Weekend dive report, drama!

hmmm...

I just found that I get 10% off at site59.com through work, and they have some cheap weekend getaways. I may have to come see you in NY. What main city is even remotely close to you?
 
fly said:
hmmm...

I just found that I get 10% off at site59.com through work, and they have some cheap weekend getaways. I may have to come see you in NY. What main city is even remotely close to you?
Sweet

Well, we have two options at the least at our disposal

Albany is about an hour or less from the new place

OR you could fly to Boston and we could bring you to NY and back since we usually go like friday night and come back late sunday, or even monday
 
ChikkenNoodul said:
Sweet

Well, we have two options at the least at our disposal

Albany is about an hour or less from the new place

OR you could fly to Boston and we could bring you to NY and back since we usually go like friday night and come back late sunday, or even monday
cool. Looks like they have flight + hotel in boston for $180 for a weekend. Mebbe Zoe and I can make it up thurr soon.
 
ChikkenNoodul said:
You can find shark's teeth off of Venice beach

And as Candy said, there's stuff around WPB - I'm sure there has to be more stuff in the gulf

my swim team in college used to do a xmas training trip to deerfield beach in FL every year...I always snorkeled close to a mile out cruising up and down the coast...checked out everything there was on the bottom...apparently I missed one spot...a year later a lifeguard found a canon sticking out of the seafloor ...there was a whole galleon still attached to it with something like $200 million in gold onboard :mad: :(
 
ChikkenNoodul said:
So.....

We had two dives scheduled for each day this past weekend, Saturday we were joining a group from a shop that used to be local to us when we lived in NH.

We had two seal dives planned out of the NH seacoast, a pile of rocks in the ocean that the seals liked to hang out at. Since we hadn't been to that site before, we opted to follow the dive leader on the 1st dive, and broke into two groups.

Big mistake, the dive leader and someone else in the group had reached their turn pressure by the time they got to the bottom - of course they thought we were starting out in 40-50', when actually the bottom was at 75' :rolleyes: so after 15 minutes of gazing at clams in 75' of 47 degree water, we surfaced. Granted the surface current was bad, which had everyone breathing hard.

During the dive, we noticed some fiasco with someone's weight belt from the other group, got back on the boat and found one guy from the other group had skipped the first dive. Oh, and there's a mystery weightbelt on the boat.

Waiting for the other group (who were happily watching a seal underwater) to get back, a call comes over the boat radio from another boat saying they have one of our divers, and he's not in good shape! :eek:

We're all like, no way - we have all our divers, must be from someone else's group.

Nope, the boat gets there right as the other group arrives and it's the buddy of the guy who skipped the first dive.

He does not look well, and has to be carried into our boat, he's screaming about his legs and they put him on O2 and take his wetsuit off, he calms down a bit.


It turns out he lost his weightbelt on the surface, and the dive leader of the other group and his buddy (the one who skipped the dive) retrieved it. He gets it back on and goes down again without anyone in the other group knowing except his buddy, makes it somewhere between 50 - 70 feet before losing the belt again, rockets to the surface in 2 seconds, and gets carried a couple hundred yards or so away by the current and somehow manages to hold on to a buoy at the surface.

So we rush to the Coast Guard station to get him to a waiting ambulence for a nice hyperbaric chamber ride, and end up spending the day at the station dock waiting for the boat captain and dive leader to be released. Yay!

I feel REAL bad for the poor bastard, and I hope he's ok. My wife is going to ask the shop owner later to see.

His buddy, when I last saw him being taken away in another boat to get his and this guy's stuff to his car, looked like he knew he had fucked up real bad. I only hope he's capable of apologizing to his friend.

Damn I haven't scuba dive for 24+ years. :(

When my father was stationed in Panama he and I learned how to scuba dive under the PADI system. The gentleman who was our instructor was the best diver in the entire Caribbean area. He and I had a lot of fun with that for the year we were in Panama. The only stupid thing I remember doing was during the course we had to bring up a pool grate for some reason or another. I nearly killed myself getting that up to the edge of the pool. :fly:
 
why_ask_why said:
my swim team in college used to do a xmas training trip to deerfield beach in FL every year...I always snorkeled close to a mile out cruising up and down the coast...checked out everything there was on the bottom...apparently I missed one spot...a year later a lifeguard found a canon sticking out of the seafloor ...there was a whole galleon still attached to it with something like $200 million in gold onboard :mad: :(
Did he get to keep the dinero?
 
why_ask_why said:
my swim team in college used to do a xmas training trip to deerfield beach in FL every year...I always snorkeled close to a mile out cruising up and down the coast...checked out everything there was on the bottom...apparently I missed one spot...a year later a lifeguard found a canon sticking out of the seafloor ...there was a whole galleon still attached to it with something like $200 million in gold onboard :mad: :(
Jebus.....

I wouldn't feel too bad, at least you weren't a professional salvor looking for it and it was found accidentally :p
 
ChikkenNoodul said:
Jebus.....

I wouldn't feel too bad, at least you weren't a professional salvor looking for it and it was found accidentally :p


How does that work? Just finders keepers? That's a significant amount of taxable income.
 
Sarcasmo said:
How does that work? Just finders keepers? That's a significant amount of taxable income.
The laws concerning maritime salvage have to be at least 10x more confusing than the US tax code, though generally if the claim is not disputed I think about 80% goes to the finder after a year and a day IIRC.

Then there's taxes on top of that I'm sure