Lake Michigan - Grain Barge

[netmage]

Just returned from an evening dive coordinated by one of the shops I support. The boat was Enterprise Marine and can be found at www.captaindales.com. Big heavy boat - kinda slow, but definately caters to the advanced/tec diver. christmas tree ladder, lots of space for gear and changing good crew and rigging setup to assist w/ deco, dropped o2, etc...

Anyway - we dove the "Grain Barge", about 5 miles off Waukegon harbor. It went down last year in about 115-125' of water. Nice huge wreck with big open holds you can easily drop down into with massive wreck damage to provide nooks and crannies and even swimthrough around the wreck. Unfortunately we were diving Air, my computer kicked into deco around 18 minutes and we turned the dive. Conditions were awesome, 1-2' seas. Visability was 25-35'. Did a very slow ascent, 1 minute stop at 50', and 3 minute at 15'. Deco cleared somewhere around 40' with the ascent. Total dive time was just over 30 minutes.

 

[Juls64]

We were out on the Great Lakes Explorer last year, the day after that went down. We joked about how good the fishing would be around there.

Thanks for the report!


Juls

 

[netmage]

We were out on the Great Lakes Explorer last year, the day after that went down. We joked about how good the fishing would be around there.

That does bring up this point - this was the first wreck I had been on in the Great Lakes where there was fishing line present.... We ran into about 3 lines, one coming down, and two near the end. They got tangled up in my manifold and had to cut em loose... So definately ensure you have a cutting instrument and easy access to it when doing these wrecks...!