Welcome to ScubaBoard, the world's largest scuba diving community. Registration is not required to read the forums, but we encourage you to join. Joining has its benefits and enables you to participate in the discussions.
Benefits of registering include
Your wife sounds awesome! I think getting more women into the sport and supporting those who are already in it is probably the best way. I have had some incredibly supportive people around me that have helped me feel welcomed in the community - it meant the world to me then and I hope that with time the diving world will be more open to all kinds of people. Thank you for your comment
Funny, I don't know any other woman like that.
Frank, I hope you both know just how admired and respected Melanie is among many of us Texas divers. She’s been a role model for me, it was always such a pleasure and sense of comfort to watch her quiet competence in action every time we went out with you guys here in Texas. Y’all are really missed.Funny, I don't know any other woman like that.
When we ran the Spree in Texas, the men, especially the ones who ran out of air that she had to drag from the water blubbering by their stack and swivel hated mine, called her every name in the book, weren't going to go on a dive boat with "that bitch".
Her super power is finding lost things in the water. Mine is dropping her in the right place. We were working for the Navy in Key West, and the MDSU team were complaining to the scientist that they couldn't put the bolt in the hole on the underwater rig he had invented. Melanie was walking by and she had installed the rig many times (it was a major PITA, and you had to hold your mouth just right to install this particular bolt, inch and a quarter by 8" long) and the scientist asked if they needed her to go show them how it was done. She had briefed them how to do it, but being a girl, she couldn't possibly know anything, right?
We were practicing mine hunting with the MH-53 squadron out of Norfolk. We'd go out and drop the mine shapes, the mine hunters would find them, the shrimp boats would drag them around at night, then the mine hunters would go find them again. Then we had to recover them, some were miles from where we dropped them. The bottom was "shrimp bottom", sand covered with 8-12" of fine silt, about 5 feet of visibility. The trick is to follow the fish. Since there were no features on the bottom, I would look around with a wide bean sonar and get within a couple of hundred feet of a concentration of fish, drop her over, and she would go follow the fish and find the mine shape. It was an awesome job, they would hire us after the MDSU team gave up looking. We were good for about 10 dives a day between the team, and would find 4-6 mine shapes in 10 drops. Mark them and the Navy would com out and recover them later int he day. We made a lot of money on those jobs.
We miss them in Florida too!
