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Night Dive on the Spiegel Grove 134fsw.
Key Largo- Florida Keys
Boat - Quiessence
July 6th 2002
I had just finished a resort class in Key
Largo and had a small errand to deliver gear to a friend diving
the Spiegel Grove that night.. When I arrived the guys
told me a spot had opened up on the boat and did I have my stuff??? WELL!!! it turned out that I hadn't even
unloaded the car yet from returning from my cave class the day before and lo and
behold I had almost everything I needed. With a quick air top
up from the guys at Quiessence (thanks very much :-).... ), I even had the
perfect mix for the dive, plus Oxygen for deco too.. Amazing.. (the beauty of
never unpacking your car!!) . I looked in my pocket and I had the
money I had just earned on the resort class... I shrugged and thought,
"Oh Well" and decided to go on the
dive. I may be joining "Diveaholics Anonymous" pretty soon. As
we arrived at the wreck we broke into two dive teams, scooter and
non-scooter. It was just twilight as we splashed into the
water yet still quite a while before darkness and I could see the wreck
clearly. I was also impressed to see some really large snapper and
barracuda populating the wreck already. My buddy and I headed down the mooring ball that was
attached to the end of the large crane, and on arriving at the wreck we were
excited to find very little current. :-).. First stop was to explore
the well deck. In the twilight this was a dark and mysterious
prospect. It is so huge that as you swim into it
your light simply disappears into the blackness. You can see the
other side just about but top to bottom (ie: the beam of the ship) was
like the black abyss. I think it has something to do
with lower viz inside there. As you reach the far end of the
well deck you simply hit a big flat black wall. I searched the
wall for holes and doors but gave up fairly quickly wanting to go out and get to
more of the wreck. My buddy said he spotted a hole in the wall
so I am going to look for it again next time I'm there. Slowly
the light ahead of me grew and we popped back out into the waning
daylight. Next step was swimming outside along the
superstructure, I saw the other buddy teams, one team was parking
their scooters and disappearing into the wreck. Our team
entered the superstructure at various different points and followed the line
that was placed in there. We didn't follow it all the way
through but did it sort of piecemeal exiting entirely at different
points. I was fascinated to see the amount of silt already built up
inside but it was easy to avoid silting given the horizontal position of the
passageways. We also toured the galley looking into the
freezers that are still in there. Working our way forward we
toured the bow section, and took a quick peek in some of the windows up
there. It was strange to see it now sideways, since the last time it
was upside down, and I had to re-orient myself with the
features. We
turned and began to swim back towards the stern... I looked below me and I
could see the same scooter duo still popping in and out of the wreck,
they looked as though they were having alot of fun and I supressed a grin,
thinking, well if you aren't in a cave then holes in a wreck are the next
best thing.. or maybe it's the other way around.. who knows!!! both
are fun. We swam back the full length of the wreck and headed
towards the stern, by this time it was really getting quite
dark. I reached the stern and signaled to my buddy, did
he want to go around the other side of the wreck and look at the props.... yes
he did... so we went around. By now the current had picked up a
little and we were no longer on the lee side of the wreck.. I discovered that
this ship has a warm side and a cold side.. Brrrrr. But it was
worth a trip because the props (or should I say prop) is a great sight to see...
they are HUGE.
Sadly I looked and saw my bottom time was coming to an end, and my buddy was
signaling end of dive type questions so we headed back to the
line. By now it was totally
dark. I knew the direction of the crane line but it seemed
silly to abandon the perfectly good line we were on rather than go looking for
the other one in the dark with the current picking up, and the other one was tied off
much deeper anyway. After a while I saw the other team's
HID lights as they decoed on the other line, and we flashed back and forth
OK signals.. Out of the dark I saw someone coming over to
visit us... He offered me his scooter for a quick ride around (thanks Mike
:-)....), I had time to kill at 30ft before my gas switch so I took him up
on the offer and took an additional tour around the stern at a much higher speed
than the tour I had just completed, there's nothing like that to make you smile
at the end of your dive. I wish I had more time
but I needed to switch and he needed his scooter back anyway so I returned to
the line and reluctantly handed it over. The
rest of the dive was nice just hanging out in the light current.
We were entertained on our ride back in by a great firework display on the
Key. It was an awesome dive. I was a bit sad because my little
holiday was coming to an end, but it was a wonderful closing dive
for me, after a full 10 days of non stop diving it was my 19th dive, both
cave and wreck. We quickly unloaded and managed to find the latest
closing restaurant on Key Largo for a quick dinner, finally arriving home at
about 1:00am (again), I slept all day Sunday <<G>>. |