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I had been waiting and waiting and
holding my breath for this trip. I was sure something would go
wrong but somehow I managed to end up getting to dive it.
I arrived at the marina in plenty of time at about 8:30pm. My buddy was
already there fiddling with gear in her truck. The capt was nowhere
to be seen yet so I joined her and fiddled with my gear as
well. There is always something to be fixing even at the last
minute.
The weather was very hot and humid but with very little wind.
As always it was much easier to load up the boat when you are full of excitement
and anticipation for the dives ahead. We placed one set of doubles
each inside in the cabin, plus our second set of deco bottles, and the
gear we were planning to use the next morning was set up on deck. My
tanks were completely stuffed with 15/70!!.
We set out on a glassy sea, and after having one discreet beer we headed for
bed. As usual it was a mountaineering feat climbing over
the tanks to get to our bunks :-). There are two sets of bunks
up in the bow the top one being a 1/2 bunk. We told Joe that
we were smaller than him and he should sleep in the top bunk, but being the
ultimate gentleman he spend several minutes wriggling and worming his way into
the top 1/2 bunk, amongst a pile of fishing rods and dangling fishing
weights swinging merrily by his nose. H and I tried but could not stifle
several large bellows of laughter as we watched..
I woke early, but heard nobody
moving around and we were still motoring along, so I snuggled back into my bunk
for a few minutes. It was impossible to stay there, it
was just far too exciting so I popped up and hung out on deck for a little
while. Gradually one by one the gang appeared on deck, each with their own
idea of what breakfast food should be. Joe claimed that he had been
dreaming all night that he was a fish, I can't imagine why
;-)... And Mike had a couple of the approximate two dozen "hot
pockets" that he had brought for the trip!!!!
Diving the Rhein
Tortugas Saturday May 24th 2003
Depth 250, to the deck 200fsw
Pretty soon we were ready to dive and about this time the other boat in the
group, carrying a second group of four divers arrived at the site
:-). H. and I dropped in first as deck space is pretty much limited
to gearing up two divers at a time. We were
greeted by a mild current as we scootered down and as we got closer
to the wreck the visibility was rather disappointingly
reduced. I had been expecting at least 100ft vis, as I had
experienced on
the previous trip. The plan for this first dive was to scout
out the wreck in it's entirety and then get oriented so that we could go back
and look in more detail on our second dive of the day.
The Rhein is quite a large wreck, with an enormous profile.
There is also a tremendous amount of growth which makes it look very
pretty. The two huge posts standing up amidships are
incredibly tall, and must reach up as shallow as 150ft. It is
a weird feeling passing these posts on the way
down. As before the fish seemed so enormous
compared to those we find on my local dives, but I was disappointed not to see
my friend the GIANT hogfish from last year. I was told later
that he had been captured by a spearfisherman on another boat a while
back. Due to the lower visibility it was quite gloomy and hard to get
oriented. We pretty much scootered the perimeter of the wreck, then
checked out a couple of the cargo holds. The sides of the ship are
full of rectangular holes that lead into one of the cargo
holds. After this we swam towards the crushed and
more destroyed section of the ship. Carefully we entered the
interior, and picked our way slowly through the maze of beams and fallen
doorways and walls. This end of the wreck was really fallen
in. Above my head I could see a clear way up to the outside,
and as we were not finding anything very exciting in the rubble and thinking of
all those tons of bending metal above my head was
beginning to give me the creeps, we exited out onto the
deck. Shortly after my buddy gave me the signal to end the
dive. We had reached the end of our planned 30
minutes. As we were ascending I saw some of the
other divers out and about on the wreck, and as we completed our decompression
we were joined at intervals by each group as they finished their dives.
We passed our surface interval swimming back and forth between the two boats and
generally socializing and having a fun time, but it hardly seemed any time at
all before we were ready to get back in the water. This second
time I dived with Mike and Joe, as an "assistant porthole
gatherer" :-), I'm not sure I knew what I was getting
into. The best analogy I can use to describe this
dive is "Mr. Toad's Wild Ride"!!!! We had alot of places to go
and things to see, and only 25 minutes to cram it all in. We zoomed
at top speed allover the wreck. First stop was to find a porthole that was
lying off the side of the wreck in the sand. Mike swooped down on it and
then I helped him finish the job filling up the lift bag. then Joe
showed me where to find the piles of melted beer bottles and we managed to
gather three intact ones that went in my goody bag. Then we
swooped into the superstructure where Mike knew of another porthole.
This time I had to hold the scooters and other stuff while Mike and Joe
liberated the porthole from it's mouldering surroundings. By
this time we were running very short on time and we zoomed back to the line and
quickly donned our remaining gear, racing against the clock.
Although we all had plenty of gas to take additional time, we all knew that we
were working with specific gas and time limits to ensure we could easily make
our third dive of the day. I learned a great deal on this dive, even
though it seemed to me to be faster than the speed of light. It never
ceases to impress me how these guys can get such a detailed knowledge of the
wreck layout and where everything is, in such a short amount of time. I am
still in kindergarten when it comes to learning what to look for and spotting
important nautical items. However next time I will be bringing my own
toolkit!! Diving the Araby Maid
Tortugas May 24th 2003
Depth 210,
Finally our third dive of the
day. Originally we had planned to dive just before sunset so that we
would have a little light on the wreck but this was not to be, and four of us
entered the water together under the cover of full darkness and dropped down the
line.
What a spectacular sight the wreck was. Somehow at night
it seems that everything is so much more colourful in the artificial lighting and the wreck was a maze of
lights as we all zoomed around on it. There were fish
everywhere, and we even spotted a moray eel hiding in amongst the debris.
This was to be a short dive of 15 minutes only, and sadly those minutes were up
way too soon. On this third dive of the day deco seemed endless, and
I could almost see my bunk calling to me up above :-). Tired
but happy we all finally clambered back into the boat, almost too tired to
hang out for a while we hit our bunks pretty fast. Wow what a day it had
been!! May 25th 2003
Early next morning H and I made our second visit to the Araby
Maid, again we were in the water first and scootered happily
down. I am still convinced that this wreck is my
favorite one of the trip, it is older and just smells of history and
stories. It sits upright and the shell of the wreck is
actually still intact. The top deck and most of the
superstructure is gone, leaving a large framework of beams below which lies the
lower deck. This is totally fascinating since you can still see a
great deal of the wooden floorboards in place and the wood is very
apparent. There is a large section of the hull
completely misssing forming a large break. This was the damage
inflicted by being rammed by another ship. The mast is
fallen and laying off to one side with it's tip pointed down into the
sand. There is also a fairly large debris field
around the area of the mast. We spent some of the dive
retrieving what we thought were brass rings used as part of the rigging, but
Mike told us later that they were simply steel cable loops, and with a grin
showed us how to tell the difference. Yet another lesson on what to
look for :-). Alas our time is always too short and without a
doubt I could have handled a third dive on this wreck.
Diving the U2513
Tortugas May 25th 2003
Our next date was with a submarine, and we set out to move over to the dive
site. However on the way we spotted a large group of dolphins, just
hanging out and asking us to play with them. Of course who
could resist and we all grabbed our mask & fins and abandoned ship within 5
minutes. Mike having the foresight to bring his video
camera. It was a totally fascinating
experience. We could hear the dolphins underwater and you could
almost see them conversing with one another, as if with their
noses. The seemed to enjoy our company for a little while and
then get bored, I found I could hold their interest for a little
longer if I dived down a few feet, they would then swim over and challenge me
coming tantalizingly close but never quite close enough to touch my outstretched
hands. As they swam off we continued to move the boat close to
them and then they would come back and play for a little
while. I also learned at this point that it is quite
easy to scooter in your bathing suit, and we popped the scooters in the water to
see if they wanted to play some more with us. One seemed
to follow Joe around right behind him as he zoomed
along. There is one small problem though, if you
do this wear a tight bathing suit otherwise it will get blown off in the
propwash instantly =:-o.... Finally we realized that if we didn't get a
move on we would not make the sub so we quickly got back underway, leaving our
playmates to themselves. The U2513
was the last of the deeper dives of the trip, resting at about
215ft. H had never dived a sub before so we explored it from end to
end. Out from the sub just laying in the sand are a
bunch of what look like torpedoes and there are simply loads of them just laying
all around in several spots. They are torpedo shaped and had a
covered prop looking thing at one end. Looked like a good
imitation of a farallon scooter to me ;-). I spent some time blowing
the sand away from one with my scooter to uncover it and get a better
look!! I was truly fascinated but I can tell you that I stayed away
from touching or moving that thing. Well you never
know!!! As we moved around we passed Mike and Joe setting up
their gear on the top of the sub, working on one of their special projects
:-). Pretty soon it was time to go and H gave me the thumb and
we left.
Decompression on these dives is really spectacular, there are fish allover the
place, and many many curious jacks. On this particular dive I
had a real surprise, I was quietly just hanging there and a big fish
bumped right into me from behind, I nearly jumped out of my skin, and then
to make matters worse it swam right by my face. My first
reaction was to punch it out of the way with my fist thinking it was going to
attack me. On closer inspection I saw that it was really a
fish in trouble and had a huge fishing weight hanging down from it, and the poor
thing was ailing fast trying to swim with the weight
attached. It did the rounds bumping into the various
divers until eventually Mike thought it was asking him for help and got hold of
it by the weight and released it from it's anchor, it swam away happily
after that. Night Diving the Oil Wreck
145 fsw
Tortugas, May 25th 2003
Three of us set off for our long awaited night dive on the Oil wreck.
No scooters this time, just swimming and with only one deco bottle it was very
relaxing :-). The only problem was that the visibility
was just terrible on the wreck something like 5 ft. As we reached
the bottom of the line I could hardly tell that it was lying on the upturned
hull, and only when we moved it down to the sand was I able to orient
myself. It felt as though I was diving into a muddy
ditch. We attached a flashlight to the hook and then
gingerly explored the wreck a little in a straight line
alongside. After about 15 minutes of checking out the
wreck and the large fish we started to return. Suddenly
out of nowhere Mike suddenly drew back and popped out of a hole followed by a
really big and very Pi@#$#ed off turtle, I had just a split second to turn
my body to one side and block the blow with my upper arm. If I
hadn't moved it would have hit me head on. At first the guys
were wondering if I was alive, but then after I emerged in one piece from the
large cloud of silt stirred up by the collision there was a great deal of
chuckling and I am sure a few masks filled up with
water. After this we figured it was about this time to
end the dive, and we made our way back to the anchor light and
left. It is a strange feeling decompressing in the dark
way out there in the middle of the ocean, but on this occasion we were
joined by a whole bunch of those red wiggly worms that seem to find our HID
lights so fascinating. There were also quite a few irridescent
squid hanging about as well.
We climbed back on deck, stowed our gear for the next day and got
comfortable. This time nobody was ready to crash right away and we spent a
great time with the crew catching and eating tuna fish and having fun
while just hanging out on the bow. The sea was completely flat
calm, and a few of us decided to bring our sleeping bags up outside and sleep on
deck. I was awoken by Joe in the middle of the night who had
decided to go back below into the AC but wanted to let me know where he had gone
in case I thought he had rolled off the bow while asleep!!!, but I am sure I
would have heard :-).
Diving the Oil Wreck
Tortugas May 26th 2003
Depth 145,
Up early the next day we had to be in the water quickly to get two dives in and
make it back to the dock by early evening. H and I hit the
water without our scooters and just lazily toured around the
wreck. The wreck is almost turtled and full of
huge jewfish and turtles. We popped inside for a while to see what
was what, and to try to find out just where all those big fish were
hiding. The visibility was not great on the wreck but you
could see the huge shadows of the fish as they passed by, not afraid of divers
at all. tDiving the Baja California
Tortugas May 26th 2003
Depth 110,
Well the time for our last dive rolled around. This was the
Baja California, and the shallowest wreck of the trip.
Although we had been working with a wounded compressor taking huge lengths of
time to refill the tanks, we had waited patiently until all four sets were
ready. Swimming down the line we arrived to view the large deck gun
sitting tilted onto one side. I made my way around the side of the
hull and rounded the corner to see a sight that I had never seen while diving
before. It was a real live dolphin, just a single one on his
own. I barely caught sight of it as it flipped it's tail and
disappeared as quickly as it had arrived, never to be seen
again. I was truly amazed to have seen such a
thing. I wanted to grab H and get her attention to show her
but by that time he was long gone. We quickly moved on to the
remains of the cargo hold which if you look hard enough contains large
quantities of interesting medicine bottles that were part of the original
cargo. I came up with an old vick bottle which still had a
quantity of vick in it, a small white medicine bottle and a blue
glass bottle that was clearly part of a set. Mike found one of
it's partners :-). H found a large brown looking medicine
bottle. We spent quite a long time on this wreck none of
us wanting to leave and end our dive trip of course. Epilogue
We arrived back at the dock at a very reasonable hour, something like 5:00pm I
think, and set about the onerous task of unloading the
boat. It was stiflingly hot and very very
humid, not a pleasant task at all. A far
different chore than three days earlier when we had loaded up full of excitement
and anticipation.
As we were finishing up, the guys generously decided to give H and I the
portholes we had found :-). Believe me I took them up on the offer
immediately. It was my first porthole, and I really did not
care just how smelly the ride home in the car would be with it for
company. That is the trouble with SUV's for dive
vehicles, you have to live with your wet smelly gear and portholes all the
way home :-). As I got close to home I stopped to pick
up my younger daughter who had spent the weekend with friends at Busch
Gardens. You should have seen the look on her face as her
bedraggled, very grubby looking and obviously eccentric Mum proudly showed
off the contents of the trunk (one huge oyster encrusted porthole) to her
teenage friends... it was too funny.
This was one of the best weekends of diving I had ever spent, the
dives were fantastic each one a lifetime experience on its own, and the
company was awesome as well. What more could I have wished for.....
I can't really think of anything much that could top that. Thanks
everyone for diving with me :-) and thanks for the porthole.
Note: Porthole pics will go here when I have it properly preserved :-).
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