothing but sand here at this 80 ft deep site, and the LSU, a pile of concrete blocks, and a recently sunk fiberglass sailboat.  Humming the recent hit ‘Dead & Gone’ by T.I. & Justin Timberlake …..I look to the east…I look to the west…..etc…and NOTHING.   This wreck is THE site.  So we explore it and the rubble slowly, and manage to find some interesting stuff - two nudibranch’s evidently involved in some sort of copulation (we looked away quickly to avoid embarrasing them), a large porcupine puffer (matches my new Japanese cell phone charm!), sea stars, some various Hawaiian goatfish, and then the coup de gras - I sight a very large (like 10 inch) frogfish, hiding in the rubble near a railing…..very very cool!   K & I take it in, watching as it walks about using it’s pectoral fins like hands to hold on or brace itself.  What a neat find, right at the end of our dive.  Ok, maybe time to head up….no…wait…look at the size of that octopus!   Wowsville……all this in 3 minutes!  So we follow him, watching the Cochran carefully and realizing that good research never ends, so the DAN guinea pigs stay down, taking in the octo’s activities as he does some repairs to the front of his nest, rearranging shells and other good hiding materials.  Amazingly creative animal, and smart, waiting till we had pushed our limits on time, to finally show himself!  So we balance the great show with the growing deco obligation, and finally head up, to enjoy 5 minutes at the 10 ft mark to clear ourselves enough to surface.  once again, our 45 minute runtime at 80 feet is 15 to 20 minutes longer than anyone diving the Suunto’s - amazing!  And we survive, again!

Finally we surface, climb aboard, and head back in.  Back to the hotel, showers and fresh clothes, and it’s time to go shopping!  Woo hoo….this never gets old for her!  Hilo Hatties is always a hit, and helps keep Dave stylin’ at the shop with his collection of Hawaiian shirts.  Some more goodies for K, including a chic new Le SportsSac computer bag, then dinner in Waikiki, and we are finally….almost….done!

Our last day in tropical paradise starts off with a lazy morning, the first one in two weeks we haven’t gotten up at 6 a.m. or earlier to go visit or see or do something.  We pack, checkout, and finally head to a museum of Dad’s choosing - the U.S. Army Museum of Hawaii.  This is a pretty cool place, located in a former shore defense artillery bunker, right on the beach.  Dad enjoys it, K is less than impressed but she tolerates it well for Dad.  Now it’s off to the airport.

We swing by the airport and check our bags in, then head out to return the car to the offsite location.  No problem on timing, we are relaxed, ahead of schedule, and very unlike most of my travels.  So we drop off the car, take the shuttle bus back, clear security, find our gate, head to the airline club, and kick back to await the boarding call.  So while we are there, K suddenly says “Dad…my shoes are in the rental car!”.  Oh my goodness, there goes that relaxing departure!  With less than 45 minutes to take off, Dad is out the door, waving down a shuttle bus, heading out to the rental lot, finding the car, finding the shoes, finding a bus back, again through security, being summoned on the PA system for the gate, finds Kristen, then we are finally boarding…….yep, now this is more like a standard Dave departure.

So the flight is actually overbooked (yes, it that’s depressed economy thing again….the flights to Hawaii are overbooked!).  So, they are asking for volunteers to jump off and make room for some family members to get on board together. I try to convince K that this is a good idea, a couple hours delay, a big travel voucher, and a first class seat on the next flight, but no, she wants to go home NOW!  OK, whatever, we head to our seats, and since the flight is over booked we are not even sitting together, and I give up my assigned seat so a mom can sit next to her infant.  I know, sensitive moment.  So I go to my new seat, and there is a guy who  wishes his wife could sit next to him, but she was stuck up in the exit row with about 6 feet of legroom.  OK, OK, I’ll be sensitive twice, and I exchange seats with her and let her sit with hubby while I stretch out in her seat - it’s nice when the airline Gods smile on you like that.  Meanwhile, Ms Kristen, who did not want to consider taking a later flight and a first class seat, has been seated next to a very, very well nourished couple, stuck (literally) in the window seat….ha ha ha……how’s that first class seat sounding now, missy!  So we take off, things are cool, and I order a couple of beers to pass the time.  Well George, my flight attendent, can’t be more helpful or attentive.  First he takes my second beer, and packs it in a bag of ice, to keep it as “cold as he likes it”, and, to take the level of service one step higher, he even fashions a coozie for my beer from some paper towels and tape from the first aid kit, so it stays nice and cold.  Then he serves me not a a bag of peanuts, but a whole cupful, that he evidently filled one little bag at a time……Hmmmm…was it my wink or something??    

So as I enjoy my coozie-wrapped beer, I get to enjoy some of Hollywood’s finest works, including ‘Escape to Witch Mountain’ (starring the Rock), ‘Yes Man’ (with Jim Carrey), and finally ‘New in Town’ (with Renee Zellenger). Finally K, myself and my favorite attendent George make it to Atlanta, I bid farewell to my new ‘friend’, and Kristen and I catch the last and final leg of this adventure, to Philadelphia and home.

The end!!! 

 Part I - Driving & Diving our way south, aka John & Ray & Dave’s Excellent Scuba Adventure

Today marked the start of Indian Valley Scuba’s Annual Memorial Day Key Largo diving trip, and this year’s event is the most special yet!  Expected to run ten days, it includes Cave Diving in northern Florida, drift diving and spearfishing off Boynton Beach, working with the Coral Reef Foundation to restore live corals to damaged areas of the Key Largo reef system, a typical IVS dive-dive-dive four day 14-dive wreck & reef weekend, and finally some shark tooth collection dives in the muddy Cooper River of South Carolina on the way home!  Add some rebreather training, open water checkouts, a ton of specialty and advanced training, and you have a typical relaxing week in water for Team IVS.

Sunday John Glodowski, Ray Graff and Dave loaded up and headed out, driving the first 980 miles to High Springs, Fl, to get ready for our first cave dive tomorrow.  Long, long drive, 15 hours with rotating drivers and lots of caffeine to get the team on location on time and not miss a dive!   Clear sailing through Washington, but raining from there to Florida made it an even longer night of driving.  Thank goodness for Diet Mountain Dew and Red Bull! 

Our first morning found us knocking on the doors at Ginnie Springs as they opened up at 8:00 a.m.  As usual, perfect customer service greeted us in this most organized operation, as the three of us signed in and registered for a morning of cavern and cave diving experience.  The river has dropped substantially since our last visit here a month ago, and the springs were running clear once again.  We set up and dropped into the Devils Spring system, first getting comfortable and our buoyancy adjusted in the shallow water above the Little Devils spring, basically a fissure down into the rock, measuring about 6 feet across, 40 feet long, and dropping almost 40 feet down.  The spring that feeds this enters through a small hole in one corner, and is clearly a “no-mount” entrance, meaning that in order to pass through the very tight restriction you would have to be holding your tank and regulator in your hands; as you would not fit if it were on your slung along your sides - yes, it’s that tight!  So we passed on that entrance, and made our way down to Devils Eye, and dropped down into the entrance.  Basically a shaft about 12 ft in diameter and 20 ft deep, it provides access to the entrance to the cave system.  We made our tie-off at the entrance, and our secondary just inside, and away we went, spooling out line and exploring the various nooks, crannies and passages through the cave system, finally reaching the main line and tieing off the reel.  From there we exited through the Devils Ear entrance, stopping for a safety stop while being washed by the significant outflow from this subterranean spring system.  From there we surfaced, and had an opportunity to debrief the dive, discussing the experience, and talking about our re-entry.  After a little surface interval, we dropped back in, re-tracing our steps, picking up the reel and slowly working away back to our original entry point.

Very cool dives, and now we were ready to enjoy a bit of a drift dive down the Santa Fe River.  The entrance to the next spring system was about a 1/4 mile downriver, so we kicked out a bit, and dropped down into the tannic-stained water for a brisk ride downstream.  Lots of freshwater mullet, bass, and a couple of large turtles were encountered on our way.  Popping up a few times to make sure we didn’t miss the next turn, we finally saw the small clearing in the trees that indicated the entrance to the Ginnie Ballroom spring.  We kicked up that waterway, finally crawling, and eventually walking, as the water got shallower and shallower as we approached the cavern entrance.  Suddenly the bottom dropped down to about 20 ft, and we swam down to the cavern entrance.  A narrow slit in the wall, and we slid in, as the cavern opened up into a massive underground area, hence the name, Ginnie’s Ballroom.  We explored the space, dropping down to 65 ft inside, and visiting the inlet spring, barred off for safety, that flowed so strongly that you could not swim and hold yourself in place near the entrance - an amazing amount of water passes through this cavern!

With only three dives under our belts for the day, we knew we needed a little more nitrogen racing through our veins, so it was off to Paradise Springs.  Located just an hour down the road in Ocala, this private spring & cave system is located on a horse farm, well off the beaten path. Find the little sign along the side of the road, take the one lane path through the woods for a half a mile, cross the railroad tracks, a right, a left, past two homes, through the gate, and to the house to check in!  Pay your fee, watch an orientation video, and it’s time to head down to the spring entrance.  Located about 40 ft below grade, it’s a bit of a hike to get down, especially wearing double 100’s.  But the trip is worth it, as we slipped into the small pool that was the entrance to this underground system.  Another buoyancy check, bubble check and a safety drill, and we began the exploration, dropping down into the cave system to a depth of about 140 ft before finally encountering some serious silting deep down in the narrowing passages.  Good spot to turn the dive, and we headed back up, stopping to examine the great variety of fossils and bones trapped in the side walls and ceiling of the cave.  From whale vertebra to lizard bones to sand dollars the sizes of dinner plates, this is a pretty cool spot for some underground education.   Finally it was time to head to the surface, and we climbed back out to the truck, loaded our gear, and got ready for the next leg of our journey - a five hour ride to Boynton Beach, FL.  We’ve got some photos to share from this portion of this trip - click here!

We arrived late at night in the still-pouring rain (three days in a row now) and got a few hours of well deserved and much needed shuteye in at the Holiday Inn Express.  Tuesday morning we finally saw some sunlight and hints of blue in an otherwise gray sky, so we took that as a good sign!  We found our way down to the marina and met Captain Shane of Deeper Dive Charters, our host for today’s activities.  We boarded, got squared away, and headed out in some good seas for a 3-tank trip, sightseeing and spearfishing the offshore reefs.

First location was Briny Breezes, a barrier reef at 80 feet. All the diving here was of the drift variety, and everyone had a job to do - John was hunting, Dave was shooting too, both of the video and speargun varieties, so we appointed Ray as the flag-master for the day, and he was assigned to tow a navigational-aid size surface float and marker flag for us while we dove.  We motored over to the spot, and it was “dive-dive-dive” as the command came from the bridge to drop in!  A very nice drift at 80 feet for almost 70 minutes - it’s great when you drive down and can haul your own doubles! We followed that with a long 20 minute or so surface interval, then headed to our second location, Gulfstream, another nice offshore reef line.  Lots of color, good coral formations, but nothing worth firing at so we enjoyed the scenary, including a huge 6 ft long turtle with a locator beacon attached to his shell - pretty cool to see such a mature animal.  Our final drop was at Delray Ledge, another nice 70 footer with some nice profile and vertical relief, and here John managed to give one nice rooster hogfish a headache I’m sure he’ll remember for a long time!  Gotta watch that angle on the shot!!  Finally we headed back in, disembarked, stopped for a nice curbside dinner at a Boynton Beach cafe, and headed down the road for a 3 hour jaunt to Key Largo.  And of course the rain continued to pummel us non-stop!

Part II - Coral Reef Restoration & Key Largo Diving

Confusion was the order of the day on Wednesday morning, as we woke to a nearly unrecognizable sight - the SUN!!   Woo hoo - the first time in our trip so far!  Once again, the scuba gods were smiling on Team IVS as they graced us with spectacular weather to kick off our coral reef restoration portion of this adventure.  This is one of the highlights of this year’s trip, and what a tremendously educational session we kicked it off with.  Ken Nedimyer, founder of the Coral Restoration Foundation, spent the morning sharing all the in’s & out’s of the coral reef system and what his foundation is doing to help restore it to a healthier more vibrant state with our restoration team, including Bob Stitzinger, Larry Gould, Butch Loggins, Sue Douglass, and Ray Graff, J-Glo and Dave Valaika.  The foundation currently specializes in Staghorn corals, and has over 3,500 live corals growing in their nursery, located about 6 miles offshore near Molasses Reef.  His presentation was thorough and his passion was obvious for his cause, and he quickly converted the attendees into coral advocates of the highest nature!  We broke for a brief lunch, and then headed out to the nursery.

Once on site, we began the task of cleaning and preparing the corals that we were to relocate on Thursday.  Scraping off the algae and other growths, we cleaned each live coral specimen with care.  Standing 3 to 4 inches high, these corals were the results of successful clippings of three different genealogical strains of staghorn coral.  The corals grow at a rate of about 1 millimeter a day, resulting in an inch or more of growth each month - wow!  So the corals we were about to plant had just been clipped off of healthy specimens earlier this year, and were already ready to go forth and help restore the reef!  We prepared 50 corals, and spent the remainder of the dive doing some routine maintenance work on the underwater ‘farm’.  Our second dive was at the site of the 1983 grounding of the Wellwood freighter, which drove into and onto Molasses Reef, causing a huge swath of damage, not once, but twice, as the salvage tugs dragged it back off the reef.  This site has been the scene of intensive study of reef restoration projects and techniques, and it was interesting to see the progress or lack thereof of some of the methods utilized over the last 25 years.  The most outstanding success by far was the restoration of the Staghorn coral population, and this was completetely the result of the Coral Restoration Foundation’s efforts.  We toured the site, and surveyed the locations for our restoration work scheduled for tomorrow.  Finally, we wrapped the evening up with part II of our coral education program, and got into the details of what would be expected of us tomorrow as we actually worked on the coral relocations.

Thursday morning we headed right out to the nursery, and spent two hours underwater, working to prepare fresh clippings onto bases and clean more growth off the nursery stock.  It is imperative that the corals are as clean as possible as the water warms or significant die-offs and incidents of White Band Disease show up in July & August.  So clean we did, scrubbing, scraping, and chiseling the various plants, sponges, and critters that had taken up domicile on the nursery plantings.  It is a very interesting shift in one’s mindset to go from our normal all-eco-inclusive “don’t touch, take nothing, leave only bubbles” mentality to working on behalf of the Staghorn coral and removing / destroying other species that pose a threat to them, in the nursery environment.  As we wrapped up our nursery duties we loaded the clippings we had prepared yesterday into tubs and hoisted them up onto the boat for a short ride to their new home.

After a short break for lunch, we motored out to the Wellwood site once again, and brought out little coral friends down with us   The lovely Miss Amy Slate was on board for the afternoon’s activities, and Carlie & Leslie Adams had also joined us for this afternoon in the roles of video and photo documenters, so we were set to get a lot of great footage of the activities.  Each restoration site was actually a grouping of three corals representing the differnt genotypes that Ken has nurtured at the nursery.  We chiseled and hammered and scraped the hardpan to prepare a suitable attachment point, mixed our two-part epoxy, and bedded the mounting disk that each coral was attached to into the reef.  Once set, we worked more epoxy in and around the base, smoothing the structure out and providing a more ideal platform for the coral polyps to grown and expand downward as well as upward.  Finally, we measured and documented the size and development of each coral and affixed a permanent ID tag into epoxy with a unique identifier number so that the growth and progress of the program could be monitored for years to come.  Our mission for the day accomplished, we headed back in.

After a round of hugs and kisses and T-shirt & email exchanges at the dock, it was time to turn to the next matter at hand - a night dive!  John Zyskowski, as well as Glen & Drew Hotte, had arrived and were itching to get wet, so we grabbed a quick bite and headed back out to the wreck of the Benwood, our favorite nightime dive site.  We arrived well after sundown, as we prefer, and slipped into the blackened waters to explore the nocturnal scene below.  Our efforts were well rewarded with some great up close turtle encounters, inquisitive squid visits, and the usual cast of characters out and about.   A perfect first night dive experience for Drew and a great Adventure Dive towards his Advanced Open Water certification!

Meanwhile, as we played under the sea, more of our group had arrived, including Stephanie Skelton, Meredith Bernardo, Kris Kritchell, and Tom & Debbie Brennan.  Also arriving tonight were our open water students, including Luanne & Jeff Stauffer, Katie & David Manninen, Joe Brown, and Katie Chin.   The weather continued to be perfect, save for an occassional downpour, but the sun keeps coming out, the wind stays away, and the seas are calm.

Friday we had half our group heading out on the Amoray Diver for some reef visits, and the rest of us headed over to Jules Undersea Lodge for our first two checkout dive.  With Instructors Butch Loggins, Ray G & Dave V, assisted by DM candidates John G, John Z, Carlie & Leslie, the group did great, progressing through the skill sessions with no problems at all!  While we were diving, a huge thunderstorm blew through, with lots of lightning striking all around and thunderclaps that made you jump, while the rain poured down on us - pretty cool!  Two great easy dives under our belt, we headed back to the resort to grab some lunch and get ready for the afternoon boat.  Our first location was the Spiegel Grove, and of course our newest divers had to sit this one out, but it was a beautiful day topsides to kick back and enjoy being out on the sea.  The rest of us jumped in, and were greeted with great visibility and ripping currents, not a bad combo!  Some of us did this dive with double 100’s and ended up with a 60 minute run time on this massive wreck, very cool to have that much time down there to really do some exploring!  Of course, IVS-South instructor Dave Hartman was on board to lead some of his famous deep & dark tours through the innards of the Spiegel Grove.  Our second location was Sandbottom Caves on French Reef, always a popular site, with some really cool easy swim thru’s and lots of large marine life to entertain and amaze us.  Visibility continued to be great and there was no current on this site to speak of so a great dive was had by all.  The dives were so cool, in fact, that Katie & Dave Manninen made the decision to not miss the “coolest dives” and opted to stay and dive Sunday, rather than head down to Key West - smart move!  Friday night more of our party arrived, including Tricia Arrington, Mike Parzynski, and Jack Sandler.

Saturday morning again the fantastic weather continued, with Bill Zyskowski joining us as we boarded early to head out to Fire Coral Cave, another superb site on America’s most popular living reef system.  After a 60 minute dive there, we motored over about 5 mooring balls to dive site #2, Eagle Ray Alley.  The site lived up to it’s name with some eagle rays spotted cruising through, a very photogenic turtle, and even a shark visited some of our divers! 

Back for a quick bite to eat, and it was showtime for our new divers as we headed out to visit the Spiegel Grove once again, and give everyone a chance to experience some deep wreck diving.  Greag Roll had joined the group at this point, and nearly everyone was accounted for!  Current was once again….shall we say…ripping?  Great experience though, and while this type of diving didn’t impress everyone right away (Luanne!) it was a good chance to expand our diving horizons and see a little bit of what else we can enjoy on our trips.  Stop # 2 was on the Benwood Wreck, perhaps the fishiest dive in the Keys, and the wreck was jammed with tropicals of all sizes and flavors. 

One more run back to the dock and most of us loaded back up for the night dive.  Heading out late, thanks to the great relationship we enjoy with Amoray and Capt. Joe, we entered the water well after sunset, so we were sure of much more nocturnal activity than most of the other Keys operators treat their clients to.   Got some great video of a couple of turtles and Meredith spotted not one but two octopus - way to go girl!!  Back to the ranch, some quick showers, and then we headed over to the Paradise Pub for burgers, wings and brews.

Sunday morning again the weather gods smiled on us, and Wendy & Alex Lepore joined us for some great dives.  Our first location was the City of Washington, where we got a chance to oversee the fish feed that Atlantis was conducting that morning.  About a half dozen nurse sharks showed up, some nice groupers (but no Bruiser!) and of course Psycho, the Great Barracuda.  We conducted some REEF Fish ID classes on the wreck and it was great for our divers to have a chance to actually participate in the REEF fish counts we do year round in the Keys.  For more info on REEF click here!  Site #2 was Mile’s Wreck, again, more turtles, sharks, and critters large and small, and another FISH ID dive survey completed.

After lunch it was time for our trademark double-deep dip on the Duane and Spiegel wrecks, sowe loaded up the Nitrox, and headed back out.  Conditions on the Duane were great, with some strong currents on the line, but nothing within the confines of this 327 ft long wreck, and the visibility was along the lines of 100+ feet.  A huge goliath grouper hung with us on the wreck as well as a large turtle and a stingray, so another memorable dive on one of the earliest members of the Florida Keys artificial reef system.  After that we visited the Spiegel, enjoying even more string current but great viz.  On this dive we were conducting some penetration training with reels, and Jack  & Mike did well, most  importantly learning how multi-tasking at depth with reel, light, buoyancy control and leading a dive is a major challenge!  And even more important, both Jack and Joe Brown geting a first hand lesson in why it is important to use the wreck to shield yourself from the current, especially when you are heading up for the ascent line!

Part III - Conch Republic & Cooper River Shark Tooth Diving

 A lot of the gang headed for home port Monday, but a bunch of us drove down to Tavernier and boarded the Conch Republic Divers boat for a day of diving on some new locations.   Stop one was the wreck of the Eagle, and you could not have asked for better conditions. Viz forever, and minimal current, as we enjoyed this 120 ft deep wreck, torn in two pieces a few years back by Hurricane George.  Click on the link for more information and some history on this wreck.  Our second site was Patches Reef (also known as the Aquarium) and we once again took the spear guns for a swim, with nothing presenting itself for us to bring home to the dinner table.

Our afternoon plans were to dive the Bibb, sister ship of the Duane, but the current was absolutely ripping on this site, so we opted to head up once again to the Spiegel.  The good news is that this ship is so large that you can enjoy many, many dives on it and each one will find you exploring new territory and areas of the ship.  After a nice dive there, we headed to our final Keys location, Conch Wall, located just outside the Aquarius habitat.  This wall, sloping from about 40 ft to over 100 ft, is a majestic site, with lots of high corals, good fish populations, and something for divers of every ability.  Once again, we brought the guns out for a swim, but this time I managed to sneak up on a nice black grouper and put a shot right behind the gills.  Finally one for the cooler, I thought, as the fish shot out, but no, he ran right under a coral head, and as fast as I could swim there, it wasn’t fast enough, as he managed to wriggle off the spear -darn!  OK, I thought, now we play the game as John G and I slowly stalked our soon-to-be grilled fillets through the reef.  He was good, but we figured we had him outgunned, and it was only a matter of time before he popped out enough for us to put the finishing shot in him.  But suddenly, our group of two hunters became three, as a large shark joined in, aggressively running up and down throught the reef, clearing picking up on the trail of our dinner!  Now the question was, who was going to get to the grouper first?  Well, the fact of the matter is, the shark won, chasing our grouper off a bit out of our range, and I’m sure ultimately enjoying our efforts.  Darn!

Well gosh, you’re thinking, this is like the children’s tune, ‘The Song that Never Ends’, but we’re getting close!  (ha ha…I have you hearing that jingle in your heads now, don’t I? ).  Well John, Ray & I packed up the truck and headed north, driving all night to make our next appointment with Alex Blalock of Deep South Rivers, our host for Tuesday’s diving on the Cooper River in South Carolina.  What a beautiful river area, with remains of former rice paddies, indigo fields, and life from days gone by, not to mention lots and lots of big alligators swimming in the river or sunning themselves on shore!  We managed to get three good dives in, with water temps around 72 degrees, and visibility in the 18 to 24 inch range!  Serious black-water diving was the order of the day, and our efforts paid off with some really nice findings of Megladon shark teeth, fossils and some fragments of early Native American pottery. 

Diving the Cooper River is unlike any other diving that IVS does the rest of the year.  Picture this:  head over to your local volunteer fire department, say around midnight, when it’s good and dark.  Then have the crew turn on a 4-inch hose and direct it right at your face and chest.  Now, have a couple of bus boys from the local restaurant continuously throw handfuls of tossed salad at your head - get the picture?  Between the unbelievable water movement, the amount of vegetation that flows in the river (and wraps around your face, head, regulator and every other part), and the fact that you can’t see more than 18″, this is some adrenalin-pumping diving, and worth every moment in the water!!  And if that’s not enough, remember that no good IVS dive trip is complete without an engine breakdown, and this trip was no exception, as we experienced some serious knocking & banging on our way back in.  One long, long ride at 5 mph but we managed to make it back, adding a few more photos of dive boat captains bent over a broken engine to our collection!

Finally, all great things must come to an end, and after 9 days, 34 dives and nearly 3,000 miles driven, it was time to jump back into the truckster and drive the last twelve hours home, through the night, of course, arriving back to reality at 6:30 a.m.  Just in time to head to unload the truck and head to work!  Well OK, John & I headed to work, our more senior amigo Ray has passed that point in his life, and he headed home for a leisurely siesta!

Once again it’s time for Team IVS to head south and enjoy the manatees and diving of western central Florida. 

Tony ‘one-glove’ Johnson, Jim “where’s that light” Dalhberg, Christian “I’m working on my screaming-in-terror” PADI specialty Johnson, and Dave Valaika headed down to Homosassa Springs Thursday evening for a five day dive adventure to the Crystal River area of Florida. We checked into the Homosassa Riverside Resort to two spectacular riverfront condo’s, complete with kitchens and patios.  First class start to what we hope ends up being a first class trip! 

Friday morning we headed up to see our friends at Adventure Scuba in Crystal River.  Carl & Dave run a first class operation, with the proper amount of “laid back” factor to fit right in with us.  We chatted for a bit, exchanged good diving stories, talked about the Lorinczy’s recent visit, and headed out with Capt. Henry for a morning boat dive on the Crystal River.  As we loaded the boat we had the opportunity to watch a pair of Osprey parents catching fish and flying it up to the nest to feed the young ones.  Pretty cool.

We loaded the boat and headed out to our first stop, Three Sisters Springs.  This is a cool little cut in the middle of an island in the river that has several natural springs boiling up through the sand, providing visibility in the 100 foot plus range.  Nice little 20 ft dive to explore the area, and the only thing missing was, the manatees!  Seems we planned our trip a few weeks late this year and the majority of the local manatee population was already off enjoying the warming waters of the Gulf of Mexico.  That didn’t deter our adventurers as there is plenty to see and enjoy even without the big mammals.

Second stop was King’s Spring, which is a cavern located right out in the middle of Crystal River.  The downside is that the viz in the river was maybe 10 feet (actualy better than last year!) and you have to plummet down about 30 feet into a hole in the rocks to find the cavern entrance.  But the adrenalin rush is worth it, as the cavern opens up to a nice large area, with a couple of tighter side shoots, and the vis inside is great.  Tons of fish hanging around made for some great photo opportunities too.

Well we’re heading back in now, and hey, we still have gas in our tanks!  Can’t send them back like that, where can we dive?  So we opt for Catfish Hole and head across the river to find it.  It is actually located directly underneath a private dock, so we geared up, make a hot-drop as we pass the dock, and swim on in, Helen Keller style, through the zero viz of the river.  Finally the clarity improves, and there’s the entrance - big enough for two divers at a time.  We slip inside, and sure enough, this spring is loaded with catfish!  Pretty cool to see, and quite a bit of flow too!  It’s small though, so definately not a headliner, but a great little stop on the way back to the dock.

We head back to the dock, unload, meet up with Dave at the shop, and head north to K.P.Hole state park, the launch point for our Rainbow River drift dive.  We board the pontoon boat and Capt. Henry motors us up to the headwaters.  We encourage him to take us all the way to the top, and he obliges.  As we motor upstream, Christian is thrilled with seeing the alligators sunning themselves on the shores and tree branches along the edges of the river!  Wooo hooo!

We drop in, and being a 100 minute drift down the river - yes, 100 minutes!  Way cool as we sail over and through all sorts of grasses, through rocky areas, boiling sands, and more, taking in the variety of cool life we see, including alligator gars, turtles, bass, and more.  Very nice way to wrap up the last dive of day #1.  On the way home we are trying to locate an Outback Steakhouse, and we stop for directions at a local gas station / convenience store / live bait distributor, and we connect with a local gal who happens to be “heading that way”, and was only stopping by to load up on Bud Light.  So we follow her, and it is like 45 minutes into the woods, as we all begin hearing the theme song from “Deliverance’ playing in the back of our  minds, before we finally return to civilization, and our Outback!  Whew!

 Saturday morning it’s time to head up to a few of the springs, but we opt to stop by Adventure Diving.  When we get there we learn about an open house being held up at Forty Fathom Grotto this weekend, so how can we deny ourselves that?  So we sign up, via fax, and head off to our first location, Blue Grotto.  The place is a’hopping, and we get the pleasure of watching the antics and procedures of some of the local shops and instructors as they prep for the water.  It’s always great to watch how others conduct their programs and see if there is anything we can take home to improve ours.  Today, that was not the case!  So we gear up and head in, with Jim & I taking the longer, deeper route, and Tony and Christian opting for the more cavern-like entrance area.  Tony, just recovering from some major ACL surgery, is feeling some pain in his shoulder so he stays shallow.  Interesting but clearly depth (or pressure) related.  We wonder whether it is the depth or his dive gear that is causing the discomfort.  After a few good passes through the darkness, we’re ready to head on to our next location, practically across the street.

It’s called Devils Den, and rightly so, for the intimidating entrance down a set of stairs and into the cavern.  Once inside, it opens up to a huge cave, complete with a hole in the roof for natural lighting, and filled with crystal clear water to a depth of about 65 feet.  They’ve got a couple of platforms there for training, and there are plenty of tight little restrictions to practice on as you swim around the edges of the cavern.  Lot’s of bars and signs clearly mark the recommended limits of diving here, but hey…am I hearing “guidelines”?  So Jim & I venture in a wee bit further, and even Christian got into the adventure, as long as we gave him a bright light to explore with!  Tony’s shoulder is really acting up so he surfaces early from this one.

Well it’s only 3:00 and our gear is already wet, so hey, let’s go diving at Forty Fathom Grotto!  We motor up and as we pull up, who is there to greet us but John Galetsky, our OMS sales rep!  Small world, eh?  John gives us the nickel tour, and we learn all we need to know about this 240 foot deep hole in the ground.  As we are touring, I think I hear another voice I recognize, and as I turn, there is my favorite mermaid Angela, so how can we resist pulling up a chair, grabbing a microphone, and sharing a little IVS live with America? And all we kept thinking was “where is Eric?”.  If you missed the live broadcast, you can go to www.scubaradio.com and click on the archives for the show that day!

After that radio interview session, we decided to explore this new Florida dive site. So Jim & I slipped beneath the conspicuously dark waters to see what lay below.  And guess what it was?  More darkness, as you might imagine.  At 70 feet we completely lost sight of any indication of light above us, and the viz remained a solid 5 to 8 feet, so Jim & I enjoyed a ‘night dive in the Cooper River’ experience.  We dropped down to about 140 feet but there was no sense in going any further, as this was never going to clear up.  So we circumnavigated the main area a few times, saw all we could see, and finally called it.  We got topside just in time to see the last of the free hamburgers being given away, so we settled for chips and some leftover salads.  Not exactly the Indian Valley Scuba foodfest we’re used to, but hey, a new experience.

Sunday morning Tony decided to sit out, with his shoulder really bothering him, so Jim and I decided to up the ante on adventure and add another new location to this trip.  So we headed out to find Paradise Springs, which was pretty highly touted as a good cave location.  We drove along and finally saw the dive flag under the mailbox, and turned up a long dirt trail into the woods.  We must have traveled 5 miles up that road and were just beginning to think this was a joke, when we saw another little sign, on the other side of the railroad tracks.  So we kept going another mile, and entered a property with another sign, continued driving further through the woods, past the horses, past the fields, and finally pulled up to a single family home.  A young lady greeted us outside, asking if we were there to dive (not sure what the other options were!) and of course we said yes, so she said come on in here to the combo garage / orientation center / full-service dive shop, and watch the video and fill out the forms.  The desk was a tailgate from the truck which was conveniently parked in the garage and obviously had not moved in years, and the video was informative.  Jim & I headed down to find the spring, and there it was, a little hole deep in a hollow, measuring maybe 15 ft x 25 ft in size.  And it sat about 50 feet below grade, so we humped our gear down into the hole to check this out. 

We were not disappointed at all, as the small opening really widened as you went below into a very wide area, chock full of fossils in the walls and a lot of cool fish, including large plecostomus catfish.  Jim and I explored the cavern area, then headed down into the abyss, to lay some line and explore the cave down to about 165 deep and maybe 400 feet of penetration.  Jim handled it very well, and it was a good dive overall.  He was gushing when he came up…he’s hooked!

After that we headed over to Ginnie Springs.  This is a first class operation, with a professional staff and a system that is both efficent and customer friendly.  We got our gear and headed up to the first spring, and who do we run into but Larry Green, training director of NACD (National Association of Cave Divers).  Great chance to chat and get caught up, and finally we’re ready to dive.  The area was completely flooded with the Santa Fe river running about 4 or 5 feet above it’s banks.  The river was completely black, and the folks at Ginnie had erected canvas barricades to keep the river water out and let the spring water flow outward, keeping the cave inlets clear.  Smart folks there!  We dropped into Little Devil, and explored this fissure down to about 40 feet, just checking out the “no-mount” entryway into the limited cave system beyond.   There is something fundamentally wrong when you have to take your tanks off to get INTO a tight space to explore….maybe it’s me?  In any case, we opted to keep our gear in place, and swam down to the next inlet, Devil’s Eye, where we dropped in, and explored about 200 feet of penetration, finally emerging through Devil’s ear, but out in the river.  The water was so black and moving so fast that as soon as we cleared the opening, we could not relocate it to go back in and reverse our path.  Absolutely amazing.  So we swam back over the barrier, and dropped back in, and this time laid line to explore the cave system under the riverbed, penetrating about 300 feet into the labyrinth.  Again, very cool system, and Jim did really well.

After that we drove the car over to the main spring, past the flooded campsites, and got in a nice dive in the ballroom.  Nice wrap up to a great weekend, and we headed back to pack and head back to the airport (and reality) tomorrow.

Trip Report posted by Robin Schiendelman 

We didn’t think the day would ever come! Because we were able to get a direct flight from Newark Airport to Curacao on Saturday morning, we drove up Friday night.  We got a stay & fly package that allowed us to park the car at the hotel all week and take a shuttle to the airport on Sat morning. The flight didn’t leave until 9 am and it was nice not having to get up too early! Newark airport has the best Belgian waffle breakfast..they even use fresh strawberries! So it was an easy trip and in a few short hours our group of 9 divers  were de-planing in sunny Curacao. We were met by  Alex, one of the friendly staff from Sunset Waters Beach Resort,  with the resort shuttle. He came with a smile and bearing cold water, cold beer and fruit punch with and without alcohol. Now that’s a welcoming committee! A quick 35 minute drive and we arrived at the resort. Our rooms were ready and we were able to quickly unpack and go to the resort restaurant for a snack before heading to the dive shop for a briefing. Sunset Divers is right on the resort property so we only had to walk down a flight of stairs from the main restaurant to the beach. We were greeted by Dave, one of the shop instructors and he explained the system. A big board was hanging next to the office where we signed up for the boat dives. Our package included 2 boat dives per day so we were already on the board for those. Optional dives included an afternoon boat dive every day, one night boat dive,  a “special” afternoon dive to Watamula (more about that later). We were each given a numbered hanger for our bc and reg’s and a basket for all the other “stuff”. Divers have lots of stuff. The gear room was big and airy with lots of room to hang everything and lots of ventilation so wetsuits & booties would dry overnight.  This is also where they keep the tanks. The door has a combination lock and we were given the combination so we really did have complete diving freedom. At any time of the day or night, we could access our gear and full tanks and go diving! There were plenty of rinse tanks next to the shop and best of all the boat was only a few steps away. After our orientation, we finished unpacking and went to dinner. All meals and all drinks were included. And we were surprised  they had really good drinks!  We really expected to have to drink cheap wine all week…and maybe it was cheap but it was pretty good!  Two of the DM’s Scotty and John Jr. (who arrived from Ohio the week before)  joined us for drinks after dinner. The rum & tequila were flowing. It’s our first night and we’ve got the staff corrupted already…or maybe they corrupted us! 

We all headed to bed early since we wanted to be up in time for breakfast and to make the 8:30 am boat. Our rooms were not fancy but clean and comfortable with an ocean view. It was wonderful sleeping with the windows open and hearing the ocean. 

Up at 6:30 am on Sunday since it was the first day. Our entire group wondered into the restaurant for a buffet breakfast featuring fruit, cereal, and a selection of breads, eggs, sausage & more. Then it was time to head down to the dive shop. The crew had already put our bc and reg’s on the boat and set up the tank. We each carried our own basket of “stuff” and wetsuits over to the boat. The crew was really efficient and our dm Scotty and Captain John were ready to pull away from the dock at 8:30. Finally time to get wet! Our first dive site was Porto Mari and it was about a 20 minute boat ride from the resort. We saw lots of cleaning stations, spotted moray, sharp tail eels, adult drum fish and lots of trunk fish. Scotty went in the water and led the dive but it was optional to stay with him. The only requirement was that we be back on the boat in an hour. OK, we really like this place! After an hour surface interval, we moved to the next dive spot, Harry’s Hole. Another hour dive and back to the resort for lunch. Gary, Brett and I opted to do an afternoon boat dive and we dove Generations Reef where we saw some arrow crabs, two scorpion fish and lots of anemones with tiny anemone crabs hiding under the tentacles.  Luke, Mike, Eric & Dave opted to do an afternoon shore dive to check out the house reef.  The dive shop has wheel barrows available so you can wheel your gear right down to the beach where there are 2 benches set up. It is real easy to gear up and then walk into the water. It was a bit of a walk (maybe 20 yards) to get into deep water, but the bottom has only smallish rocks and some sandy patches so it was easy. They saw lots of cool stuff too so we decided to do a night dive on the house reef. At dusk,  Luke, Carollyn, Eric, Brett, Gary & I were ready to hit the water again. The house reef has an airplane wreck (or what little is left of it) and lots of cool critters. We saw a gold spotted moray eel, 2 small crabs that we could not identify in the critter book and a really big lobster that walked right into our dive lights, through them and kept going across a sandy patch. We figure he must have had a hot date!  There were also as group of about 5 or 6 small striped grunts that were feeding in our dive lights. That was really cool since they would get so close to your hands that you could feel them brushing against you.  Too soon it was time to end the dive and go to dinner. A few drinks and some socializing after dinner and we were ready for bed and to do it all over again the next day. 

Monday we all did the 2 morning boat dives and were joined by a group of 4 dive instructors from California as well as 2 other divers who were on the island for a ham radio operator’s competition.  Saw a small turtle on the 2^nd dive.  Schools of brown chromis and Creole fish on both dives. Everyone went their way in the afternoon either going to town or napping. Gary & I did a shore dive on the house reef both in the afternoon and again that night.  Dinner was a Mexican buffet at the beach side restaurant. We were joined again by DM’s Dave & Scotty for a couple of drinks after dinner. It’s always entertaining to listen to the stories from the DM’s! 

Tuesday morning another 2 great boat dives. We were scheduled to dive Watamula in the afternoon but the reports were that vis was almost zero so we re-scheduled for Thursday. Again, we all went our way in the afternoon with some of us kayaking, others snorkeling and 5 of us opting to do a shore dive.  Eric, Gary & I had a really cool encounter with a scrawled filefish. Normally they swim away from divers, but this one was definitely checking us out! He would swim from one to the other of us, hover right in front of each and sometimes raise & then lower his spike! It was really cool and must have lasted for at least 3 or 4 minutes. Everyone decided against the night dive so it was time for a nice long shower and a chance to see the sunset. It was a beautiful sunset and then it was time for dinner, a few drinks, some stories and to bed. Boy this is a tough week! 

The California dive instructors must have been watching me struggle into my wet 7 mil wetsuit and they gave Gary some advice they use with little kids in California.  The legs are not too bad but trying to get the arms up when a suit is wet can be really difficult. So here is what you do…you pull the arms up at least so the wrists are correctly placed. Then you get a buddy who has some really good lungs. He blows into the wrists and up the arms of the wet suit almost like they’re a balloon….which then fill up with enough air that the suit just slips up onto the top of your arms. Sometimes it takes a couple of blows…but it worked like a charm! And the looks from the other people on the boat were priceless! 

Wednesday another 2 great boat dives .Our first dive was at Duane’s Release and we were lucky enough to see a barrel sponge spawning! It was really cool and something none of us had ever seen before. Brett, Gary & I did a shore dive after lunch. There were reports of seahorses on the house reef but we had not been able to find one. On this dive, though, Brett was able to find the elusive “Chinese seahorse”.  Unfortunately, plastic seahorses don’t have good buoyancy so every time we tried to take a picture, he fell nose down into the sand. The after dive stories were a lot of fun though as a few of the other divers weren’t familiar with the “Chinese” species of sea critters.   Dave, Gary & I did another shore dive that night. In addition to some crabs, we saw a slipper lobster. They are so cool.  Time for another quick shower, dinner, drinks, socializing and to bed. 

Thursday was shaping up to be a busy day with 2 morning boat dives, an afternoon trip to Watamula and a night boat dive. First two dives were really nice. Our DM was Lynn, the shop manager and she found 2  (real) seahorses! Eric had never seen a seahorse before so it made for a really special dive. After lunch, we headed back to the boat for a 45 minute ride to Watamula. This site is at the northern end of the island and is rarely visited. Only 2 dive operators go there and each only once per week so it’s in really pristine condition. Because it’s at the end of the island, current is unpredictable. DM Scotty made all of the group stay together and floated a dive flag so the boat could follow us. Although they sometimes see big pelagics there, we were not so lucky. We did see all the usual reef fish and a small school of jacks. But, believe me, we were not disappointed. The coral formations were the biggest and best any of us have ever seen in the Caribbean. There were more species than I can name and every one of them was immense. It was absolutely breath taking. Well worth the 45 minutes boat ride! After about a 50 minute dive and safety stop, we all surfaced together and the boat came to pick us up. The surge and waves made boarding a slight challenge (although nothing by New Jersey standards!). But we all made it back on board. Everyone agreed it was one of the best Caribbean dives we had ever done. 

Back to the resort with just enough time to relax for a few minutes, put a dry swim suit on and back to the boat for the night dive. We went to Generations Reef with Brett, Dave, Gary & I joined by 2 other divers. We saw a Many-toothed Conger Eel (a first!) as well as spotted eels. There were many of those little worms that like to swarm your dive light and since there are anemones everywhere in Curacao, we decided to try to feed the worms to them. It was so cool! You bring your light down toward the tentacles of the anemone and the worms follow. As soon as the worms touch the tentacles, they are snagged! There were so many worms that every tentacle had at least one and the anemone was completely closed up to eat them! The poor little anemone crab that had been hiding among them was left completely exposed!  The crew had hot chocolate on the boat for us when we returned from the dive and then it was back to the resort for the quick shower and change. Dinner tonight was a beach BBQ. 

Friday came too soon brought our last day of diving. Mako Mountain and Boca Hula were our final two sites. Again we were treated to some great diving and we even spotted a juvenile trunkfish! They are so cute and not easily found. Now comes the sad part…time to clean gear. Because of the way the shop is set up, it really was pretty easy to rinse and hang everything. And since we had an afternoon return flight on Saturday, we were able to let everything hang and dry overnight. 

After lunch, some of the group decided to relax on the beach at the resort while a few of us who hadn’t been there earlier in the week opted to go into town. Willemstad is a beautiful little town. One of the prettiest and largest I’ve seen in the Caribbean. The Dutch architecture is really different and add all the vibrant tropical colors and it is very picturesque. There are plenty of shops, restaurants and bars.  There are some interesting bridges there including a pontoon bridge and some small swinging draw bridges. We wondered around for a while, took some photos, did our obligatory shopping and then had time for a drink before we went back to the shuttle. 

We all gathered for our final dinner and afterwards moved to a larger table with Lynn, the dive shop manager, John Jr., Tim (a DM candidate at the shop newly arrived from the Mid West), and some of the other divers at the resort. We all swapped dive stories and pumped each other on the best places to go diving. We’re adding the Maldives to our list thanks to some stories from Teamo, a diver from the Netherlands who said he saw sharks on every dive. Soon it was approaching midnight and the limits of our nocturnal partying (Gary & I are not night owls). When we left there were still a few party animals going strong. 

It was nice not having to get up real early on Saturday. We had time for breakfast, finish packing our dive gear, check out and head to the bar for the last  couple of Pina Colada‘s. We have a rule that on travel days there is no 5 o’clock rule for alcohol consumption. So by 10 am we were all in the bar. A couple of hours later it was off to the airport to begin the journey home. 

Curacao is one of the ABC Islands that are part of the Netherlands Antilles. The weather was beautiful and every day the temp was about 85F. There was a constant breeze so it never felt hot. The water temp was 76-77F. Our divers wore everything from a 7mm full wetsuit to 5mm to 3 mm to shorties to one (crazy Brett) who wore nothing but a swim suit all week. Everyone speaks English and the US Dollar is taken everywhere making this a really convenient place to visit. Those who have visited both agreed the diving in Curacao is as good as or better than Bonaire. Lots of fish (although nothing big) more anemones than I’ve seen anywhere else in the Caribbean (although don’t look for clown fish like a couple of our divers did!).  Also lots of drum fish, eels and healthy reefs. Sunset Divers is a top notch dive operator and we would all highly recommend them. The boat, the gear room and especially the crew were outstanding.  Our “standard” rooms at the resort were typical minimal Caribbean. Everything was clean and there was plenty of hot water although one of the rooms had low water pressure.  But this is not a 5 Star hotel and the buildings we were in looked like they could use some upgrading. The food varied from buffet to a menu selection of 3 or 4 items. The food was about average with a few things pretty good and a few things only ok.  The hotel & restaurant staff were always friendly and accommodating. 

All in all, it was a wonderful trip and we had a really great group of people. We are looking forward to doing it again!