decapoddiver
Contributor
My buddy and I decided to try and do a scallop/lobster dive yesterday off my boat. Launched the boat, tried to start it, drained the battery trying and had to put it back on the trailer so that I could get access to jump it with my truck (sigh). Got it started and headed out. We immediately noticed some small rollers but weren't concerned. We anchored in our scallop area and my buddy hopped in first. He said that the vis was crud but I figured it might be better at depth. It sometimes is. It wasn't. After 5 minutes and a trip back up the anchor line to the boat looking for him we finally joined up at the anchor. Two foot vis max. If we didn't bump into a scallop, we didn't see it. After about thirty minutes and getting split up twice we decided to rethink our plans. Vis was down to less than a foot.
We cleaned the 40-50 that we caught and decided to look at a potential bug spot with our remaining air. Yippee! I descended and found four foot vis and no bugs but burned up my tank looking in some serious surge. We decided that with the coming tide that the vis might improve so we headed back out to the scallops.
Things were much better this time. Six foot vis and we were able to actually see the scallops. Managed to load my three bags and his two. All in all, not a bad day but low vis scalloping is not something I want to do again.
We cleaned the 40-50 that we caught and decided to look at a potential bug spot with our remaining air. Yippee! I descended and found four foot vis and no bugs but burned up my tank looking in some serious surge. We decided that with the coming tide that the vis might improve so we headed back out to the scallops.
Things were much better this time. Six foot vis and we were able to actually see the scallops. Managed to load my three bags and his two. All in all, not a bad day but low vis scalloping is not something I want to do again.
