Leaving
Woohoo, It's really out there..
Boat from the water (Pic by JR)
Dive Team (Pic by JR).
LL on Deco (don't ya love my yellow fins) Pic by JR
Conference time!! (pic by JR)
Jim, Mixing for next day :-)
Capt. Jim Drives the boat.
_________________________
Wreck Pics Courtesy of
Reef Divers
Additional Pics by Cristian Pittaro
Capt. Jim Wyatt, had expressed a desire to start taking out technical divers on his boat and wanted some guinea pigs for his new operations. Of course we were all very willing volunteers, and I had wanted to dive the Wilkes Barre for several years already. Not only this, Jim had recently put in a trimix fill station at his shop and was itching to use it :-). I had been working up to this dive for a long time and could hardly wait. I had met Jim by e. mail and of course had perused his website often, but was totally unprepared for the person that I met, he had even very kindly invited us to stay at his home for this trip. We arrived around 8:30pm on Thursday night (it's about a 3 hour drive from Miami). I felt at home right away, and as the evening wore on we talked more and more about diving (well what do you expect ;-)..). I was fascinated by Jim's stories of the cave dives he has made before, it's a humbling experience to sit across the dinner table from someone who was cave diving with Shek Exley!!. But what great stories. I even heard stuff about diving Ginnie before they put that darned camp ground in there!! it was just awesome. We all had so much to talk about we almost forgot to get some beauty sleep before the next day's dives!
April 19th day 1 dive 1,
This was to be an afternoon dive, with the morning taken up by reviewing the
fill station, looking at dive gear and other "get to know you
stuff". Then we loaded the boat and set off at sometime around
noon. Jim had several sets of coordinates for the stern
section of the wreck but not sure which ones would find it.
This turned out to be a piece of cake, and when I finally set eyes on the wreck
I realized why! It's a Monster. We searched back and
forth for just a few minutes, then this HUGE black blob showed up on the fish
finder. Amongst loads of cheering and high fives we
marked it on the GPS... I mean there was nothing else that could have been it,
it filled the whole screen almost.
The purpose of the first dive was just to reccy the area, look for a good tie off point, and
make a short dive. If the current was running I wasn't going to
leave the line behind (so we could drift but still be marked for deco)
. If there was no current then I was to leave the line tied off for
the next day. We checked for current but found almost none on the
surface. My buddy Wally and I dropped into the water, and I took
down a light line with a marker buoy to tie off onto the
wreck. I descended as fast as the line would allow, and
as I hit about 150ft the visibility began to drop, then I saw the sandy/muddy
bottom.. I slowed my descent and hovered around looking, depth showed 254ft.
I couldn't see it but I
could see a huge dark area in front of me. I also noticed a bunch of
anemones on the bottom, bent over and billowing, and realized that
although there was no current at the surface there was one zooming along down
here so I kicked in the direction of the wreck ASAP so I wouldn't pass it before
I got there. Vis was by now less than 50ft. As I
reached it I was just coming level with the center of the wreck. The
current was moving from stern to bow, but of course there was no bow just the
snapped off end which seemed such a clean break, and it reminded me of the way
you would snap in half a large pickle. There were no signs of
collapse yet as far as I could see. I hid behind the wreck in the
lee of the current and looked in front of me. It was just a huge
yawning black hole! It reminded me of one of those giant car
ferries that can take hundreds of cars. I just had to stop for a minute to
take in the view, I was totally overawed by the size, and the blackness of the
hole. One day I will go in there. I slowly made my
way up the wreck, reached the deck and began the ascent to the highest
point to tie off the line. It was totally
fascinating.. the whole deck is covered with stuff, and it's kind of like
a little city on there, huge deck guns, and what we thought were
searchlight or maybe machine gun mounts. The current was not that bad, and
I was able to hide from it quite a bit, so swimming back towards the
stern was not too difficult. I tied off the line at the top of
a big chimmney or smoke stack looking thing, and noticed that as
soon as I hit 150ft the current just switched off, It was
fascinating. The depth of the tie off was 157ft, and I elected to
leave the line in place. Quickly I calculated that the profile of the
wreck was actually about 100ft, not counting what was buried in the sand... No
wonder it popped up on the fish finder so well. I
hastily pulled out my HID to shine down into the middle of the stack
before we left. It was so big that the light beam just disappeared into
the blackness. I'm thinking one day I will go in there
too. By this time, my all too short dive was over. so we
headed back up. Not a big deco due to the shortness of the
dive. I had a runtime of about 44 mins.
April 20th-day 2 Dive 2.
Today Wally and I were joined by Cristian and his camera.
Since one buddy had smaller tanks we planned another maximum 20 minute bottom
time at the deck (200). It was easy to find the wreck now
using the line and yet again of course the convenience of no surface
current. Today as I descended the visibility was much
better at the bottom and I could clearly see the wreck from about
80ft. I arrived at the tie off point, and it was yet again the
sudden switching on of the current, except this time it was MUCH bigger but as
usual along with the much higher current came the better Visibility so that part
was awesome. This time it was no joke swimming around and most of my
dive was spent either hiding behind objects, or crawling like a fly hand over
hand around the exposed part of the wreck. Actually it
was quite fun because there are so many things on the deck that all sorts of
little eddy currents would sweep around corners and blow you through the
passageways.. Cristian was furiously taking pictures so having
stolen the idea from someone else's website I climbed up on top of one of the
deck guns and got him to take my picture. You know, one of
those "been there done that" type pics. We also saw
a huge monster Goliath Grouper, he was totally huge and filled the whole
passageway along the side of the ship. Cristian snapped away and got
his picture too. We peeked inside several rooms and they
are still full of stuff, not like the Duane, that is
empty. I saw chairs tables and furniture, and wondered
what kinds of stuff could be found in here. We didn't hang around
there for long there was just too much to see. I think we saw
about 10% of the wreck before our bottom time ran out. Now I really
did have to do the fly impression crawling back up the superstructure to the
line. This part of the wreck is covered in lots of fishing
line, and big old nets so you need to be really careful not get
entangled. Yet again as I reached the line, the
current suddenly switched off. Temperature on the wreck
was about 71deg, surface was about 80deg. Since my
drysuit zipper was still broken from the previous week I had been forced
to dive wet, and I was amazed that in fact I wasn't all that
cold. My main problem here was that I needed to go to my old
yellow pair of fins so that the booties would fit, I'm amazed that they
did so well given the current. (never mind new suit in the works).
April 21st Day 3 dive 3.
Today we were joined by more folks. JR was to be our trusted
safety diver, and Tim came along to help crew. We had spent
some time on our dives figuring out how to arrange tech gear on the boat and
help Jim come up with a system. After much discussion it
seemed that 4 tech divers and a safety diver would be OK. Even
with additional scooters. I have to say JR did a great job visiting with
us and checking to see we were OK on deco, where he met us as we were coming
up. He also took away the cameras and filmed us and took our
pictures too.
I was so excited today because Jim had asked if I'd like to try out his
newly refurbished video camera and film the wreck. Believe me
he didn't have to ask twice... I did explain that I had never handled a video
camera before but he promised me that it was easy to do.. so eagerly I accepted
his offer. I have to admit I was a bit apprehensive
about handling the extra stuff in case the current was ripping and wondered
about dragging the camera around. As it turned out once I got in the
water it was easy to handle the camera it was almost exactly neutral and I had
rigged up a lanyard to clip it off so if I dropped it I wasn't in danger
of losing it (not that I'm a chicken or anything.. <G>)
. I was also instructed not go go below 200 since that was the
depth rating. Not a problem the deck was exactly 200. So
off we went swimming down to the wreck, slow descent this time aiming to
film the wreck as it came into view. This never happened
because the camera went into sleep mode and eventually I had to go down to
the wreck where I parked and spent some time figuring it out. Cristian
being a camera whiz, managed to get it back out of sleep mode and
running. PHEW!!. What a blast it was filming the wreck,
and Jim was right it really isn't that hard. The current was
down a little from the previous day, but so was the Vis. I was quite
grateful since this allowed me a much better chance of getting good
shots. Again I filmed the deck guns, now with my two
buddies there next to them.. then Cristian swam up to me giving me the
shark signal... I turned around but it was too late already... I had missed
it... apparently a large bull shark had crossed the wreck from one side to the
other in front of him and behind me!!!! Yikes.... A pity I missed
it, it would have been awesome to film him/her on my very first
video. We explored the deck a little and I tried hard to
film as much of the wreck as possible so that Jim would be able to use the
footage for his business. We had got a little low on
helium on the last day and My END was about 125 so I was ready with lots of
excuses if the video was really bad. Actually it turned out it
was OK. We did a 25 minute BT on this dive, and I had a little more
time to play but still saw merely a fraction of the
wreck. I have definitely put a scooter on my next year's
wish list.
Epilogue.
I want to go back as soon as I can.. :-). Capt Jim did a great
trip, and we all had an excellent time thanks Jim. I
will be adding more pics of the wreck as they become available, but the first
pics are here, courtesy of JR :-) (thanks JR). More pics to
come.