RGecy said:
I think Bob had a new respect for zero vis, black water diving. [/b] I was very impressed he didn't freak out! Although he admitted that at about 15' he had some second thoughts, but none the less, made it down and completed the dive.
Oh my! And how! OK Robert, I'll 'fess up, I was a tad nervous thereb at times!
I _thought_ I'd done bad vis (2-3 feet) and I've done my share of night diving. But this is both, and then some. At about 15 feet it looks like there's a black curtain hung horizontally in the water. You can look down at this kinda shimmering black layer and turn over and see the dull olive green of a cloudless sky and noonday sun. And you tell yourself 'it's just dark, and "I ain't 'fraid of no ghost" and drop through the curain. Now it's black below, and of you roll over it's totally black above as well. It's darker than a night dive because a UK C8 only penetrates about 6 inches while on a night dive you can see some distance with the light. I'll admit that my chest tightened and the instinct was "run for the sun." When I get freaked out underwater I allow myself 2 or 3 deep, fast breaths, and that seems to get me centered again, so I blew a lot of bubbles, "got a grip," and met Robert on the bottom.
70 min. 33 feet. A dive such as I've never experienced. Nose literally right on the bottom. At one point I ran my hand over a rounded object and thought "this is a skull" although it was strangely slick. Turned to Robert to show him and it was gone. On the boat he said "I was going to point out a horseshoe crab, but when I tried to get your attention it was gone." And there were weird noises. Above us, then answered from behind, or way off to one side. Robert described than as like a bullfrog call, which is about as good as I can do. Perhaps a little softer and more drawn out than a bullfrog. We'd seen dolphins from the boat, and on the last dive I saw one right above where Robert surfaced. On the fossils forum someone suggested alligator, but I'm not convinced...
RGecy said:
The current started to move pretty good and we decided to do our second dive in about 25' of water just around a bend I wanted to check out. No teeth, but I did find some bone. Which leads me to believe the teeth are probably there, but they are most likely buried 6-8 inches in the sand and mud. The dive was short and I only spent about 1000 psi.
Dive 2 in a different place we hit lots of mud and got separated about 90 seconds into the dive. Mud, worse vis, no teeth. Now I'll confess that although I'm quite used to getting left behind when I'm obsessing about some picture I'm trying to get, getting separated in these conditions kinda freaked me out a little. OK, quite a bit.
On dive 1 I was able to stop and look around and see this faint red glow of Robert's light that was (like Greg Brown's little squeaky sounds) "coming from far, far away." I'd think "Whoa, we're getting pretty far apart" as it looked like the light was several feet away, so I'd move towards it and bump into Robert about 6 inches later. So suddenly I'm quite alone. No reassuring distant red glow. No regulator noise. Just me and the bullfrogs. I knew Robert would be heading up-current so I tried to follow. After about 10 minutes I (thought I) heard tank-banging and, very relieved I must admit, figured it was a "let's bag it" signal and decided to surface. No Robert, but from the boat I could see nice regular bubbles. Maybe the key to this psychic stuff is simply wanting it badly enough, as I think I really wanted that dive to end and Robert did eventually bang on his tank to signal he was going up; I just heard the banging about 10 minutes before it happened!
RGecy said:
Third dive was near high tide and we returned to the first site since we knew there were teeth there. With the high tide, the depth was now about 38'. This time the vis was near absolute zero. Probably 6-8 inches at best. The sediment was thick and we actually got separated. You must imagine being within an arms distance and not even being able to see your partners light. None the less, it makes you focus when the vis is this bad. I actually found fewer small teeth and more of the large teeth on this dive because I was going by feel more than sight. I think we ended up pulling 3 or 4 in the 5.5 to 6 inch range, but they were in poor condition.
Dive 3. As Robert says, we got separated again. The vis on this dive was worse again and it's only a matter of a few feet between still together and quite alone. In clear water it seems you can hear a reg some distance away, but I think all the junk in the water also mutes any sounds. Robert had said that the tide would turn in 30 minutes, so not wanting to end up downstream of the boat once we were separated I decided to end my dive at 20 minutes to give myself a good "get back to the boat" margin. Stayed into the current and was pretty sure I was fairly close behind Robert's position as the vis would be "good" at maybe 9-12 inches and the would abruptly drop to zero which I attributed to his fanning and disturbing the silt. Picked up a couple more small teeth and surfaced at the end of the rectangle defined by the anchor line and the granny buoy (which both ran in the same direction as the tide was turning). 2 minutes later from the boat I saw a dolphn right where I thought I'd surfaced and about a minute after that Robert surfaced in at pretty much that exact spot.
There's "fabulous diving" where you see tons of stuff (or I imagine bring up a coin or cannon) and there's "fabulous diving" where you experience something truly new. This was both as it presented some new challenges _and_ led to some artifacts--treasures to me--that I'll talk about and show people for quite some while. Robert: Thank you for a great day's diving, for your super hospitality, for some new tales to tell, and for that awesome tooth! Let's do it again!
RGecy said:
I gave Bob the biggest tooth from the day and I am sure he will post some pictures when its cleaned up. Its about 6 inches!
It cleaned up really well. Robert, sent this via email earlier, but for anyone else who'se interested, here's a pic (should have included a scale, but yes, it's about 6 inches along one side!)
Again, great dives. Thanks Robert!
Bob.
