After Saturday's adventure David and I headed out for another dive. This time the north was even worse, and we decided to give the Sugar Mill a try. We parked, got the gear on and walked 20 minutes to the water and it looked kind of brown near shore. Oh well, we walked all the way down so we are going!
The surface was flat, the wind was picking up a little, but it looked like nice conditions. The plan was to consider yesterday's northbound train-of-a-current and go south so we could do the rubble first and then come with the current north to do the pilings. We went down into murky water and then in the distance could see a layer of blue with murk above and below it - there was hope!
We dropped into about 40 feet of water so we could follow the slope down and not miss the rubble. Before you knew it we were at 60 feet in the rubble and then 87 looking up at the surface. No current. That's a little deep even though he is using the other regulator (not yesterday's disaster one). We came up and stayed in the 60-70 zone for quite a while and then headed to the pilings after seeing a mob of Spade Fish and loads of schools of other types. There were huge Puffers and eels and just about everything else.
We stayed around the pilings for quite a while looking for seahorses. We heard that someone has been taking them out to sell to the aquarium trade. Shame. They should take the lionfish I found (just call me the lionfish whisperer) - My 5th one. That at least is a non-native-we-should-remove-them -before they eat everything species that doesn't belong here. We spent quite a long time. We turned and the line up of squid we saw before were there again. This time they wanted to rumble and brought reinforcements. 14 in all. David had only 200 pounds of air left so we started coming in at around 20 feet. He wanted to surface (but I had air) until he saw an octopus. We went down to peek at it. It looked closer than it was. He was out of air and used my regulator again for what we thought would be a "quick peek" and a speedy rise to the surface. That was until my dive computer alarm sounded and told me that all of a sudden I needed to go a little deeper and stay there for 6 minutes! 6 minutes? What the hell for?
I have a very conservative computer that I follow because what will kill me is that I have air. I ALWAYS have air and I like to use it. My computer will tell me I owe 4 minutes of decompression time when my husband who goes deeper won't owe any time. I take my computer under advisement but usually figure it is fine to do what I want - I have enough air to do 20 minutes of decompression time!
So David and I breathed off of my tank for 6 minutes, came up, gave the customary Yoo Hoo and had our longest dive ever...2 hours and 13 minutes! If you are a diver you are thinking this is fake (nope)....they were at 30 feet the whole time (nope - 87 and 60 for a wad of it). This is unheard of! We were both on 80's, not 100s, not twin tanks, nope..just regular tanks. I found a couple perfect pair of sunglasses. We saw all kinds of cool stuff (except the lionfish that shouldn't be there). It was a really long and really pleasant dive. I can't wait until Jeff gets home so we can do it!
No comments:
Post a Comment