Well it looks like I'm the first to come to respond after the event, so here's my report [well, my report for the whole weekend!]
Saturday was Cape Ann Day. It was cold and rainy, the conditions were horrible, and it was a truely wonderful time! Only three of us braved the weather to get together, Shellbird, MSilvia and myself. After some discussion we decided Stage Fort Park might actually be sheltered enough to be diveable, as the nautical forecast was stating 20-25 knot winds from the NE and 6-12 foot swells. The front side of Stage Fort had some pretty large swells and breakers onto the beach, as well as quite a few divers, so we headed over to check out the left cove. The swells weren't quite as big, and there wasn't much for breakers on the beach, and we were the only ones there, so we decided to give it a go.
Visibility...well... wasn't. I could see my knees, but I couldn't see my fins. The whole dive it was rare if you could see both of the others, so we sort of kept in a line, with Shellbird and MSilvia sticking close together, and I, with the flag, skirting around them so that no one ended up tangled in the flag with the surge. We stuck to the bottom and moved really slow, found some marbles left over from a treasure hunt dive from a few weeks ago, and chased a few bugs.
Shellbird managed to come home with a souvenir... a sea urchin shell. After being a little turned around and trying to find our way back to the beach, we finally succeeded and crawled ourselves out of the water.
Given the horrible conditions, the visibility that was for not, and the rocking surge, Shellbird managed through her first non-training Open Water dive wonderfully!
Shellbird was a little stressed from the conditions, and decided against a second dive. I still had a good chunk of air left, so MSilvia went off for another tank and we decided to go try and catch us some dinner over by the rocks on the left side. Off we went bug hunting, which was one of the most enjoyable dives I've ever had, as the surge on that side was so fierce it became a drift dive with a pull up every 10 ft or so. I just relaxed and cruised around. We chased a bunch of bugs, but ended up without any keepers. I fought with one for a little while, that I suspect was a keeper, but I just couldn't get a good angle on him and couldn't coax him out. So we ended up with 6 empty beer cans and another sea urchin shell for shellbird.
After we headed over to a seafood place across from Cape Ann Marina for dinner. Picking up twin 6 packs from the liquer store next door [with 3 of us, we decided to pass on the keg] we sat down for our feast of feasts... calamari, fish chowder, MSilvia and Shellbird decided to swallow their pride and split the twin lobster special. I couldn't bring myself to accept failure, and so I went with shrimp
After a couple hours of conversation both in the restaurant and in the rain outside, we decided to call it an evening and headed our separate ways.
Due to the poor visibility, I didn't bring out the camera so we unfortunately don't have much for visual documentation, so if you want to see the pictures, you're gonna have to come on the next one!
Well, since this post is getting a little lengthy, I think I'll save the rest of my weekend for another post.
