Northern Light, Saturday..
I arrived early at the boat, but.. SURPRISE!!  I wasn't the first.. Scott and Wayne were already waiting.  We talked a bit and then Z showed up.. making  four divers. for the adventure.   We were joined by another Two divers from Divers City, JJ and Barbara. who were to be our two person support team..  Captain Bob was in charge of driving the boat today...

It was a beautiful ride out.. the sun was almost there, and the waves were less than two feet.  I had been studying the tides and saw that at 7:00am it was an extreme low.. this led me to suspect that by the time we got in the water it would be moving at a rate of Knots and I was expecting a stiff current... I could not have been more wrong.. NO current yet again!!    What a pleasant surprise.  I guess I will have to study harder.  

I slipped into the water just behind Z and dropped down.  It is amazing how much slower one's descent is with a drysuit,  I was only going at half my usual speed.  We weren't quite so lucky with the visibility as we had been with the weather and it was quite dark on the wreck.  Z put his camera away again almost immediately.   The water was clear but there was a preponderance of those giant long stringy particles in the water (more grossly known as sea snot).   I spent my time on this dive trying to get a better orientation of the wreck as a whole. It is indeed a very disorienting one.  The ship is broken into two parts.    The smallest section, the bow,  is keeled over to one side and the stern is broken off completely but has landed upside down  and back to front on top of the rest of the bow.. It is truly weird, especially when you see the rudder just sticking up out of the middle.   I decided I couldn't be narked so it must just be the disorienting way the wreck is laid out.  

I saw plenty of large grouper this time and at one point as I was swimming parallel to the wreck I played chicken with a small shark (about 4-5ft long).. The shark seemed to be swimming towards me as I was swimming towards him, on a collision course.. I was wondering who would turn first.. AHA.. well the shark did... about 20ft away from me he flipped his tail around and was gone.. probably thought he could give me a good scare, but I must admit I was wondering what was going to happen next.  I do not know what kind of shark it was, (another thing I need to study more, I was always much more into invertebrates.) 

I had an exciting time as I decompressed, this was the first time I had used the drysuit with my light Al80's. (I was saving the steel tanks for the next day).   It was highly amusing for my buddies  and I can assure you that it would be so easy for me to deco upside down like a bat. The funny part is that they were all so polite and didn't say a word,  I was expecting the usual jokes about butt weights and such similar stuff.

Saturday Afternoon French and Molasses Reefs
On arriving at the dock I was greeted by Judith and Martine.   Judith was doing her first two dives ever.   Martine was an advanced diver but was coming along to keep us company.  We had two very pretty dives.   The first was on Molasses reef at 27fsw,  where we sighted a turtle from the boat.    The second dive was on French Reef at 24fsw.  By this time the sun had become quite low on the horizon and most of the light was bouncing off the surface making it quite dark underwater, yet full daylight at the surface.   I began to see the start of some of the reef creatures venturing out from their holes thinking it was time to come out already.  I think Judith enjoyed it, she did agree to come back in a couple of weeks and do her next two dives :-)..

I arrived home at about 8:30pm.. and went to bed!!!

Harris Freighter, Sunday
I woke early, but this time somewhat tired from the day before.. at about 5:30am I realized that I had to rig my two deco bottles for the day's dive.   These were ones I had borrowed to save having to worry about refills  but had to rig them as part of the deal.  So I sat in my robe for the next hour with a cup of tea, playing with all the clips, rope and inner tubes, but finally the result was great.  I was almost jealous they looked better than my own :-/ !!!

We were a smaller contingent of divers for this trip, just Me, Mike Potter, JJ and Barbara.. Everyone was in great spirits on the way out and Capt. Bob was laughing and chuckling.. It was a long ride, about 90 minutes,  so I settled in for a nice snooze..  The weather held up and again we had calm seas and only a slight current on the wreck.  Plus better Visibility than the day before.

This time we dropped the grapple from the surface and went down close to  the line.  Although I couldn't see the wreck at first I could see JJ's tanks below me and a huge blob of fish.   Gradually the tanks and the fish merged together and led me directly to the wreck.   I dropped down to the sand about 30ft away yet could see the whole wreck clearly and with the light current it was easy to swim to it.   It was then that I felt it... aaaarrghhh the trickle of cold water somewhere in the vicinity of my left arm.   I put a little more air in my suit but this didn't really solve the problem.. However the water wasn't very cold.

This wreck was pretty small and sitting upright.. but with a big chunk broken off.  I  could also see the superstructure but it was in some state of collapse.   As I was patrolling the perimeter I was buzzed from behind by a school of huge silver jacks.   One even almost brushed by my face (maybe it was a good day to have a leaky suit...!!).  I had never seen jacks this big before (about 4ft long) and I was fascinated and turned on my back to watch them.  This wreck really had alot of fish.  I continued on, and soon realized that there was a huge debris field to explore, and I would never make it there because of the short bottom time.   For the first time in my life I felt as if I wanted a scooter.  I managed to get to the first part of the debris and found a big blob of wreckage that looked to me like a giant cleat.  The fascinating part was that it was covered in sharp oysters, or some similar species of bivalve.  Very interesting.   As I rounded the end of the ship and went under the washout I saw my depth gauge register 222ft.  I was surprised that I was not deeper.  I had planned for the advertised 230fsw. 

I met up with JJ and Barbara and together we started our ascent and drifted back over to the line which we used as our ascent line.   It was yet again another wild deco for me. By this time I was sloshing around in a giant bag full of water, I had not realized just how big this leak was.  I can't imagine how much water got inside there.  It's a whole lot more comfortable this way,  but it certainly makes your suit behave very differently than when it is intact.   I found I had to train the bubbles towards the dump valve and eventually gave that up and just let them out of the cuff (after all it wasn't as if I  had to avoid getting any wetter).   It was very funny climbing back into the boat.. I could hardly get my legs in.  I wonder how many gallons of water I was lifting.

We arrived back at the dock, tired but happy, and I went and treated myself to a giant hamburger before I drove home.. Yummy :-)... yet another great weekend.. and a tired but satisfied diver. 

EPILOGUE:
I tested my suit on wednesday.. and there are NO LEAKS!! the mystery remains with either the dump valve, which I will have to check on my next dive.. or maybe the zipper was not quite done up.   This will now be an item on my checklist for EVER!!