At last we were all ready to depart for the first of the wrecks on our journey. Yes this was yet again the Mercedes, this time back on a night dive though. Our plan was to scooter from the Mercedes to the Tracey. We made live drops in three pairs onto the Mercedes, Dean and Cris, myself and Dave and then Cliff M and Mark. At first we thought there was very little current, but as we dropped Dave and I very quickly drifted past the downline. If we had been swimming this would have already been a necessary re-drop, but with scooters it was a piece of cake. The current seemed to pick up as we descended and the vis was apparently nothing like Sunday's dive!!! Even with my big light all I could see was the line several feet away, and I could feel the pressure increasing by my ears and the sqeeze in my drysuit. This was the only point of reference that I could find to tell me whether I was making progress. Finally I slowly passed a knot in the downline which gave me a visual reference, it was a weird feeling.

Once on the wreck things were much better and we scootered around for the first few minutes of the dive checking out the Mercedes, getting everyone grouped together, situated and then organized for our departure to the Tracey. At 13 minutes we spread ourselves out as far as the visibility would safely allow, and we headed out into the darkness. It actually turned out to be quite easy to differentiate between divers, each person has their own little identification. For example, Cliff had a halogen light and was a different colour, and well I could hear Cristian wherever he went due to the clanking noise of his stage bottles :-). Dean was navigating and I was using his Sh***ty compass ;-), as a backup to confirm our direction. When you do this type of dive you begin to really appreciate the big picture of the bottom contours and we initially went up over a really pretty reefline, ascending from about 100ft to something like 50ft. As we passed over the reef I could see the current bending the soft corals right over, and it crossed my mind we'd never make it in this current. Then once past this reef we hit a large muddy plain and dropped back down to about 65-70ft.

 We scootered flat out accross the mud desert for about another 13 minutes the vis was not great, and keeping track of each other, plus watching the direction and attempting to correct for the current was pretty challenging. Suddenly at 26 minutes almost right in front of my nose the huge side of a wreck appeared!!! It was time for handshakes and high fives all around, we had actually made it. We estimated the distance to be approximately 1/2 a mile. Then we really began to have some fun (as if we hadn't had enough already :-).) We began exploring all the different wrecks in this group. Scootering inbetween the Tracy, Scutti, Merci Jesus, and two other small sailboats one called Moonshot, the other I don't remember the name. There was probably more but too many to count. We went back and forth until I began to get quite dizzy and started mixing the darned wecks up. Then we went looking for a special piece of wreckage that we had spotted on a previous dive, and lo and behold we actually found that as well!!! The marine life was out in force. We saw two good sized (more than 4ft long) nurse sharks, then found a huge sleeping turtle inside one of the wrecks, and a whole fleet of southern stingrays all parked on the bottom.

 I was quite sad when at 58 minutes I see Dave give me the thumbs up, but well I guess you have to surface some time :-(. Normally Cristian is the one who starts the deco games, but on this occasion he was just hanging there quite seriously, so I decided it was time to push Dean along a bit with my scooter. Next thing I know I am under attack, and he was retaliating. Now I KNOW his scooter is faster than mine so I had to rely on other dodging tactics to keep out of his way. Fortunately for me I have been hanging out with a lady who really knows her scootering and she showed me how to make super sharp turns. I found myself being able to dodge him pretty easily. Having evaded the attack I was then astounded to find Dave joining in, and eventually we all ended up having a cool game of bumper scooters. We did way too much deco at 20ft, but nobody wanted to get out of the water we were simply having too much fun playing like little kids :-).

 I finally surfaced with a run time of about 78 minutes. I always have such a great time on the night dives, I'm still psyched this morning, :-), and although we teased him alot my hat is off to Dean for the navigation, good job :-).