It’s high time we visited the Conch Republic once again, and this time we’ll be enjoying the entire 120 miles of the chain.  Our week-long journey started early Monday morning  - well early for the Swartley’s that is!  Geeez Louisse, they were up and running at 3:00 a.m., and had their sleepover guest Csaba Lorinczy moving too! As might be expected, I took a more leisurely approach, deciding my original 8:45 flight was cutting into my chance to get some more work done, so I opted for 10:20, then finally decided to fly out on the 11:30 flight….gosh I love Delta and how they let me be, well, me!

I arrived at the airport with well over 20 minutes to spare before baggage check in was cut off, which in itself is pretty amazing for me!  So I parked and got shuttle over to the airport and walked up to the curbside check-in with my five bags, 3 of them at or close to 70 pounds.  Ruh-roh…none of my “regulars” were at the skycap stand!  This might not be good.  Some of these guys go back years with me, with my favorite being my friend Jackson, who actually took my car and drove it off site to a valet lot twice for me when I was running really, really tight on making a flight.  Left the keys there, took the shuttle back to work, and I picked it up at the lot when I returned.  Talk about service plus!

So I saunter up to the counter, make eye contact, tip money clearly viewable folded in my hand, and get the check in process started.   Well our friendly skycap must have been suffering from an acute visual problem today, cause the conversation went something like this: “Mr. Valaika, there is a two bag limit, so these extra bags are going to cost you $25 each”.  Well home boy, I might have been born at night, but it wasn’t LAST night!  How about we just hump these bags inside and I’ll deal with it there.  So I walk into the terminal, and who is there to greet me?  My two favorite girls from the Delta Crown Room, which is currently undergoing renovations, so they are working the ticket counter…talk about fate smiling down on David here!  As you might expect what’s a few extra bags and a few extra pounds between friends? Problem solved, let’s head to the gate!

The flights to Atlanta and then on to Fort Lauderdale were uneventful, and I arrived on time.  Grab the bags, and head over to the Car Rental Center, a pretty nice arrangement where all of the major car rental outfits are located in one central complex right at the airport.  Well, almost all, I realize, as I walk inside and look at the marquee for the company I had chosen, based on a smokin’ price on an SUV for the week.  Hmmmm…seems my guys are located waaaay off the airport site.  What to do, what to do….well a little negotiation later, and I am driving off the lot with a bran spanking new Ford Escape with all the options, for less than what I was going to pay.  Amazing how this deal was not even close to available when I booked my reservation on line, but a little quality face time, and perhaps a dash of schmoozing, helped cement the deal.  Fate smiles again….let’s keep this up!

Well while I was traveling Csaba got in a couple of dives with Jim, Jess & DJ Swartley, while Lynn and Hannah did a little shopping.  This is Hannah’s checkout weekend, so we’ll be getting her in the water on Friday.  I arrived after they returned and picked up Csaba for our ride to Key West.  First stop, IVS-South, also known as Dave Hartman’s house, where we picked up our sets of doubles and stage bottles that we keep there for our more adventurous dives…can’t beat this for convenience!  100 miles later, and we are at the Key West Condo, where Matt & Jen Yaroch have already checked in a little earlier.  The team calls it an early night, and we wisely opt to get some rest  in preparation of tomorrow’s adventure.

Wednesday morning came and it looked like it had the makings of a glorious day.  The sun was shining, the sky was clear, it was in the 80’s….all great except for how hard those flags were flapping on the shrimp boats in the harbor.  That pesky wind thing!  Makes the ocean so much less friendly!  Oh well, we are here to dive, so dive we must!

Today’s diving was with Looe Key Dive Center, located at mile marker 27 on the Overseas Highway.  Check in was at 9:00 with a leisurely departure scheduled for 10 a.m.   We all got up and got prepared for the day.  This is where we learned a little more about Jen, specifically the amount of time she likes in the morning to get ready for the day.  Must be that NAUI thing, I don’t know.  We’ll avoid the details, but let’s just say we’ll be making a few adjustments in our timing for tomorrow a.m.!

In any case, we FINALLY loaded into the cars and motored back up Route 1 to Looe Key.  The folks at Looe Key Dive Center are great, and we got through our paperwork and boat loading in short order.  The boat was a bit crowded with a total of 46 divers and snorkelers on board. In addition to the mass of humanity, there was also the captain’s “kitchen”, basically his own personal concession stand where he’ll be cooking up Sloppy Joe’s and hot dogs, selling an array of snack foods, plus offering drinks, including margaritas and beer!  Now this is the way to run a dive boat - the heck with the crowding issue!

The wind was still a little brisk as we headed out on the 48 ft catamaran, and the seas a wee bit angry.  It was a little wet and a lot bouncy getting out and as we approached the dive site, the water was a hue of green that was strikingly similar to some of the folks on board at this point!  We tied up, geared up, and started the dance of working our way, in full gear, on a bouncing boat deck, from the stern, where the crew had all the divers sitting, through the crowd of snorkelers to the bow, where we were tied in.  Not sure about the planning process here, but we managed.  Splish, splash, we dropped in, and started down the line to the Adolphus Busch, a 210 ft long freighter sunk in 1998 as an artificial reef.  Covered with fish and laying nearly perfectly upright on the bottom at 120 ft, this wreck offers a lot of nice penetration opportunities through its length.  As our team approached the wreck, there was our first Goliath Grouper slipping down into a hole on the rear deck.  Camera on, I slipped right in behind him, and caught some video as he played cat and mouse with me through the myriad of piping, valves, fittings and machinery that was in the compartment.  Concern over entanglement issues?  Not when there is some nice video to shoot! I unwrap few hoses and finally extricate myself from the passageway - all good, still breathing.   Got a few nice shots, good way to start the dive!

While Jen & Matt opted for a topsides tour, while Csaba and I went straight through the belly of this wreck, squeezing through the various holes and cut outs, around the engines, in and out of the cargo holds, just exploring it all.  Unfortunately the viz sucked already, and the slightest errant move of your hand or fin inside just raised a cloud of fine silt up, bringing the already poor viz to near zero.  Sure sucks to be in the “second diver” position behind the guy with the camera - sorry Csaba!  Hmmmmm…..what a concept - might promote a camera sale here!  But we’re diving inside a wreck, so as long as we can see our way to the next turn or hole, we are cool with that.  We reached the bow, and then back tracked through the wreck.  Hitting 38 minutes of bottom time at 120 ft on our 28% EAN, my Cochran was still ready to explore, but my buddy’s Galileo said it was time to head up.  OK, what was the rule…follow the ‘least’ or ‘most’ conservative computer?  Hmmmm…….It was OK, so we began a nice 10 minute ascent, clearing the 3 minutes of deco obligation along the way up on my ‘puter, and then waiting until Csaba’s gave us the green light also. Thank goodness he wasn’t diving a Suunto!

However, no good dive trip is complete without some drama, so here’s today’s: unbeknownst to Csaba and I, the captain had already pulled the ladders, and was ready to release from the mooring, sure that no one was still in the water, let alone down diving the wreck.  As he began to call the roll, Matt shouted out “hey, some of us are still diving”!  Ooops - maybe they should wait for the two of us.  Ladders are dropped back down, and sure enough, 15 minutes later the last two pokey divers pop up onto the surface, as Csaba and I swim over to the boat, ignorant of the fact that we were so close to being abandoned at sea!  Ignorance is bliss, and we’re still smiling when Matt shares the story with us.  No harm, no foul…ready to keep on diving!

Back on board, the captain had the grill going full blast, and lunch was being served.  First class indeed, in spite of the near miss on the abandonment thing,  and if the boat had only been a little less crowded, this would have really been great!  But we managed, and the good news is that a lot of the fish feeders managed to refill their bellies in preparation of providing some more topside entertainment.  Cruel, I know, but so fun to watch!

As the number of fish feeders at the rails had increased, it was time to get some of these folks in the water!  We moved the slight distance over to Looe Key Reef, and the waves were literally breaking over this barely submerged island.  We jumped in for our second dive at the site called ‘The Nursery’ while the snorkelers splashed around us, braving the less than ideal conditions.  As one might suspect, the viz sucked, the surge was strong, and the max depth was about 25 ft, so there was no escaping it for us.  We managed to hang for 45 minutes in hopes of spotting something cool, but that was not meant to be today.

Enough of that, we moved the boat about a hundred yards to a site called ‘Shark Alley’.  Conditions here were, amazingly, the same as they were 300 feet away - what a surprise!  But we still dove, and though the snorkelers numbers were waning, some still managed to get in and play.  Another half hour and we had had enough, and called the dive for the day.

It was back on board now when Csaba pointed out a chilling fact to me - on most IVS trips, some of our hardier divers manage to earn the ADD award….that stands for All Dives with Dave.  Well it seems that on this trip, there is the potential for another level of award, and Csaba is in the lead….MDD, or ‘More Dives than Dave’.  Seems his strategy of heading down early with the Swartleys managed to let him get in two dives before I got in town!  Now I am thinking of strategies, maybe a covert night dive or two, to get my numbers back up on this trip!

Back at the dock there was a nice ending to the Looe Key experience - when you check back in after your trip, they give you a coupon for a free drink at their Tiki Bar next door, plus they offer you the use of their pool to relax and enjoy a few more hours of your day.  Well what marketing genius is this at work here?  Of course we’ll take the free drinks, and of course, once we are seated at the bar, we’ll order a few more.  Had they not baited us with the free drink, we would have simply gotten in our car and headed back to wherever we came from.  These guys get high marks from me for thinking outside the box, and cross promoting their businesses.  Now my wheels are turning….how do we get some free drink or appetizer coupons from some of our local establishments to further enhance the social aspect of our diving community?  Can you picture the folks from IVS actually heading out to a bar or pub after a class or day of diving?  How cool would that be?  What a concept!!  Stay tuned for updates on this one as we begin to conduct our research!

After some generous support of the local establishment, we head on back to casa IVS-Key West, and freshen up for dinner next door at the Hogfish Bar & Grille.  Talk about convenient, great music, good food, cold drinks - and all about thirty steps from our front door!  Dinner was good, the conversation was great, Jen’s color returned - all good stuff.  Great day overall, and looking forward to tomorrow’s diving on the Vandenberg.

Thursday morning came and we had agreed to talk to Captain Chris at 10 in the morning since the weather looked like it would be improving through the day, so an afternoon trip was in order. Csaba, Jen & Matt headed out for breakfast and some tank filling. And we are being treated to some special entertainment, as the Navy’s Blue Angels are here for an air show this weekend, and are practicing all day and coming in and out of the Naval Air Station Key West which is located practically next door to the condo.  These guys are screaming in low right over the harbor and the docks, flying solo, in formations, all sorts of cool stuff.  This is actually the second time that Team IVS has been treated to an impromptu air show, as we enjoyed the Blue Angels in Pensacola last spring while we were there to dive the Oriskany.  I am suspecting maybe these Navy pilots might be secret IVS groupies!  Very cool!

So we had a pre-dive meeting this morning, to go over the planning for the day, especially things like timing of the boat departure, since it was such a contentious subject yesterday.  We spoke, slowly & clearly, and tried to keep it as mono-syllabic as possible, in deference to our NAUI listener.  The boat is picking us up right at the condo so all we have to do is walk out the front door and climb aboard - sweet!  Our mission for today is a 3-tank journey, with the first two stops being on the Vandenberg, followed by a third location to be determined.  Csaba and the crew headed over to get our tanks filled at Sub Tropic Dive Center, our local support shop for things Key West, and while they were out they enjoyed a sumptuous breakfast at IHOP.  Csaba enjoyed the strawberry pancakes, Matt had a big fat omelette PLUS pancakes, while Jenn laid down a base layer of pancakes, sausage and home fries, sure to delight our finned friends in a few hours out at sea! I know, so cruel…yet so true!

The face of IVS South has joined us this morning, as Dave Hartman drove down from the upper Keys to dive the V-berg with us. The weather is laying down, the seas are calming, and the afternoon is looking great! Capt. Chris shows up at 1:30, and we load the boat up right in front of the condo.  It’s a small boat, a 26 ft Glacier Bay catamaran, so rather than struggling with limited space on board, we opt to set up our gear on the dock and don our wetsuits too.  Once everything is set up, we motor through the harbor and in less than 5 minutes we are on the ocean.

Well the winds had subsided a bit, but were still going at about 15 knots out of the south, which meant they had plenty of chances to influence the waves on the sea.  Our six mile run to the Vandenberg was one rough ride to say the least.  We enjoyed some nice sightseeing on the way out, as the Blue Angels continued to wow us with precision maneuvers out over the ocean.  There were also many turtles out too, and a few major schools of Portuguese men-o-war to pass through, glad we saw them on the ride out and not while we were diving!  As we approached the wreck, there was something floating in the water, almost invisible yet there, and we slowly motored up to investigate.  Well my oh my, it was a free diver in camoflouge, hangin out with his speargun.  No marker, no float, nothing to keep us from accidently running right over his butt - what an idiot!

So after a bit of a heated exchange between our captain and the offender, we tied up to the mooring ball and prepared our descent.  The current was, shall we say, ripping at the surface, so we tied off a granny line to the mooring to assist us as we entered the water.  Not the best conditions but we were here to dive, so dive we must!

Let me take a moment and sing some praise for Miss Jenn.  This was a trip of nothing but firsts for this woman, and she took every single one in perfect stride.  Yesterday was her first wreck dive ever, and her first bout of seasickness.  Today was not only her second wreck dive, but her first back roll off a small boat, first experience with strong currents, first dives over 100 feet, first wreck penetration, and unfortunately, her second session of seasickness.  As noted above, our finned friends loved her!

OK, I digress….so we splashed, and fought hand over hand up the granny to the seriously bouncing mooring ball, trying to avoid a face full of that as we swung our arms around it to grab the line down to the wreck.   The first 25 ft or so of descent was a real kick, with each of us hanging on like flags on a windy day, literally straight out from the mooring line.  What a ride, and you could see the thrill in Jenn’s eyes…ok, well maybe I interpreted it as the look of thrill!  Or disbelief…or terror…but it was a cool look!

Amazingly though, as we dropped closer to the wreck the current became less and less forceful, so we were able to really enjoy the dive at deck level. The viz was probably in excess of 100 ft on this dive, and one of the first things that greeted us was a large turtle swimming by, not more than 10 or 12 feet from us, checking us out and not minding us being there at all.  Great start!  From there we swam up to the bridge, enjoyed penetrating that area, dropped out onto the starboard side deck, worked our way under the dish antenna, and slowly returned to our starting point.  The bio-mass on the wreck was tremendous today, with multiple schools of silverside baitballs all around, hungry schools of amberjack on the prowl, oodles of barracuda, humongous parrot fish, crustaceans, shrimp, the list goes on.

Csaba and Dave H had done their own tour of the wreck while I dove with Jenn and Matt, and after I escorted those two back to the mooring line, I did a bit of touring on my own.  After a nice 45 minute run time with a max depth of 120 feet I surfaced, and the rest of the gang was back on the boat.  So much back that Dave and Csaba had already accumulated 25 minutes of surface interval.  I had to ask them if they intended to actually log that as a dive!  I couldn’t be too harsh on them, as Csaba, ever the supportive one, was somewhat green ala Jenn.  What a team player he is!

So by now, 10 minutes of surface interval had passed, and my Cochran was indicating that it was time to dive again!  And Jenn was not doing well so it was time to get dive #2 under way and minimize the agony for her.  So come on boys, let’s get our gear switched over, get dressed, get in the water……geeesh!  We finally splashed for our second dive, and I had taken on the responsibility to bring Matt back as directed by his bride - oh the pressure!  I asked Matt if he wanted to do something  a little scary on this dive, and before he could answer, you can imagine the response I got from Jenn.  OK, Plan B….

So we headed down and this time toured the stern, coming upon a grouper about 6 ft long there, plus more of everything.  We dropped down into a cargo hatch, and entered one of the decks at 125 ft, taking in the galley, kitchen prep areas, and some storage rooms before heading back topsides.  We hit a few more areas along the deck, and then it was time to head back to the mooring.  There was Csaba and Dave already on the line so our timing was good.  Nice slow descent, some 50% EAN to clean up the tissues a bit, and we finally surfaced after a 40 minute run.   Another good dive in the books.

Now here I took the time for another sensitive moment, thinking of poor Jenn sitting this great dive out up top.  As we headed back across the deck to the mooring, I noticed a nice size conch shell sitting there, intact, sans conch.   What a great souvenir this will make, I thought, let me just sneak up on it and make sure no one is living inside.  Looks good, no hermit crab legs hanging out, no damsel fish hovering, looks like a green light for me.  So, I pick up the shell, give it one good look, smile at my good fortune finding it sitting there, and even take the time to rub off the algae on it.  This will look nice in her house, and should be a nice reminder of her second wreck dive!  Now, where to put it, as I am sure I will need both hands to manage the ascent line and my stage bottle in this current. So I pull the top of my wetsuit out at the neck, and drop the shell in on my chest for safe keeping.   Now as I do that, I am thinking, I DID check that no one was living there inside, right?  Yes, yes, of course I did.

So what is that scratching I am feeling as I move up the ascent line?  I am sure it is just the edge of the shell against my skin, so I wiggle the shell a little through my wetsuit, make some adjustments, twist a little, there, I am sure the scratching has stopped.  Nice slow ascent, man is that scratching again?  Nah, must just be some sand in my wetsuit, cause now it is my stomach that is itchy.  I give it a rub through the suit, there, better now.  Move up to the next stop in my ascent, man is that itching on my side now? Nah, it is psychological I am sure..let me give it a good firm rub through the suit…there, all better.

I surface now, swim up to the boat, quick check for stinging jellyfish, all clear, so let’s get the fins off and work our way to the ladder.  Man the current is strong, so the focus is on that.  Fins off, hand them up to the captain, get the stage bottle off, pass that up, ok, one, two , I am up the ladder and on the boat.  There is poor Jenn looking green, but I have just the thing to make her smile!  I reach into my wetsuit and pull out my shell for her, and hand her the souvenir.  She smiles, then says “oh my god, what is that in there?”.  Well gosh it is a bristle worm, hmmmmmmm.  We shake it out onto the dec, being careful to avoid touching it’s stinging bristles located all along each side of his body.  Now I am thinking, has that itching, burning sensation returned?  Well yes, in fact it has…I gotta get out of this wetsuit!!!    Slip out of the backplate, help me unzip, let’s pull this thing down…..what’s that red welt trail heading down my chest and belly?  Why it’s the track of the second bristle worm that lived in the conch shell, and he was less than impressed with my decision to relocate his home.  Help me get the rest of this suit off, dang that is burning, and man those welts are big!  I am grimacing, hoping Jenn will eventually like her new shell! Making notes to myself to review this decision in greater detail, once the burning has stopped!

Well the seas had not laid down at all, and we opted to blow off the third dive and get back to port with our team.  Once we tied up we enjoyed a few brewskies dockside with our captain, and then loaded the gear into our cars.  Jenn & Matt are spending the weekend (and their anniversary) in Key West, Dave H is heading home, and Csaba and I are driving back up to Key Largo to join the rest of the gang for a weekend of diving, Amoray style.  But before we could get there, we had one last stop, on Big Pine Key - the No Name Pub, highly recommended by Joyce Kichman from her days residing in Key West.  Not easy to find, but great when you do, it was hopping!  The food was great, the drinks cold, and the staff was a lot of fun to be with. Another great place in the Keys on our list!

Friday morning at Amoray, and we are reunited with the Swartley gang, plus Cindy Eisenhauer, Brian Montague, Larry Gilligan and Barb Hill (White) have joined us for the weekend.  Unfortunately there will be a slight delay this morning, as the Amoray Diver had developed some sort of fuel problem yesterday, but the mechanic is here, and soon enough the engines are purring like kittens.  Barb, Hannah and I are heading over to Jules Lagoon for Hannah’s first couple of dives, and the rest of the gang are going to brave the ocean.  There is still a bit of a breeze going but nothing to sweat about - the day should be good!  We’ll be reporting back on that in a few!

Barb, Hannah and I headed over to Jules to get Ms H’s certification process going, while the rest of the gang headed out to the reefs.  We had a great morning, and even though Hannah was a bit anxious over the whole thing, it worked out well.  The conditions at Jules were near perfect.  We were the only folks there, the visibility was the best it has even been - well over 20 feet, and the water was clear!  We had a couple of nice dives, completed a bunch of skills, and I even got quite a few photos since the viz was so good.  Meanwhile the remainder of Team IVS enjoyed visits to South South Ledges and Mike’s Wreck for a great morning.

Hannah, Barb & I enjoyed lunch at Hobo’s to celebrate a good morning, then we headed back to meet up with the group for the afternoon dive.  Our first stop was the Spiegel Grove, followed by the Benwood.  Let’s talk about this Spiegel dive….

We had a couple of groups set up, with Dave Hartman taking Barb W on a wild and wooly interior tour.  Csaba hooked up with DJ & Jim Swartley for a “mild” tour. And finally, since Sue could not make this trip, I was nominated to lead the “Lame-O” tour (yes, spelled by holding your fingers in the shape of an ‘L’ on your forehead).   My group consisted of Jess, Lynn, Cindy, Larry and a Wes (not one of ours!).

First, to add to the excitement, the moorings we desired on the wreck were all taken, so we opted to tie into one of the upcurrent stern balls and I jumped in with a granny line, and swam it back and across to the port crane ball, where the Florida Keys Dive Center boat was hooked in.  My group splashed, and one by one they worked their way across the line, battling the current, and finally all SIX of us were gathered and ready to descend.  We started down, keeping a fairly tight formation on the line, and we reached the crane.  It only took a couple of minutes for the last two guys to finally arrive, while of course we were burning pressure gas.  OK, let’s get this party started!

So we drop to the deck, and begin our way forward, exactly as we briefed.  Jess was my buddy, Lynn & Cindy were coupled, and finally Larry and new guy Wes were bringing up the rear.  We got to the superstructure and I took role, only to find we were now FOUR.  Geez friggin’ Louise, how can you lose two people in a straight swim no more than 50 yards long?  OK, I turn back, and find Larry, who has lost his partner.  I give him the official WTF sign, and he shakes his head, not sure where Wes has gone.  So, I gather the group and we being our way back. Larry re-appears, still alone, but Csaba materializes, so I write on my slate that I have lost two already, and he understands, and knows where they might be found.  I pass responsibility for them to him, and turn to continue the tour with the ladies.  So, now that we are down to approx 2,000 psi, I opt to not penetrate forward, but to cross the wreck to the starboard side.  Well there is a hole there in the deck, about 8 feet square, that you could drive your car through, so I figure, what can go wrong here?  I signal the girls we are going in, it is only a one room penetration, in the roof, out the back - sounds simple, eh?  Jess follows me, then Cindy, finally Lynn.  Remember - this hole is at least 8 feet square!

So, out pops Jess, then Cindy, and Lynn, so we are good to go, and head towards the starboard rail to the crane, where I intend to cross over the port side and to our mooring line.  I turn, there is Jess & Cindy, right where they should be, but now the count is THREE, and where on earth is Lynn?  So, I scan the area, and she is a little above us, and I signal to her in no uncertain terms to get down here - now!  My signals fall upon deaf ears (eyes?) cause Lynn is just drifting off into the blue……..my goodness gracious, what else can go wrong here?

So, like the 7th Cavalry, who appears but Csaba, who has taken my last two lost souls to the line, and I pass Cindy and Jess off to him, so I can head out in search of the Lynn-ster.  I swim all the way forward, and she is nowhere to be found.  I am thinking, how could she have had such good buoyancy control just moments ago and then decided to do an Un-CESA, sailing to the surface without regard to anything we have worked so hard to instill in her!  So, I do a little forensic diving, and sure enough, there is one of her weight pouches laying in the one little room we had gone through. I am thinking, as I look at the hole as big as the opening in roof of the old Dallas Cowboys stadium that we entered, how could you get caught up and lose your weights here?  Oh well, let’s go find Lynn.  So, heading back to our mooring line, it’s a quick ascent up, thank goodness I am packing a 50% Nitrox mix in my stage bottle to help compensate for the lack of appropriate safety stops.  I pass by Csaba and the girls on the line, on my mission.  I am thinking the worst - who is going to cover the store when Bev is diving with us?  And who will head up the Dive In Fest committee?   This woman is irreplaceable - we need to find Lynn!

So I surface and scan about, and who’s bright pink BCD do I see way over there on the Island Ventures boat?  Hmmmmm….can’t be too many of those out here.   I swim over to recover our little lost soul, and thank Ann and the Island Ventures crew for allowing Lynn the chance to rest and catch her breath on their vessel.  Oh the shame….how will I extract repayment from Lynn for this faux paux?

Finally I have my entire group of SIX back on board and we can move to our next location, the Benwood.  Jess is my bud, along with Barb.  I pass Lynn off to her husband, and inform her that it would be healthy for her to breath down my bottle of EAN50 on her ascent, so I tell her halfway through the dive I will be passing it to her.  The girls and I splash, and it is a great dive.  So much to see, huge trumpet fish, lobsters, lizard fish, scorpion fish, Peterson’ shrimp, black grouper, file fish, fire clams, nassau grouper, sea pearls, Christmas tree worms, crabs, spotted morays…this place is hopping with fish and marine life!

We have a great dive, 50 minutes at 42 feet, and could have enjoyed it longer, but the boat needed to get home.    Once back on shore it was time for blog updates, and then we headed over to casa Hartman for an evening of mixed drinks, good video, and great commeradie.  From there most of us headed to the Paradise Pub for burgers, and Dave H brought the house down with his rendition of Frank Sinatra’s My Way during the karaoke contest.  Job well done!

Saturday now, and what a most beautiful day.  Sky is clear and blue, winds are gone,temperature is perfet - exactly like IVS ordered!  Hannah picked our first location today, Key Largo Dry Rocks, also known as Christ of the Abyss.  Viz was great, no waves, current or surge, just a beautiful dive.   Second location was North North Dry Rocks where the great conditions continued.  Lots of critters, crabs, nudibranchs, lobster, the usual cast of characters.  Clear sky overhead and a very sunny day made for super natural lighting for underwater photography.

Back for lunch and a quick turnaround, and we headed out for the Spiegel Grove.  Only one boat was on the wreck, so we had our pick of the mooring balls.  My group today was the 60% of the Swartley family that can be classified as adventurous - DJ, Jess & Jim.  Our plan was to keep it shallow and work the upper decks with some penetration and that is exactly what we did, keeping it around 70 ft.  A very large Goliath Grouper was laying on the deck, allowing us to approach quite closely to check him out.  Jess spotted a few large sea cucumbers, some big bristle worms, and a crab.  Great dive, and we hit the mooring line just as Jess dropped below 1,000 psi, so the three of them headed up.  Csaba had just finished his deep adventure dive with Brian, so he hooked up with me and took the lead on a little extended tour for the two of  us.  As we finished our tour and approached the mooring line he was 4 minutes into deco on his Galileo, while I still had 8 minutes of no deco bottom time available on my Cochran.  At that moment who swims by but Hartman, so gosh, let’s go on part three of this dive adventure! Csaba opts out since his computer is already not happy, and Dave and I head back inside, deeper, to play and explore.  I still have 1,500 psi in my 120, so I am good for gas.  We end up with 47 minutes of bottom time at 110 feet, and start up the line to satisfy our mild deco obligations.  I clear at 15 feet and Dave clears three minutes later, so we are good to go - 60 minute run times on the wreck!

From there it’s a short hike to the Benwood, and most splash right away when we get there.  Cindy has to complete her Rescue Diver open water scenarios, so we enlist DJ and Jim to help out while Barb offers to provide in-water observation.  Cindy was wiped from the surface tow and took more than a few minutes to recover, but we managed to get her back in the water for a half hour therapy dive.  Let’s just say that I didn’t have the heart at that moment to share with her that I felt we needed to repeat this exercise again tomorrow!  The dive was very nice, with a huge green moray for us in the anchor locker, and the usual cast of characters across the wreck.

The wind had been picking up and the temperature dropped about 20 degrees on our ride back in, but we are hopeful that the boat will be running back out for our night dive!  Well as it turns out, NOAA is late in posting the evening weather conditions & forecast, so we decide to throw caution to the winds and sail.  Our choice is a good one, because while the wind is brisk, blowing at maybe 15 knots, it is coming from the northeast, so the seas are more than manageable.  We arrive on site well after dark, as a night dive should be!  My immediate team consists of Jim & DJK Swartley, and we splash on in for our dive.  As soon as we hit the wreck, into the forward anchor locker we go, to see how if our moray is still there.  Well gosh, it’s a little crowded in there as we slip in through the steel, not only with our moray but also with a large turtle who had checked into the room for the night.  Let’s just say it was a little tight as the turtle was swimming was swimming around us, the moray pondering whether to bite or not, and DJ and I right in the middle of the tight quarters - cool!  Got a few nice pics’s there, and time to explore the rest of the wreck.  All sorts of nice activity about, all the large parrot fish in for the night, crabs eating, lobsters exploring, basket stars out in all their splendor, big puffers hanging under the structure….just a great dive!  Our group manages 64 minutes of sight-filled bottom time and finally it is time to head back up.  We motor back to the resort, and the fatigue must be setting in, as only Csaba, Larry and I manage to make it to the Paradise Pub for the customary post-night dive cheeseburger.

Sunday morning brings up more of the same great stuff, clear skies, balmy temperatures, and no wind - just like we ordered!  Time to head out and Csaba suggested we visit some of the less often visited reefs off Tavernier, namely Pickles Reef and Snapper Ledge - so we did!  We arrived at Pickles first, and had a great dive, very healthy reef structure, lots of life, some nurse sharks, large morays, I even got some nudibranch mating photos - woo hoo!  Second drop was Snapper, and wow were the fish in abundance here.  Utterly amazing how many fish can congregate in such an area, the clouds of snappers, grunts, and goatfish were thick!  This is a really nice reef, and we are thankful to Csaba for the suggestion this morning!  The weather stayed perfect, the sun kept shining, you could not ask for a nicer day on the ocean.

After lunch it was time for our signature double deep trip, visiting the Duane and then the Spiegel Grove again.  Our first drop was the Duane, and the mooring balls were limp in the water as we approached….who knows, might indicate no current below, or might just be a tease to get us into the water!  Hartman led a tour with Barb & Larry, while I took DJ, Jess & Jim with me.  Csaba reached out to another diver who he had befriended, and offered to be his guide & mentor on this site….what was Csaba thinking?  Clearly a  case of “not one of ours”, after various issues gearing up, he jumped in, promptly lost his weight belt and light, got fouled in the granny line, argued with the crew about their desire to have him re-board and get set back up, telling them all he needed to do was shove more weights in his BCD pockets, which, thankfully, they would not allow.  By the time he go back on he was spent, and then accosted the captain regarding the cost for the nitrox which he was now not using.  Whew!!  Good choice Csaba…….NOT.

Meanwhile, the rest of us enjoyed a great tour on this wreck, circumnavigating the entire ship, managing the 3 knot current well, great teamwork and communication skills, just a great dive.  After I sent my crew back up, I drifted off the stern to the sand to see if I could find the lost weight belt, but all I found was two HUGE Goliath Groupers checking me out way behind the ship.  I figured the belt was a lost cause so I took some pictures, shot some video, and worked my way back across the sand at 124 ft to the wreck and up to the mooring line.  Nice 40 minutes of bottom time, minimal deco obligation, thank you Cochran!

Our second location was the Spiegel Grove, for our final dive of the weekend.  Teams remained the same, except Csaba’s new friend sat this one out, so he hung with the Hartman ‘Belly of the Beast” tour.  Our team did great, with DJ leading the descent, and the Swartley family just shining in all departments with communication, navigation and situational awareness throughout this dive.  Made me feel like a proud papa!  I basically followed them along, and once they were ready to go back up I made sure they found the ascent line.  After that I still had a few tissue groups that needed nitrogen, so I dropped down into the well deck, swam it all the way to the stern, dropped down the ramp, swam under past the props, crossed back over and swam the starboard deck back to the superstructure.  Another nice 40 minutes at 134 ft, and again, my Cochran kept me out of trouble, with an 8 minute deco obligation.  I joined Csaba on the line, and he had a little more time to hang as his Galileo is a tad more conservative than my computer.  All good, great hang, great dive, great way to wrap it up.

Once back at the dock we headed over to Rib Daddy’s for dinner.  There were about 14 of us there, including C. Lee from the Amoray front office, and Bob our mate all weekend.  Dinner was great, the conversation greater, lots of laughter and fun all around.  No one left hungry, that is for sure!  Awards were handed out, with Jim Swartley, Larry Gilligan, and Barb White earning the coveted ADD (All Dives with Dave) award.  There was also one other award handed out, one that we hope does not repeat in the near future - the MDD (More Dives than Dave) recognition given to Csaba, who managed to get in 20 this weekend, versus Dave’s piddly 18 dives.  Trust me, this won’t happen again!!!!

Monday and the crew headed home, with a few staying another day to relax after a super weekend of diving and playing in the Keys.  We’ll be back soon!

News from the Planet Pterodactyl website blog!

Sunday, April 04, 2010

Great Dive Show!

Hello again! The Beneath The Sea dive show in Seacaucus, NJ on March 26-28 was terrific. On all previous shows that I attended, I always had my own booth. However, this time I was invited to exhibit from the booth of Indian Valley Scuba, 601 Yoder Rd., Harleysville, PA (215) 256-6000. IVS is an Authorized Dealer of Critical Aspect Inc. dive equipment. I had met the owner David Valaika, his store manager Beverly Loggins and one of their sales people John Glodowski previously. Now this occasion gave me the opportunity to meet many of their other employees. And I have to say that IVS is very much the “family” that they describe themselves as. What a great bunch of people! The “corporate culture” of IVS certainly starts from the top with the very personable and outgoing personalities of those who run IVS. In the picture you can see the giant inflatable diver at the IVS booth…the highest thing in the convention center. As promised, I conducted a raffle during the show to win a Pterodactyl. Many tickets were sold with the winner being Collen Finkle of MD. I highly encourage all to visit IVS if possible and also their web site… www.scubagearplus.com. You can purchase a Pterodactyl from their site at a great price with free shipping. Also available is The Mega Buckle. Talk to you later!

Now with that out of the way, let me share my story ….. In 1984 I bought my first desktop micro-computer, an IBM PC XT, complete with not only an 8086 chip, but upgraded with an 8087 math co-processor.  Let me just say we were overwhelmed with the lightning fast speeds and the ability to crunch numbers faster than anyone would ever need to!   The operating system was PC-DOS, and Bill Gates, founder of Seattle Computer Products (predecessor to software behometh Microsoft), was only in business for a year at the time.   Our basic storage device was a 5 1/4″ floppy drive which could hold like 256k of data.  Life was good!

So, the euphoria soon passed, and I needed an even faster, bigger machine…yes, I needed it!  Computers are like crack…..there is no going back to the abacus once you have tasted the keyboard lifestyle.  Bigger, faster, more memory, new numbers actually being invented cause no one ever conceived counting as high as a gigabyte or a terabyte…there was no stopping this train.  I think over the course of the past 27 years I have bought, personally and through my businesses, over a hundred computers, and each one promised to be the ”Final Solution” in terms of speed, storage, and capabilities….but the addiction continues….

2008 comes along and I decide to move away from those cassettes and get into high definition video and digital file storage for my underwater experiences.  I buy a JVC system and the Everio software, so now I am ready to roll..or so I think.   Two years of frustration in file management, video editing, movie making, and I am banging my head against the wall.  None-the-less, I keep shooting, knowing deep in my heart that there is an answer someplace.  My friends all know that one day, they will actually get to see themselves underwater when I finally produce that video from their trip!   

Remember now, I am a PC guy, and I know that if I keep soldiering on, it will, maybe, hopefully, eventually come…..keep saying that to myself..the answer is around the next bend…

Now I am not one that embraces change real well, and big changes are even harder for me.  I still don’t know where to stand in line at a Starbucks, or how to speak the lingo, or even what they sell there!  But I know I need to do something to get my video production going, so on a lark, I decide to investigate that other brand, and I covertly sneak over to the mall and approach the Apple store. 

I stand outside of the store, in the ‘neutral zone’ for a little while and try to figure out the dynamics there….lots of folks in blue shirts, most of them way too young to be able to help me, I am sure.  Lots of people playing with phones and computers at random desks and tables throughout the store, and something called a “Genius Bar” towards the rear.  Hmmm….ok, I figure I am ready, so I take a deep breath, look around to make sure no one sees me, and head on in. 

So I meander over to the laptop area, and sure enough, one of the blue shirts comes up to help.  Immediately friendly and helpful, she asks what I am trying to accomplish.  Well it seems that Apple does everything I want to do, just about straight out of the box, without me having to add a two page list of options and upgrades as I have had to do with my HP’s, Toshiba’s, Dell’s, and other PC’s.  Within minutes, she has narrowed my options down to one or two computers that will do everything it appears I want to do.  And I want it to do it fast, so she suggests an upgraded memory that they don’t have in the store, but rather than send me off to order it on line, she fires up the screen and walks me through the order right there.  Seems there is no commission structure at Apple, and the number one job for everyone there is to be, get this, helpful! What a friggin’ concept!  For a moment, I feel like I am at Indian Valley Scuba!

She helps me finish my order, and tells me that Apple will keep me posted on the shipment.  Sure, sure, I think, I’ll go home and wait.  I leave, smiling at the experience and treatment, and figure that maybe I might be OK with this whole Apple thing. 

Well guess what awaits me when I get back to the shop?  My confirmation of my order, and the shipping status of each item that I bought (laptop, keypad, 24″ HD monitor, and some One-to-One service agreement).  Heck there are ship dates already there and I know when to expect arrival. And none of the dates were more than a few days out…waaaay different than my most recent Dell order, where we waited weeks for the items to be built and shipped.  This Apple thing sure is different! 

Well I ordered it Thursday, and on Friday, the keyboard shows up.  And, my computer is shipping that same day, from Shanghai, China.  It arrives Tuesday, and the monitor two days later.  Amazingly different than the PC guys…. 

So I have everything now, and I need to head back over to the store to have them do a complimentary transfer of all my data from my HP laptop to the new one.  This is all part of the deal…no need for me to purchase transfer software as I have in the past, no need for me to bang my head trying to figure out why things don’t work right…..this Apple thing sure is different.  But remember, I’m a PC guy!

I check the clock and it is already 8:00 p.m. here in Harleysville, and the store is in King of Prussia, so I grab my stuff and race out the door.  Speeding down the highway, I watch the minutes click away, knowing the store is only open until nine, and of course, you know how store employees are as closing time approaches, starting to dim the lights, half-close the door, whatever it takes to defer any last minute customers.  Will I make it?  My stress level is high as I careen through the mall parking lot, hoping against hope that there will be a spot close to the mall entrance so I won’t have made this run in vain.

This is where the magic really started to occur tonight….there is a spot right in the first row, right where I want to be.  OK..fate is kind.  I park, grab my stuff, and run into the mall to head to the store.  Will they be open?  Will they accommodate me?  I race past the other stores and they are clearly in shut down mode, as it is already 10 minutes before nine.  Finally I get to the Apple store, and it is filled with customers.  Don’t they have clocks in this store?  Hmmmm… I catch my breath, and walk in, not sure where to go with my two computers in hand.  All the blue shirts are busy, so I walk up to the Genius Bar, and watch the hustle and bustle of activity around me.  Like the Starbucks thing, I am not sure where to stand, or what the protocol is, so I just take it all in for a few minute.  Finally a young guy comes out with some product for a fellow standing next to me, so I asked him what to do, and without hesitation, he says, “give me a minute and I’ll help you”.  Amazing.

The magic continues, as he finishes up the other customer, and now, in spite of the fact that is is 8:58, he walks over and asks what he can do for me.  I explain that I am a PC guy, and don’t know the drill here, and he tells me it is OK, he is here to help.  He takes a look at my new Apple and says “Whoa!  This is a smoking machine - I am jealous!”.  That helps assure me that at least I didn’t under buy!  So he walks me over to a work station, and spends the next twenty minutes telling me how the whole customer system works, what the steps are, he makes my first one-to-one appointment for me, takes my computers for the data transfer, and shows me some options with my emails and some other features.  I must admit….I’m a PC guy, but this treatment is melting down my barriers to the whole Apple thing.  The most amazing part?  It is nearly 9:30 now, there are still about four other customers in the store, all being taken care of like me, everyone is smiling, and not a single staffer has looked at their wristwatch to see what time it is.  No sense of urgency to close, they are there to do whatever it takes to make this customer experience a great one. I feel like I am in Disney as the magic happens, but hey, I’m a PC guy…remember? 

I walk out of the store, smiling, and not afraid if someone sees me exiting the Apple store.  Is the magic over yet?  As I leave the mall, I reach into my pocket and pull my keys out.  Suddenly a young lady appears at my side, and says “I think you dropped this” as she hands me a handful of cash that popped out of my pocket  - this is a magical evening!  But remember, I am still a PC guy….. (maybe).   

Kris & Michele Gosling joined Dave for a long weekend of technical diving in one of our favorite locations, Key West.  I flew down while the Gosling’s drove, and boy, while I think I pack a lot for a dive trip, these guys have me beat hands down! Good to know if I need to make any on-site repairs, Kris has at least one, if not two, of whatever I need on hand!  Once again, this darn weather thing has got to get better, as the marine forecasts are hinting at one lousy weekend on the ocean!

We really try to give our business to the little guy, but shop we used to supply us with gas mixes and rental tanks in January has not returned our calls or emails for the past two weeks.  Such is life with some businesses in the Keys…is it any surprise the failure rate is so high?  So, rather than making this a technical snorkeling trip for myself, I stop at IVS-Key Largo, and pick up the tanks we keep in storage there.  Downside is that the double 100’s have been filled for some shallower diving on the Speigel Grove, so my ppO2 will be a tad high on our dives tomorrow on the Vandenberg.  Well, the living DAN medical research experiment continues, so I’ll just make sure my affairs are in order before the morning drop!

Friday morning came and we got our 7:00 a.m. report from Capt. Chris Norwood, of Florida Straits Diving.  Wind is blowing at 25 knots plus from the southwest, and seas are 8 ft outside the reef.  Hmmmm….not the sort of conditions that the 26 ft Lucky Dog handles well on that ocean.  So, we turn our sights a bit, and Chris finds the Southpoint Divers boat is heading out this morning for a double dip on the Vandenberg.  Perfect! Or so it seems…

So we head over to the shop, and get squared away with Eric the manager.  Quick Quiz - what is Rule #1 of scuba diving?   Fill out the waivers, of course!   So we take care of the necessary paperwork, and drive the truck over to the Hyatt where the boat is docked.  As we pull into the lot, there are four Key West roosters (real roosters, not any other kind, thank you!) strutting across the lot. I know what they are thinking as they watch me drive up…”he’ll slow down”…he’ll turn to avoid us”….”he sees us”…….’holy smokes, he’s gonna hit us!!”…and with that last thought the feathers explode as the roosters careen out of the path of the truck, with the leader flying up against the drivers door and letting me know, in rooster terms, just what they thought of my sense of humor!   Gotta love me!

So rooster incident over, we unload the truck into the carts, haul them through the Hyatt’s pool area, and as we load our extensive pile of gear, are thankful we are on a 46 ft Newton cause we sure had a lot of stuff! Doubles, multiple stage bottles, pelican boxes, camera cases, even a few milk crates thrown in to give it that Northeast US dive boat look!  Our able crew today included Capt. Tim, first mate Henry, aka Cuban Henrik for his uncanny ability to fall off the dive boat, and the girls, Amber Whinery and Lucja Jakubowska.  Amazingly small world that we live in, Henry formerly lived in the Lehigh Valley, and Lucja used to volunteer with O’Donnell Diving working with disabled divers at the Variety Club in Worcester, about five miles from Indian Valley Scuba.  Amazing! OK, I digress……..so, we headed on out and this fast boat had us on the site within about 40 minutes.  The mooring balls were visible, but not by much, indicating some significant current at least at the surface.  But the good news was that the water was clear and blue as far down as we could see.

So we briefed, geared up, and splashed in, making sure we had a good grip on the granny line to avoid a stressful surface swim with all our gear on.  We opted to leave the cameras on board until we figured out how bad this current was.  Smart move!  As soon as we splashed it was a serious hang on the granny, as we went hand over hand, pulling ourselves forward, trying to avoid getting our breathing going too hard, as this would come into play with our gas management plans later.  Finally, we are there on the mooring line and we start to descend to the wreck.  Whoa!  What happened to the blue water?  What a tease, that layer was only about 10 ft deep, and now we are in some serious soup.  It only gets thicker as we descend, to the point where I am straining to see the wreck, and finally I am within 10 feet of the mooring tie off, and I cannot see anything past the metal structure that the line is tied to.  Wow…this is gonna suck!

OK, so it is hand over hand down the structure as I strain to see any sort of deck or other parts of this ship…I know there is a 540 ft long ship here, and my hand is on it, but boy I cannot see it!  Finally I touch a flat surface, and shimmy to my right, to the edge, and realize I am on a deck on the superstructure.  So Kris and I drop down another level, to the next flat surface, and start to make our way forward, with the plan being a “hole in the wall” tour to show this ship off to it’s newest diver.  As I started forward, I finally ran into a wall, so I figured we might be at the back of the ship’s bridge, maybe.  So a little to the right, and whoops, I fall over the edge again, so we weren’t on the deck!  OK, now I slide to the right, and there is the gunnel and some railing, so I know I am on the edge of the ship’d deck now!  Kris and I move forward, keeping four sharp eyes out for the gaping 20 ft x 20 ft hole that would be our entrance to the innards of this wreck.  Well, four sharp eyes evidently were not quite enough, as we keep looking to our left while keeping the gunnel and railing to our right, and guess what we found?  The bow of the ship!  How we knew this, you ask?  Cause our starboard gunnel just ran into the port side gunnel and the deck got kinda pointy, that’s how!

Well that would mean one thing….we have missed the cargo hold entrance!  So now we turn around, and head straight down the centerline of the ship, go over the huge anchor windlasses, over the #1 cargo hatch entrance, and finally, there it is, the #2 entrance. How did we miss this on the way past the first time?  Tells you something about the visibility for sure!

So a little communication at the top, Kris is ready, and we drop, straight down the shaft, until we hit 130 feet.  There we have an entrance towards that heads toward the stern and should serve as our jump off point for our Hole in the Wall tour.  So I start in, being careful with my buoyancy.  I am waiting for the viz to clear, figuring the messy water outside would not have filled the inside of this wreck too,  Wrong!  I penetrate about 50 to 60 feet into the ship, and cover my light, only to discover that not only is there any visible light ahead, but there is equally none from the direction we just came.  We are essentially totally silted out with the low visibility right in the middle of the day!  OK,,,survival thinking mode kicks in here, this has all the makings of being my final dive, so I do the prudent thing and turn the dive.  I have enough room to spin around, and do so carefully to keep track of the definition of “around”, meaning I am pointed back in the direction we came from.  Viz was that bad!  So we kick on back, and eventually the area around us opens up, and I “think” we are in the shaft.  I cover my light, and look sraight up, and I can just make out a light glow of daylight through the murk, still with 60 feet of shaftway above us, and a total of 130 feet of water,  Man, did I say this viz sucks?

Well heck, we’re here, and we’re training, so let’s do some reel work!  Kris unclips his reel, and as he does, his carabineer pops off, and slowly drops into the murky abyss.  Instinctively I start towards, it, and then realize how bad the viz is further down the shaft (like I somehow forgot that!) and I give the ‘throat slashing’ signal to Kris, letting him know that Indian Valley Scuba has a fine array of carabineers for him to choose from when we get back to Pennsylvania!  Yes it would take some serious narcosis for me to miss a sales opportunity on a dive, even at depth! 

So we tie off, and I have Kris lead, and we head inside on the 110 feet level.  Past piles of jumbled file cabinets, desks, bookcases, all sorts of junk left over from the ships cleanup.  We get into a hallway, drop back a bit, make a 90 degree turn, then straighten back out, heading towards the stern.  Viz is a steady <10 ft throughout.  Finally Kris has had enough, and we turn, actually we back up, cause we are in a narrow hallway and there is no real chance to actually turn around.  So we back it up, never losing contact with the line, and finally I am able to turn, as does Kris, and we make our way back to our entry point, reeling up the line as we go.  Still lots of denizens of the deep for us to see, shrimp running around on the walls, qull clams, juvenile fish, and many flavors of silt and particulate!  We get back to our tie off point, and Kris has had enough, so we turn in the direction that appears to be up, and make our way back up the shaft to the deck level.  From there we navigate back to the mooring point, and begin our ascent to the surface.  Thirty minutes of bottom time at 130 ft, and only a 13 minute ascent, so overall not a bad run.  Lots of practical experience gained and Kris has shown great buoyancy control skills, good reel handling (except for that carabineer incident, but we’ll discuss that at the cash register next week!), and he also demonstrated why he is wearing double 130’s on his back - this boy can breath!!  We’ll work on that too!

Topside, the wind is picking up, and one by one the others on the boat are turning green and scratching dive #2, so it is now or never for Kris and I.  Twenty minutes of surface interval works, so we shift gears and plan to dive our computers for this second drop.  I am using my Cochran EMC20-H, and Kris is sporting a VR-3 and has a Suunto Cobra as a backup, so we have two good dive computers here, and one excellent snorkeling computer!  We gear up, move to the rear of the boat, and are disappointed to see that the blue water we had on the surface for the first dive has now disappeared.  Oh well, in we go, dragging ourselves back up the granny line, locate the mooring line, quick bubble check, all good, and we head down.  Upon reaching the wreck, we waste no time in dropping down on the port side, away from the current.  We tour along the deck a little, passing under one of the huge satellite dishes, this one being the one that broke off during the sinking, so it is held in place by some heavy cables to the superstructure.  Once past that, it’s time to do some drills, so Kris does his gas shutdown procedure, drops and replaces his stage bottles, and scores well on both.  Now for the tour…..we head around to the stern, and wow, there is a Goliath grouper in six to eight foot length watching us approach.  Very cool!  From there, we swing forward, enter the hatch down to the laundry shoot, Kris ties off again, and we drop, parachute style, straight down this tight chute,  There are no exits once you commit to dropping until you get to the bottom, so the adrenalin rush is good!  We hit the bottom at 130 feet, and I show Kris the laundry area, where the viz is much better than what we have seen so far on the wreck.  From there I drop down a hatch into shaft alley, where the main propeller shafts are located.  We check that area out at 140 ft, and watch as our deco obligation starts to accumulate.  We turn the dive, and head back up from where we came, not daring to attempt an alternative passage, with the viz as bad as it is.  The penetration line serves as our version of Hansel and Gretel’s breadcrumbs, leading us back to the relative safety of the exterior of the wreck.  Once back up on the deck, we made our way forward to the mooring point, and started our ascent.   Thirty minutes of bottom time at 140 ft, and we had a twenty minute deco obligation to satisfy before we could see the sunlight again.  As we hang, the Cochran clears, then the VR-3 gives us the OK to surface.   The Suunto?  It is “bent” beyond belief, and will need a couple of days in the divers time out chair before it is ready to submerge again.  Did I mention it makes an excellent snorkeling computer?

So back to the dock, and at least it is a beautiful day topside, although a bit breezy. We unload the boat, and head out to get gas….of course no one is there, so we shift to plan B, and take our tanks over to our friends at Sub Tropic Dive Center.  We get back to the condo, expecting to find Michele there to greet us with cold drinks in hand.  But no, she is not, and we call and there is no answer on her cell phone either!  Well, as it turns out, Michele is a bit, shall we say technically challenged?  Seems she took Kris’s new Nissan Maxima out this morning when we were leaving, and Kris started it up for her and had it running when she got in.  Well Michele stopped to do some shopping downtown, and made the mistake of shutting the car off!  Well when it was time to leave,  she could not figure out the Japanese version of how to fire this chariot back up!Seems you need to have the electronic key placed just so, press the ’start; button, and make sure you have the gas pedal depressed at the right time.  So she spent some time searching for a place to insert the manual key, and finally went back to the last street vendor she had bought things from, and he came and figured out that tricky ignition.   I promised Michele we’d keep that secret just between us friends, so please friends, don’t tell anyone else!!  With that in mind, I won’t even begin to share her GPS story!

So finally it’s time to turn in, and during the night I awaken to what for a moment I thought were jets from the Naval Base flying by….and by…and by.  And just before I was fully awake, I could swear that was Dorothy tapping on my window, with Toto in her arms, seeking refuge from the storm! Nope, it turns out that is the wind, it is absolutely howling here, trees are shaking, rigging on the boats in the harbor is whistling, and that tapping?  Well it turns out it was only a tree branch outside my door whipping around in the wind…..oh well.   

Saturday morning comes and as you might imagine from the night, it isn’t much better.  Chris Norwood calls, his boat is scratched for the day, and so are most of the others.  The Sea Eagle from Captains Corner did head out to the Vandenberg, could not find the mooring balls as they were completely under with the current, and spent a half hour trying to tie in.  That failed, so they headed to the Cayman Salvor, and still could not hook in, so they headed about 12 miles west to try to find some quiet water on the far reefs.  So here it was, 11 o’clock in the morning and as I am talking to Leslie who runs the operation, she tells me the folks on board have still not gotten in the water for their first dive of the morning….man there must be some green faces on that boat, and we’re not talking a St Patty’s day event!  Needless to say there will be no diving today, so the Goslings head out to tour the town, and I stay in, to type this blog!

Saturday night in Key West would not be right without a party, and we have to look no further than next door to find one.  Turns out one of our local friends is celebrating his 50th, and the owners of the Hogfish Bar have shut the place down in order to throw a huge private party for him.  Well gosh, it is good to know people, we Michele, Kris and I are ushered into the party, and wow what a neat affair!  All you can eat buffet, all you can drink, all you can dance…..this place is jamming!  The band is fantastic, and the guest list reads like a Who’s Who in Key West.  Of course Joe Weatherby is in attendance, as is Chris Norwood, and some of the other captains and crews I have come to know here, plus George, the former mayoral candidate, Bobby, owner of the Hogfish, Dave Sirek from ABC news, and many more.  And even better, the owners of both Sea Tow and Tow Boat USA are there, and those who know me recognize how valuable these friends might be!  All in all, lots of fun, lots of laughter, great time had by all!   

So now it is Sunday, and the wind is still kicking, so most of the boats are headed west to the reefs.  The water is still too rough for Florida Strait’s boat, so Chris calls around to find us someone bold enough to take us south to the Vandenberg.  As the day progresses, most afternoon boats cancel due to the conditions.  OK, one boat available, $300 is the ransom for the ride in the washing machine…..no thanks!  Looks like we’ll be wrapping up this training in May!  Time to check the airline for earlier flight options home.   

Holy goshmoly Batman, when is that snow ever going to stop?  We today all we are thinking about is how good the de-icers are at  the Philadelphia airport, cause we are outta here!  Enough of this snow shoveling, it’s time to head to the Keys!

Theresa Lattimer, Dave Hartman, Monique…..

More to come!

Time to get the nitrogen levels back up in the bloodstream, and what better way to do that than to head down, way down, on some deep wrecks off the sunny shores of Key West?

Steve Lewis, VP of TDI, along with Joe Weatherby joined Dave V on a technical diving excursion to explore some of the deeper wrecks located off the southernmost key.   Sadly, the weather gods are not giving us any good signs for this weekend, so we are heading south with fingers crossed for the best!

Thursday evening we arrive at IVS-Key West’s base on Stock Island and set up camp in our condo there.  This is one nice home away from home for sure, and we are thrilled to have met the owner, Mike Bullock, through our favorite dive operator here, Chris Norwood, owner of Florida Straits Diving.  Three bedrooms, accommodations for eight, newly refurbished throughout, this is living large indeed!

Friday morning comes and with it the 7:00 a.m. NOAA marine weather update.  Ruh roh - six to eight footers on the outside today with twenty-five knot winds whistling through.  Not the perfect recipe for a small boat and heavily laded divers on the ocean!  So, do we cancel?  Are you kidding?  We get a slightly larger boat! 

Our friends at Sub-Tropic step up and offer their boat for the day, which coincidently was available since no customers wanted to head out in these conditions!  Works for us, and we loaded up our gear, and motored out to the Vandenberg.  Seas were, shall we say, a bit testy, but we managed, and in spite of the topside conditions, the ocean below was perfect, with minimal current and 200 plus feet of visibility in the clear blue water.  Nice!

We dropped right into the #2 cargo hatch, descending down to 130 feet, and slip inside for Joe’s exclusive “hole in the wall” tour, covering over 400 feet of this wreck’s interior and never popping out until we drop into the engine room in the stern.  What a cool tour it is, lots of tight passageways, many turns, some areas with no alternate exits…all good for a great dive and a nice adrenalin rush too!

We spend 46 minutes at depth, finish off a ten minute deco obligation, and climb back aboard with big smiles.  The ladder is a bit challenging, balancing doubles on our back, and two slung stage bottles each, but we manage, and get ready to enjoy a few minutes of de-briefing and relaxing on board. 

OK, few minutes are up, it is time to dive again!  Gear back up, splash, and drop down, this time towards the stern of this majestic wreck.  Take a quick look-around at the stern, then we head up to the hanger area, where they used to store the weather balloon.  Once inside, we drop down the chute to the laundry room, at 140 ft.  This is a very cool drop, as the chute is about an 80 ft vertical drop, and it is only one diver wide.  Best part?  Once you enter, there are NO outlets till you get to the bottom, so commitment is key here! 

We exit out the bottom, and take a tour of the former laundry room, still full of steam presses and washers and dryers that completed their duty at sea.  This is a real tight area, and you have to by uber-careful to not silt things up once inside.  Buoyancy control and situational awareness is key, cause things could go to hell in a New York minute here.  After some good photo op’s, we head out the rear stairwell, up one level, then begin a tour forward through lots of crew berthing areas.  Bed frames, toilets and sinks, and personal storage lockers tell the story of what these spaces once were.  All sorts of new life forms are here now, ”scouts” in a sense for a whole generation of new critters to come to these areas of eternal darkness (OK, except for the occasional zillion megawatt divers lights!),  Very cool to be witness to a sort of evolution as the sea reclaims this vessel.

Another forty minutes of bottom time passes too quickly, and we head back up, finishing off with a little 50% and 100% O2 mixes on the way to the surface.  A good day of diving, great wreck, great boat and crew from Sub-Tropic, and it’s time to head back in.  The sunset ride in just tops the day off, and we grab a quick bite and prepare our dive plans for tomorrow’s activities. 

Saturday morning comes and the wind continues to blow hard, from the south, which is a bad thing, cause there is a lot of ocean to blow across between here and Cuba, giving the wind, and the waves, time to build themselves up nicely.  None the less, we are here on a mission, so in spite of being the only boat heading out, we’re going diving!  We head our after lunch, and our first stop is the USS Curb, a former naval tug that sits upright now in 185 feet of water.  There it is on the sonar, so we check current direction, and make a few passes over the wreck to confirm we are on it.  The grapple is dropped, and we hook into it (there are no mooring balls).  One, two, three, we drop down into the abyss, and are greeted with views of the wreck from well over a hundred feet away. 

An absolutely amazing quantity and variety of life live on this wreck, sitting like an oasis in the middle of miles of flat, sandy plains.  From the smallest baitfish (what do you have to do wrong in this life to come back as a baitfish?  You don’t even get a name for your species, just “baitfish”) to huge 400# Goliath groupers (at least they get a name!), this wreck is a haven for life.  Marauding amberjacks and horse-eye jacks make passes at the smaller fish, and the fray is exciting to watch as someone goes home with dinner, while some else becomes a dinner.  Enough eloquent waxing on my part, back to the wreck!  Covered with snagged fishing nets and miles of monofilament, this wreck is a snagged diver waiting to happen, so make sure you have your line cutter or z-knife handy, and a bigger blade for the larger stuff. 

We’re diving a mix of 20% oxygen, 25% helium, and 55% nitrogen on this dive, so we enjoy 20 minutes of bottom time at 170 feet, followed by a nice 30 minutes of deco as we ascend.  The conditions remain perfect so the hang time is a pleasure with all sorts of things to watch as we pass the time.    

Stop number 2 is the Vandenberg again, but this time it is a night dive, as the sun has dipped below the waves for the day.  We hit 146 feet as we spent a lot of time exploring the engine rooms and machinery areas, racking up another 35 minutes of bottom time on our remaining trimix.  My friends spent most of the time shallower, but I wanted to pictures of the machinery, and these conditions would be tough to match another day, so my entire dive was spent below 140 ft.  Of course this comes with a price, that being a fifty minute deco obligation, with the last thirty minutes alone, hanging in the dark, catching the occasional silvery flash of a barracuda or other night time predator as they flew by, checking out the life form that was hanging there in the water.  Finally, an hour and twenty-five minutes after descending, I am back on board, and we enjoy a few beers as we toast the day’s events.  The sea had even laid down a bit for us as we headed back to the dock, making our nocturnal journey a little more mellow!

So it was time to grab a late dinner, so my friend Steve, who is Canadian and has traveled extensively through Cuba, and Joe, who is not, but somehow has also traveled frequently to Cuba, decided that is what we need to eat tonight - Cuban fare!  Well anyone who knows me would realize that Dave and any food containing spices don’t match up well, but I go, figuring there should be enough Presidente Light to wash down whatever I am convinced will be safe for this gringo to eat.  Dinner is fine, service is great, and we call it a night again.

Sunday, the winds are down a bit, but not gone, and our target today is the former naval cruiser USS Wilkes Barre, which likes almost 20 miles north up the coast from Key West.  So we batten down the hatches and head out, staying inside the reef as long as we can to minimize the seas, but eventually heading out to find our wreck.  This 650 ft long vessel was being used for the testing of underwater demolitions, and the test worked great, being detonated directly underneath the ship, and the concussion essentially ‘breaking the ships back’, as it lifted, ripped apart, then settle to the sea floor.  The stern is sitting perfectly upright in 240 feet of water, and the bow is settled a short distance away, laying on it’s port side.  Are target is the stern so we can enjoy this multi-level treasure and really get a chance to some some exploring.  We pick it up on sonar, sure enough it has a huge signature, and the grapple is dropped.  We complete our final gear checks, and splash.  Our blend today is 18/35, the lower oxygen content to avoid CNS toxicity and the resulting convulsions and death that typically accompany it, and the higher helium blend helps reduce the nitrogen in our mix, better to avoid being narc’d out of our minds and forgetting to do things, like maybe ascend!  We complete our ensemble with a couple of stage bottles, with our flavors today being the tried and true 50% and 100% oxygen mixes.

Well we start down the line, and we descend, expecting to reach the top of the wreck at 165 ft or so. This is where it gets a little weird, cause there is no wreck there.  OK, 175, 185, hmmmmm….finally, as we pass 200, there it is, a huge wreck, laying, well, on it’s side!  What the heck!  We are hooked to the bow section, not the stern!!  Time to rethink the dive plan a bit, but we’re OK, as we had planned a pretty aggressive dive depth-wise, and now the conditions matched our plans!   So we dropped down to 230 feet and spent about ten minutes there, checking out the gun turrets, deck fittings, and piles of things that have been snagged on this wreck over the years and lost by other boaters.   Up to 200 feet for another 12 minutes, then let’s grab the grapple hook and tie it off to itself so it doesn’t snag on anything else.  Well, the current had evidently picked up on the surface while we were down, cause when we unhooked the grapple, it took off like a kite, with Steve and Joe trying to tie it off, and me trying to hold the line down below our first stop depth. 

On another dive this might have been fun, but with our bodies chock full of helium, the rate of descent is very critical.  Those little molecules really like to jump out of our cells easily, so they need sufficient time for us to breath them out of our systems.  So, after a little struggling, we get the hook tied up to itself, and stabilize our depth, and begin our 50 minute, 13 level ascent to the surface.  Once there, we are careful to avoid the Portuguese Man ‘o Wars that are sailing by in the stiff breeze, with tentacles a’trailing, looking to sting something into submission, like us!

Well that was enough excitement for the day, and we call it, heading in for our last night in Key West.  A light dinner and beers at the Hogfish Cafe, conveniently located right next to our Key West condo!

Monday morning we started our journey back north, but we still had some diving to do! So we headed up to visit our friends at Conch Republic Divers in Tavierner, and get one final tec dive in on the Speigel Grove.  Forty eight minutes of bottom time below 120 ft, followed by forty minutes of staged deco, wrapped up one great weekend of Florida Keys technical diving. 

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!  

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!

We started the mission off with another great briefing from Ken Nedimeyer, the founder of the Coral Restoration Foundation. Man this guy knows his corals! We went through Coral 101, and then onto what we would be accomplishing this afternoon at Ken’s underwater nursery, home to over 4,000 live corals that he and the CRF staff have been nurturing and growing for the past five years. We headed out on the Amoray Diver to the nursery, and dropped down for two dives of scrubbing, cleaning, organizing and just giving some love to the young staghorn corals that do so well in the CRF nursery. We also got a complete tour of the nursery grounds, seeing other innovative coral propagation techniques Ken is experimenting with, plus his live rock nursery, where he grows, harvests and ships living rocks to saltwater aquarists worldwide - what a cool career choice, eh? During our time at the nursery we also selected and prepared the 24 corals that were scheduled for transplant tomorrow, setting each up on work pallets, with three different DNA strains represented in each of the eight groupings. We’ll be back tomorrow to pick these up!  On the way back in we stopped at the restoration site and Ken and I dropped in with sketch book, hammer, nails and colored ribbons to mark tomorrows work sites.

Thursday morning dawned to another spectacular Florida Keys day, and a perfect one to go diving, let alone helping to restore the coral reef! We loaded up and headed back out, stopping briefly at the nursery so Ken and I could drop down and bring the work pallets up with yesterdays coral selections. These were carefully brought on board, and placed in large tubs of seawater to minimze stress on the short ride to the transplant site.
Florida’s reefs are home to so many beautiful species that everyone wants to go there, but in 1984 the freighter M/V Wellwood decided it wanted in on the action too, running aground on Molasses Reef. While the grounding certainly did it’s share of damage, that was nothing compared to the havoc reeked by the salvage effort as they dragged the vessel back off the reef, leaving a scar of destruction a hundred feet wide and a quarter mile long. Literally everything that could not swim out of the way was destroyed, leaving a gaping hole in one of the prettiest reefs in Florida. This site has seen more than it’s share of various government and eco-group experiments as they have tried to restore the reef to it’s pre-Wellwood conditions. Some have worked well, others not so well, some simply failed 100%. NOAA, the protectorate of all things coral reef, approached Ken a few years ago and offered to allow him to test-plant a few of his staghorn coral clippings in the area to see how they would do. Well, every single one of his original plantings are still there, flourishing, growing from 2 inch long sticks to basketball-size clusters of healthy staghorn corals, and even pieces that have been knoced or broken off have taken roots and grown in the shadows of the parents. Needless to say, NOAA was impressed, and gave Ken and the Coral Restoration Foundation carte blanche to continue his plantings thoughout this site and in other areas.

We moored up to the Wellwood site and Ken conducted a thorough pre-dive briefing.  We divided into teams, and passed out the tools, tubs of epoxy, and coral transplants to each team. We dropped in and descended to the restoration area, locating the pins and colored ribbons that Ken & I had placed yesterday.  Each ribbon corresponded with a different DNA strain, so each planting group of three corals had the greatest chance to cross-fertilize and build even stronger corals for tomorrow.  The teams were assigned two groupings each, and they went to work scraping the hardpan down to get a clean base to glue each coral disk down.  Epoxy was mixed, and then a dab was placed on the hardpan, and the coral was placed on this.  Fingers worked the epoxy around the base and gently brought it to the edge of the live polyps on each coral, so as to not damage any but to provide a clean base with minimal space for invasive species or algae to grow.  Over time, as the coral polyps reproduce, they will completely cover the epoxy base and grow right down to the hardpan, but they can’t accomplish this if algae or soft corals get there first, so the technique of encapsulating the coral disks is key to maximum coral growth and coverage.

It took two full dives to finally complete the mission, with all 24 corals transplanted, epoxied, measured, photographed and documented.  A day well spent underwater, and it is tough to match the joy of giving back to something we all love so much, the coral reefs.  Finally it was time to head back to Amoray and begin Phase II of this trip, an IVS dive-your-face-off weekend!

Friday morning came and the rest of the gang had joined us, including………….  And, in the “It’s an amazingly small world” category, we were joined today by three of my friends and fellow divers from the NJ State Aquarium (now the Adventure Aquarium) Ed Frankel, Robert Large, Luke Ogden.  And, to top that off, one of our own IVS divers and store regular, Kim Zimmerman was there on vacation with his daughter and joining us.  Small world indeed! 

More to come……