Carolina Beach, NC

[wwwes]

Found some old posts about diving the Ranger. I am very familiar with the inlet and have often thought about diving it. Did any of you ever do it?

 

[ncknightdiver]

Hello I am heading to Carolina Beach NC for a week long vacation with family August 23. However, i want to get under the water so i was wondering if anybody knows where i can shore dive nearby. Also i would like to maybe do some spear fishing same thing from the shore. Any help would be greatly appreciated

Not much shore diving in the area. Spend a few bucks and take a charter with Aquatic Safaris out of Wilmington or Cape Fear Divers out of Carolina Beach. Usually you can buddy up with someone there on the boat.

 

[mrjoshw]

I agree, Aquatic Safaris is a good charter. They have a few go out during the day so you have a few options as to what wreck you want to dive.

 

[OCDinNC]

If you can afford it, there is great diving on the local charters, there are great wrecks in clear water right off the coast from where you're at. You'll be surprised how good the diving is in N.C. if you've never been.

QUOTE]
I would recommend Aquatic Safaris in Wrightsville Beach. Went out 3 days with them last June when I took my family there. 2 days of inshore to barely offshore wrecks, but the goody was when we hit the Cassimir and the Normannia. (My choices, I might add.) Gazillions of fish; so many it was hard to see wreckage. The folks at AS were good to deal with, friendly, helpful, reasonable, professional. Can't ask for much more.

 

[herman]

I bet he has alread made his decision....the post is 3 yrs old

 

[OCDinNC]

I bet he has alread made his decision....the post is 3 yrs old

Man, I love to laugh, and I'm no stranger to laughing at myself. DUH!

Kinda funny it was on the list though...

 

[herman]

I know the feeling, I was about to post to a thread a while back when it seemed like I had responded to a similar thread.......similar nothing, it was a reopened thread I did respond to.....4 or 5 years ago. Just glad I realized it before I hit enter.

 

[Diver-6873]

I had to chime in on this old post. My parents along with a friend and fish spotter originally discovered the Peterhoff in the early 1960s. When discovered her cannons were still positioned and she was being circled by many sharks. The navy had been wanting to find her for years. . . Quite a history, they recovered many artifacts privately and during a naval salvage. Some at still on display at the Fort Fisher museum along with so many others from local wrecks.

 

[bradlw]

ancient thread conversation, I know... but re. the comments about visibility
I grew up in that area. Sometimes the vis can be quite good in the intracoastal. I've done a few interesting dives around jetties, under bridges, etc. in the intracoastal and sounds that would remind you of diving a ledge in South Florida. I don't recall the conditions that would bring that good vis in, but it does happen

An example of poor visibilty, the very first scuba dive I have in my logbook after my OW certification was in a 40ft deep hole near Banks Channel at Wrightsville Beach. Roughly here 34.20919742352346, -77.80815017006324 A place I used to fish occasionally. We wanted to see what was on the bottom there. Vis as noted in my logbook was 0-5ft. I remember that my buddy and I did the dive holding onto each other...and I was the only one of us with a compass. We tried to swim a pattern using the compass, , and we had to swim with the compass touching the glass of our mask to see it!

Otherwise yeah, for scuba and getting any sort of good depth and vis, you've got a long boat ride ahead of you!

 

[Diver-6873]

In the late 60s when I first started to dive off the Carolina coast and into the 70s, we would get as much as ~100ft of horizontal visibility for a month or so mid-summer …. It was a great time.