Saturday Dive

Diving didn't turn out as expected. The weather was nice but the swells from an offshore hurricane had the seas churned up.

We met at the dive shop in Wilmington and I soon learned I was the elder diver. On board were two model pretty woman that didn't have an ounce of body fat between them. Next a few steroid weight lifter guys, typical studly crew, then me. I felt like I was on CBS Survivor and I was the old dude.

We arrived at the first wreck and the visibility was nearly zero. We moved to the wreck The Hyde and the visibility was about 4 feet. Worse than quarry diving.

We went in the water and descended down on the wreck. It was surreal. School fish were thick in the water and it was so dark we had to use lights. Sharks hang out at this wreck so we knew we may bump into one at any turn.

We felt our way along the wreck and followed a wreck line that was laid out for conditions like this.

As bad as it sounds it was peaceful. The wreck was covered in coral. Fish were thick as fog and I enjoyed watching them in the beam of my light.

My dive buddy and I lost the wreck line so we lost the ability to know where to surface. We decided to send up a safety sausage which is an inflatable brightly colored dive marker to let the crew above know our location and intensions of surfacing.

We spend the next few minutes coming up from 70 feet suspended in murky water and thousands of schooling fish.

Surprisingly we surfaced 20 yards from the boat.

The rest of the weekend was cancelled because of conditions. We enjoyed an hour long boat ride back to port in Wrightsville beach.

Overall it was an enjoyable dive in spite of the conditions.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

That is so incredibly, remarkably, entirely, undeniably, sincerely, totally NOT like my day.

Sounds like hella bitchin' phfun.

Ken said...

I didn't know sausages could float.

Rock Chef said...

4 ft visibility with sharks? Sounds a bit more terminal than Survivor, which might be better viewing if it was this dangerous :-)

Glad you made it back!