Dive Report
Just thought I would give an update. I went out and looked for the equipment. It is what is called a Van Dorn Bottle and is used for collecting water samples at depth. Andrew, a lab tech at Yale met me at the boat ramp Wednesday midday. He motored me out to the spot and filled me in on the situation. Apparently a grad student had been taking a sample and the line "broke" right at the end of base of devise where a knot should have been. I had been hoping that some rope might still be attached and above the bottom, but that wasn't going to happen.
The plan I had was to sink to the bottom attach a wreck reel to the anchor line and then run concentric circles around the anchor, expanding the search area by five feet until I either found the target or was out of air. The bottom was at 45 feet. Every time Andrew mentioned the water temperature it seemed to get a little colder. By the time I got in the water he was talking upper 40s. The good new is that if you are diving wet, you fill the suit with warm water above the thermocline. So I had an excellent plan.
The first casualty of war is the plan. I flipped off the boat and let my wetsuit warm and started to descend the anchor line. Before anyone tells me... I already took six pounds off my rig to compensate for the fresh water. But, as I descended I started to get some suit compression and was pretty negative by the time I reached the bottom, with visibility only couple of feet I discovered the bottom all of a sudden.
When I reach it I simply kept going going into a blackness that can only be described as black mud reflecting darkness in a darkroom after someone throws a black sack over your head. We later found the anchor had sunk more than five feet into the very soupy bottom. My first thought was that if I try to deploy a wreck line in this mess, I will die.
I recovered control of my buoyancy fairly quickly but decided three things: First, without a line attached to the Van Dorn Bottle, it was some where under several feet of loose silt. Second, this water was in fact colder than a witch's tit in a brass bra (I was out on the frozen fins dive on New Years a few times so I know of what I speak). And Finally, I said I would give this try and I was going to resist the urge to just bag it.
I adjust my bouyancy so that I was neutral above the bottom in a head down position, so that I could keep my light on the bottom and began swimming in a concentric cirlcle from the anchor line scanning the bottom for any sign of the instrument. I swam the pattern and felt my feet get colder and colder, checking my air and wondering why it kept say I had plenty (on regular dives it seems to shoot down at a depressingly high rate).
The only two man made objects I came across were a dixie cup and a kiddie swim fin. After I found that I wondered if there were any possibility of missing swimmers... After all, a cold, nearly hypoxic environment like this could keep a body intact for years..... I pulled the fin out of the muck, somewhat relieved that no bones fell out, and tucked it under my arm for the rest of the dive.
When my air was finally down to about 800 psi and my toes and fingers were screaming with pain, I gratefully surfaced and headed back to the boat giving Andy the fin as a potential trophy to be mounted and presented to the grad student at a beer fueled department function.
For everyone that wanted to have a crack at this job, that is what you missed out on.
