That night I called Mike at Small Hope Bay Lodge and got the bad news. There boat was full for tomorrow morning (where have I heard this before), so we can’t dive with them. “We’re diving off of the boat,” I told Mike and Bill. “Okay,” they replied, “Whatever it takes.” We’ll be fine.
The next morning we started to prep at 0700, get food in the stomach thanks to Bill’s awesome cooking. Get the dinghy ready, thanks to Mike doing whatever else needs to be done. And…get all our dive gear together. No small feat.
Diving off of the boat also entails picking a location. I floated the idea of diving a wreck to Bill, but he was thinking more of coral and nice fish. Okay, no problem we can do that. There is plenty of that out there.
We motor out of the harbour and Mike drops in the water to check out what’s down below. “Some old coral heads,” he says. Okay, we’ll try further down. Then I am thinking, “we are awfully close to the Marion wreck. Why don’t we just dive that? It’s only in like 50-60’ of water.”
I plugged the coordinates in the GPS and we are pretty much right on top of it. Mike jumps in again with the mask and finds it right away. Okay, here we are. Let drop the grapple anchor on it, which we did. Then we spent he next hour gearing up. New gear for Mike and Bill and a new experience diving off of the boat, it takes some getting acclimated to. However, much better than a dive boat….
Bill did great for his first deep (67 feet) dive. However, our dive was cut short when Mike BC was runaway inflating. I had to make a beeline for the anchor line to keep from popping up to the surface too fast.
We cooked burgers on brats on the grill and took a long surface interval. There we no waves and the sky was overcast so it was very comfortable on the boat. After gorging ourselves we setup Bill with our fourth tank and Mike and I dove on the remaining air in our tanks. Mike used one of my extra BC's. We had enough air for a second 20 minute dive on The Marion.
Afterwards to we could not raise the anchor, although Bill was determined we'll have to dive down to unhook it....
Eric
The next morning we started to prep at 0700, get food in the stomach thanks to Bill’s awesome cooking. Get the dinghy ready, thanks to Mike doing whatever else needs to be done. And…get all our dive gear together. No small feat.
Diving off of the boat also entails picking a location. I floated the idea of diving a wreck to Bill, but he was thinking more of coral and nice fish. Okay, no problem we can do that. There is plenty of that out there.
We motor out of the harbour and Mike drops in the water to check out what’s down below. “Some old coral heads,” he says. Okay, we’ll try further down. Then I am thinking, “we are awfully close to the Marion wreck. Why don’t we just dive that? It’s only in like 50-60’ of water.”
I plugged the coordinates in the GPS and we are pretty much right on top of it. Mike jumps in again with the mask and finds it right away. Okay, here we are. Let drop the grapple anchor on it, which we did. Then we spent he next hour gearing up. New gear for Mike and Bill and a new experience diving off of the boat, it takes some getting acclimated to. However, much better than a dive boat….
Bill did great for his first deep (67 feet) dive. However, our dive was cut short when Mike BC was runaway inflating. I had to make a beeline for the anchor line to keep from popping up to the surface too fast.
We cooked burgers on brats on the grill and took a long surface interval. There we no waves and the sky was overcast so it was very comfortable on the boat. After gorging ourselves we setup Bill with our fourth tank and Mike and I dove on the remaining air in our tanks. Mike used one of my extra BC's. We had enough air for a second 20 minute dive on The Marion.
Afterwards to we could not raise the anchor, although Bill was determined we'll have to dive down to unhook it....
Eric
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