Clearly this has been one of my less popular opinions, in a long list of unpopular opinions
In any event, I will re-stress, that it is the "Captain" and their skill in deciding where to drop my buddies and I into the water that allows us to hit the wreck or reef with precision each time.
A good captain that is considering a hot drop for a challenging current and wreck, MUST know the descending speeds of each buddy team. Groups of 2 to 4 ( platform size dependent) are going to be cued up, and the Captain will know that these 4 can reach bottom in approx 50 seconds, so he or she must calculate how far up current, and if any side currents exist to vector in....If the captain knows another buddy team are slow descenders, they may get a drop that allows them 2 and a half minutes to reach bottom, at which time they should see the wreck looming up toward them.
And each team really needs it's own drop, so that from the DIVe, Dive,Dive, to all being in the water, is a couple of seconds and no more.....you can't have divers wandering up and pausing prior to jumping in....The Captain a crew are part of that equation as well--and so are the divers, in that since they have been told that go means go--they have to actually be ready for this... Again, not really an advanced skill.
The wrecks in less than 120 feet, are not so hard, as not that much drifting has to occur with a fast descent....but still, if you do a wreck you have dropped on many times easily by a good captain, then go out with a captain that does not know how to lead drops, it can be a miserable dive---you can be in way to early---and hope to recognize where you are, and swim to the wreck----or you can be past it or no where near it, which will usually means a sand dive.
So I am very picky about what dive boats I use in South florida. On the other hand, I have done some captaining of private boats myself, and I can do a 'fair" job of dropping, so I can estimate where I want to be dropped, and then get a captain without drop experience, to get us to a wreck---but this is not diving skill--this is captaining skill.
On the 280 foot tech wrecks we did so much of in the 90's, some were in 3-4 mph current with high vis--like the Rb Johnson Cory"n Chriss ( Lauderdale) or the 225 foot deep Skycliff ( Boynton)--and some were in even larger currents, off of Fort Pierce and Stuart, 25 miles out in 280 feet of water, with vis often so bad we would not know we hit bottom until the tip of our spearguns hit the bottom, and we would know that we had just collided with it ( though from watching depth gauge, you would expect to be hitting bottom "soon"). Drifting was the easy way to do each wreck or reef, whether the current was big or non-existentent on these deep sites-but only because of Captaining that could predict our descent rates and the vectoring of surface and mid depth currents.
Occasionally there would be a reverse current on the bottom from 250 on down, which would usually mean that temp would go from 70's to 50's.....This was what got us to begin wearing dry suits for tech dives, because of the annoyance of having to abort a dive due to hypothermia if wearing a wetsuit for 70's temperatures. But the bottom current would not normally mess up our drop particularly, as we would be falling so fast at the intersection with it, that we would not get vectored out of the planned drop points by it...and once you get "belly to the bottom", and behind patch reef or wreck structure on the bottom, you stop moving anyway.
And again, a "fast descent" is not an athletic undertaking....it is allowing yourself to fall with no air in your BC, and your body is vertical in the water column, and you are swimming, but not exerting in any way. If we are scooter diving, then it can be a screaming fast descent, which makes it all the more easy to hit a deep wreck, but again, I don't see ability to blow air into my Eustachian Tubes through my nose as a big skill I want to brag about. And this is really all that it takes
As to other conditions unlike what you think of regarding Palm Beach dives:
Craig Suavely dropped me on the Rankin ( wreck off of Stuart/Port St Lucie area) --about 135 deep , on one day where the vis was so bad, that all I could see on descent was my computer --and watching depth as I fell, so I could know when to look around for the wreck ( hoping vis at 120-130 might improve) , I shifted my attention from my computer at about 90 feet deep--to what I was bumping into.....I began bumping into these huge Lincoln Log barracudas, that liked to hang on top of the wreck.....they were not seeing me either--we would collide, and they would probably have been almost as surprised as I was....and I decided this would be a really bad day for spearfishing, and stayed down only about 3 more minutes before deciding this would not be a dive I could find a way to enjoy.
Back to the original point....this was in a discussion where a diver accident occurred, and the comment one poster made was that the diver should not have done a free descent, that they should have used a line to go down--that this was a safer and better method. I took issue with this, as a procedure. This is how this thread began, not by my just "out of the blue", deciding to trash use of lines for descent and ascent.
I am not going to try to change anyone that likes using lines. What I will do, is when I go out of this area, to a place like Misool ( which is likely in the next year as a photography and expedition leading job--ie., free....), and if the boat is going over a high current drop site they would normally anchor on, I will ask the Captain if he would be willing to drop Sandra and I on this prior to hooking off on it. I would suggest how far up-current I would like the drop, and if there is no or little current, I won't make a peep about this, because we can do our dives the way we always do, and swim back to the boat at dive end.
