Sunday, June 04, 2006 Cat Cay Bahamas! With Eric Jr., Jack Clark and Jared Clark onboard Devante’s Dream with Eric Langley, Sr.
Wednesday
We drove to Key West in my car (Jane was PO’d that I would not rent a van for $500 and still is as far as I know) and Eric was very sick and barfed out the window. But he was a trooper and hung in there. We arrived on Wed night and did shopping the next day and setting up.
Friday
Eric took his first Open Water Diver certification course, Jack and I and Jared dove as well. After a little hesitancy Jack did great and was real excited about more diving.
Saturday
Eric finished his open water and Jack and Jared dove. I took the morning off to setup for the passage to the Bahamas. We got back to the boat, cleaned up and departed for Bimini at 5:30 PM. 
Monday, June 05, 2006
Sailed from Cat Cay to Bimini and caught two Dolphin (Mahi-Mahi) which we cooked up for dinner along with steaks that we had to eat. The channel into Bimini is new, well marked, deep and wide. We pulled up to Seacrest Marina and cleaned the fish and got ice. It’s only $55 per night (with power) to dock so we are staying here. It’s a fisherman’s marina with small boats from Florida docked and staying at the hotel units. There is one other sailboat from Florida here. It was a Bahamian holiday so I could not get a cell phone. I’ll do that today. In the afternoon we headed out and dove on The Caverns, a site that I had the GPS coords for and had a mooring. The water was clear to 70’ and the dive was great. We hung out there for 5 hours. Jared was in the water for a long time and I made him get out. He then got sun stroke and we made him drink ice water and sit in the shade. He felt better once we got back to the dock and took a cold shower. We all cleaned up the boat and stuff and had a great dinner inside in the air conditioning! After dinner, sleep!
Thursday, June 08, 2006
We are now at Lighthouse Marina in Fresh Creek Andros (pronounced Ahndros). Here’s how we 
got here. On Tuesday the 6th I purchased a Bahamas cell phone (slow process) and we rented four dive tanks form Scuba Bimini, John was very helpful. Getting to their location was an adventure in itself. Jack commented that the channel to their dock was like going up the Amazon River, actually it was scarier! We passed multiple wrecks and decrypted docks and unfinished or gutted houses. The pictures should tell that story better than I can. Then the channel got real shallow and I even turned around to leave but I flagged a guy on a jet ski and asked him about the channel depth and he said it was fine so we went back in. We made it with 8 inches to spare under the keel. We also had our tanks filled for just $9 bucks a piece, cheap! 
All this took a while and we did not get out to the reef until 2:00 PM. I wanted to dive the Bimini Trader wreck which is in about 85’ of water. When we got on site there was no mooring ball so we had to anchor. There was a strong current which we thought would be mitigated on the botoom. When Jared and I descended down the dive line that we dropped of the stern it was not. We had to kick like crazy just to keep up with the boat. At the bottom the current was just as strong. We went into it as much as we could and the across to look at the wreck. We didn’t get on the main vessel but we did see some interesting machinery scattered around. We had to work so hard to keep position that we sucked down our air very quickly. We tried to swim back towards the boat but the current took us away. By the time we made it to the surface we were way to far to swim back. I signaled the X sign to Jack which means come get us we are too tired. It took Eric and Jack and while to get the lines in and the anchor up. Jared had his little yellow tube so he inflated that to show our position. So we got some sun while we waited in the water. We later came to find out that Jack was very concerned about our drifting but we were okay, just needing to be picked up. In hindsight we should have done the entire dive as a drift dive right off Devante’s Dream with a weighted line. Scuba Bimini later said that had trouble with the current as well.
Jack and Eric Jr. did the next dive on another reef further up along the coast of North Bimini. There was no current and it was only 45’ deep. Jack looked comfortable. When they came back up he went back down with Jared and then swam around the boat for another hour. Happy camper, er, diver. However, this all was a lot of work we had eight (8) dive tanks in Devante’s Dreams’ port locker. These all had to be moved around and setup for each dive. Eric handled most of them. Very tiring!
When we got done diving we stayed on the mooring ball were trying to decide about a night dive. However we were all beat at that point so Jack broke out the rum and cigars and we wiled away the evening watching the sun set and talking about family. Later I made bacon and French Toast English muffins (we didn’t have any bread) and then collapsed in bed, comforted by the steady drone of the generator and air conditioning on the calm seas.
Okay! Whose idea was this to stay at sea… by 1:30 AM Jack was looking for the Tums as large rollers (waves but not breaking) started to come in from the North West. However, Devante’s Dream was facing North East with the wind and current. So we got tossed from side to side like a giant pendulum. Not, I repeat, Not comfortable. As soon as the sun rose on Wednesday June 7th I started the engine and headed for the harbor. I had had enough of that, only sleeping for a couple of hours. We docked at Scuba Bimini (going past the wrecks again) and returned their tanks and refilled ours. We spoke with John again and he gave us some helpful advice for getting to Andros via the Grand Bahama Bank via North Rock, which I took to heart. The way that I was planning on going was f’ining shallow he said… you had to be there. Scuba Bimini had a giant hammerhead shark on their bar wall. I would go back there and dive with them. They are nice folks.
So… we went back to North Bimini, Scuba Bimini is on South Bimini which is only about 100 yards via water and filled up on fuel and bread and headed out for Andros at 11:30 AM. Our passage was great to start with, nice breeze and Jack and I caught two nice Barracuda which we unfortunately had to clean on the boat, getting scales everywhere and just generally making a bloody smelly mess. But it was worth it. However, the wind stayed on our nose the whole way and we were just barely able to put up the sails. The day before had been calm but now we had a head wind and some seas. We ended up having them for about 15 hours. But we made it to Andros at 7:30 Thursday June 8th none the worse for wear. We have just been chilling today. Sleeping and eating. There is a crab festival here this weekend we may do that or we may have the restaurant cook our fish for us tonight, who knows!
Saturday, June 10, 2006 0630 for Thursday June 8th and Friday June 9th Fresh Creek Andros Wow. We couldn’t have planned this expedition any better. Thursday was a down day, basically just recovering from the passage although I did clean the inside of the boat extensively and the boys washed down the outside decks. Thursday night we had the Lighthouse Marina restaurant cook our Barracuda which Jack had expertly filleted earlier on the dock. It’s messy work but we got to speak with the locals while doing so. In the afternoon Jack and I went into the kitchen and met the cook, Kimberly, and we arranged to eat at 7:30 and have her cook the fish a variety of ways. Then we chilled out with rum and Cuban cigars. At 7:30 we went into the restaurant and immediately we received our dinner plates with crab rice and slaw and a big basket of corn bread. Then the fish plate was brought out in no less than 5 minutes, loaded with fried, blackened and steamed fish. We gorged ourselves on Barracuda till we could eat no more and pronounced the blackened and fried that most liked. The blackened definitely gave you pause for more bread! Note: Later I found myself hunkering for more of the steamed Bahamian style with it’s grilled onions and tomato sauce. Very tasty.
Earlier I called over to Small Hope Bay Lodge just north of where we are docked and inquired about diving with them. They are now the only dive operation here. Mike indicated that we should be at the dock at 8:30 but when I went to order a taxi for the following morning after dinner the receptionist said they had called and could not fit us on the boat. We we’re all very discouraged about this. Yes, we can dive of DD but we only have four tanks and we don’t know the dive sites here. They are kept very secret! I called Mike to see if we could squeeze on but got his voice mail and left my number. We played some cards and went to bed. The next morning the phone rang at 7:15 AM and it was Mike, after seeing who was diving he determined that we could fit. So I woke everyone up right away and we started to scramble to get our stuff together. I ordered a taxi and sandwiches from the kitchen (awesome bacon, egg and cheese that we ate at Small Hope). We had a great taxi ride with Johnnie who seems to know everyone and everything about Andros, even telling us how much houses were selling for (a house across from the beach on a 100x100 lot could be had for $90,000). He dropped up off at Small Hope Lodge which is right on the beach and ancient by Andros standards having been built in 1965. We took our gear out to the end of the dock and loaded onto the tri-maran pontoon boat (after eating our sandwiches under the palm trees at a picnic table) and prepped our stuff.
The boat was full with about 18 divers. There was one large group of about 11 guys. One guy, Bill, a full sized Laurel Hardy was the butt of many jokes and cracked a lot of his on. He forgot his sea card for diving but they found a way to get him on board after much finagling, then he found it in his wallet. Eric Jr. took a picture of him and Moose (our dive master) with it.
We dove a relatively shallow dive for our first dive at 70’ with a sea of coral as far as the eye could see. I was glad I wore my wetsuit after watching Shawn (our other dive master) put his on, it was 80 degrees but felt a lot colder with the cloudy sky. Everyone was getting acclimated to diving after a long lay off. Then another morning dive on a shallower reef. We can in for lunch which was a buffet on the beach with sandwiches, roast pork and a great chocolate bundt cake. Our afternoon 1 tank dive was on the wreck of the Marion, a navy barge that sank 25 years ago due to overloading it’s crane. Wow! Swim under the wreck, swim through the wreck in crystal clear water. Even Jack did the swim trough. We stayed down for about 40 minutes getting pictures and smiling from ear to ear! We got back to the dock and easily dunked our equipment in fresh water and had a place to store it right at the dock, just like storing your skies at the mountain, kinda like dive in dive out. We showered with warm water. Johnnie picked us up right on time and we headed back to DD.
As we walked to the dock Jack commented that another sailboat that had arrived had a lot of dive tanks on deck. I went over a started talking to the party and ended up having a long conversation with Bob Jonas, a professor that has been coming to Andros for many years. He offered me the GPS coordinate for all the dive sites here which I copied by taking a picture of them with the digital camera, kinda like a spy. He told us stories about the divers on the island and deep diving and blue holes and intrigue. Very cool.
Then Jack and I grabbed some rum and more Cubans, attempting to offer them to Bob’s son Scott and his friend Kyle but they wouldn’t have anything to do with us, as I figured. So we sat 
on the dock at an open space to the rear of their boat and watched the sun go down talking, drinking our rum and smoking our Cubans. A black man came over and asked us if we needed cigars(he had a bag full on his hip). We told him that we had purchased a bunch of them in Bimini. He said that we could have bought them from him for what amounted to being 50% less. We invited him to sit down and talk with us which he accepted, sitting down with his legs over the edge of the dock as we were. We learned all about Alfred Jr.’s family and the cigar trade in the Bahamas. He was very personable and we shared about each others lifestyle. He was waiting for the ferry to come in from Nassau with some friends to go to the Crab fest. Oh yea, we just happened to pull in here this weekend for the biggest festival in Andros, or the Big Yard as it is called. This huge 150 mega yacht is docked right in front of us and we talk about it’s owner and money.
That night we all went to the crab fest by walking across the Fresh Creek bridge. It was only 5 bucks to get in and there were about 100 booths of food from local vendors. We got baked crab and crab rice with beets. Eric got ribs. We ate them semi-standing at the picnic tables as it was very crowded. Then Jack and I shooed the boys away to go wander around. The bands were getting ready after the national anthem was sung and the speeches made. Jack and I struck up a conversation with two nice black ladies from Nassau that helped us get strawberry daiquiris with some Rum added. While we were doing that hundreds of crabs were released into the audience and there was much screaming and running around as crabs with long claws clamored through crowd. Young girls stood screaming on the table near us like mice were under there feet and the boys chased the crabs and held them up and chased the girls with them.
Pandemonium! Then those that caught crabs, some of them one in each hand, put them into boxes and saved them to eat later. Then the music started and we swayed to the beat. We found out that as this was just the first night that tomorrow night will be on the wilder side as the crowd was trying to get into it. We left just after midnight but the music didn’t stop until 5:00 AM and then the rooster crowed! I had to get up at 6:00 today to get these words down as there is just no other time! Back out on the reef today.
Monday, June 12, 2006 0800 These are the notes for Saturday and Sunday. Saturday morning Mike called from SHBL to say that we could not dive with them that day as the boat was full. Too bad, so Jack and Jared went to get the dive gear so that we could dive off the boat. Jack called me when he got there and they said that we could dive with them in the afternoon for the Shark Dive that we had signed up for, which was scheduled for 2:00 PM, yippee! We don’t have to dive off the boat.
Eric and I (mostly I) put the dinghy together and cleaned up the boat. When Jared got back we put on the engine (total assembly time :45 minutes) and headed out for some exploring. We went up Fresh Creek which is very clear and you can always see the bottom. In some places it is 15’ deep. We went up the harbor and under the low bridge (a shame) up the creek. There were a few spots were it was 3-4’ but then got real deep again. We could see a derelict barge just up the river. There are about 8-10 houses on the left had side that are nicely maintained with lush landscaping and none on the right hand side. As we went along on there was one compound with a lot of palm tree’s, hammocks, sitting docks and such. I could see a woman (white) mowing her lawn so we dinghyed over to their dock and tied up. Jared did not bring his shoes so he could not take a walk with me on the property so I went to talk with her myself.
When she saw me walking up she stopped mowing the lawn and came towards me. We shook hands and she introduced herself, Laurie Robinson. I complimented her on her property. She said she had lived there for 18 years and that she and her husband worked at the Autec Navy base. Her grandparents are purchased the property in 1972 when they came to work on the base. She inherited it from them. Her uncle owned the lot next door. “Oh and by the way that lot is for sale. It hasn’t been listed yet or even a sign put out.” “Oh really? So the property line is here?” “Yes, it’s along the line of palm tree’s lining the driveway. It’s 1.1 acres and has those two buildings. “
Hmm. Why is it that I always find property that is not listed for sale yet? So I asked her how much he was asking for it and she said $225,000. Not bad I said and walked around a little. Laurie offered to give me her uncles number so we went over to her house and she invited me in to a very nice typical CBS Florida style home with a fireplace. She had a copy of the plot plan which she gave me and put his number on it. I thanked her and went back to where Jared was. We dinghyed back and took a nap before the Shark Dive.
Around 1300 Johnnie picked us up for the ride over to SHBL. We chatted with the guys that we dove with the day before. On this trip the owner, Jeff Birch, and his son, Jeff Jr., accompanied us and told us stories about the island and it’s history. He’s been living here since he was 4. Our Shark Dive was on a sandy bottom with some large coral heads in about 50’ of water. They tied a frozen ball of chum onto a chain. We all descended to the bottom and sat in a half circle then they lowered the chum ball. The sharks darted in and around the ball, taking big chunks as they went by. After it started we were allowed to swim around the sharks and also over the top. Very cool.
There were about 5 sharks, mostly female reef sharks. They didn’t seem too hungry but they kept at it. Eventually the chum ball broke up in the warm water and fell off the chain on the sandy bottom being chased by the sharks (this is called the “rodeo”). The ball bounced toward Bill (we also call him Bubba and he is the life of the party) and he ended up with sharks all around him and backing up into them even though the Dive Master Shawn was signaling him to come towards him. His eyes were wide as saucers! Once the chum ball was pretty much gone a few of the divers went over to where it was attached to the bottom to look for shark teeth that can fall off during the feeding. Well some of the sharks were still looking for food too and Rodney and Bill (same Bill) got tangled up with one of the sharks. Rodney was practically riding one of them and then it went right under Bill. Eric was taking pictures and video the whole time and he got some great shots of this and other scenes. Very cool dive and I felt very safe. Jack and Jared did great as well.
We taxied back to the boat with Jonnie and took a nap. Around 1800 we all took a walk to the property that Jared and I had found. The gravel road runs 400’ off and alongside the river. There was one new house (clean) and one local duplex (dumpy but not too bad) on the left. On the right along the river were well maintained and landscaped homes. Not too far in was a nice hacienda that was actually a nursery with lots of plants and lush landscaping, very pretty. More nice homes and then we got to the property. It has a huge front yard that is all landscaped with palms and various tree’s. Laurie said that her grandmother spent a lot of time of the landscaping over the 20+ years that she lived there.
Jack was stunned. You could see the river from the front yard and we walked across and over to the shoreline. It’s a natural rock wall with very deep water (crystal clear) flowing but. The wall has been cut perfectly straight by the water. There is a bit of a dock and a high ridge from which you get a nice breeze. We walked along the shore which faces North West. You get a nice sunset along the river but not too much west so that you get blasted by it. Jack asked me if he could go in with me on it. Sure man….
We went back to the boat and had cigars and rum on the dock for several hours talking and just having a ball. Jared smoked Jack’s last Monte Cristo cigar. It was good. We went to Crab Fest around 2300 for dinner and music. There were a lot of people there from Nassau that had been coming in on the ferry all day. We stayed there till about 0130 having met the guys from SHBL and the ladies that Jack and I had met the night before. Later we went with the ladies to the local’s place on the beach, Skinny’s and danced till 0330. Eric and Jack went right to the front. Later Jack said it felt like a freight train was driving through him it was so loud. He was also soaked from head to toe. Awesome sea of black humanity. There were only about 8 white people among the hundreds of blacks. We were four of them. Eric saw Jeff Jr. from the Lodge go right in through the line….. We crashed on the boat at 0415 after talking for a while. My feet were killing me from walking in my sandals, with blister on the edges and just real sore. I got up at 0700 and called the Lodge a little later to see if we could dive. I had to call Jeff on his cell phone. He said he would check and call me back.
No problem. We’re diving The Blue Hole! I rustled everyone up and got Johnnie to give us a ride. The dive boat was packed but we were all real quite having but up late but excited. We went out through moderate seas so we had to keep towards the back of the boat. Once on site we all geared up together and stayed on board. Then we all went to 20’ depth to keep together. We followed Rod into the hole through a narrow opening. It was very dramatic. We descended to around 90’ and you could look up and see light streaming through the rocks. We were in the Starlight room. Eric Jr. was taking video. I was directly behind the dive master and Eric was behind me. Everyone else was single file back to the last dive master. Shannon (another dive instructor) was taking a video as well. Eric pulled up along side me. I thought he was trying to show me something but he cut his hand across his throat. No air signal! I pulled off my Octo (spare air source) and give it to him and he started breathing threw it. I had no idea what the problem was. We stopped going forward. I signaled to ascend and asked if he was okay. He indicated he was. We made a normal slow ascent. The dive master was too far ahead to let him know that we were going up. Shannon saw us and I indicated to her that we were all right. We did a short safety stop at 20’ and then broke the surface. “F___’ing scary”.
Eric put his snorkel him and we swam on the surface back to the boat. We got back aboard and Eric sat down with his head down. Shocked and obviously contemplating life. I went over to check his regulator and was able to breathe properly. I checked his Octo and it worked as well. I turned his valve to the right as if tightening it and it tightened to the stops after just a quarter of a turn! His valve had been barely open. His tank valve setup was not a normal one. They had run out of regular tanks so Eric had a tank that supported dual tanks. The valve knob was on the right side as opposed to the left side. Evidently what happened was that he turned the valve to the rear of the tank as you normally would except that it is being tightened in that direction. Now we triple check the valve!
Sunday, June 4, 2006
The Boys on DD Summer 2006 - June 6
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