jhayes75
Contributor
Well after a long 2 ½ month dry spell, I finally freed myself up to get some diving in. I met up with my LDS at their Pensacola condo. He had an advanced class going out to The Joseph L Meak so I decided to hitch a ride. Once at the condo I decided to do a gear check and it is a good thing I did. My wife apparently packed my booties and mistakenly put one of her booties in my bag. It would have been very uncomfortable to ware two left boots so I rushed over to MBT before they closed. Thanks MBT for holding the door open. The weather was awesome and the seas were flat. Our crew member was in training and it was her first time tying into a wreck. When she rolled off she had lost her mask. After getting her a spare she was down and completed the task. I now had a mission to retrieve that mask since I was the only one not in a class and had the freedom to roam. There was a bundle of some sort of vegetation floating on the surface with some fish under. It made for a great Photo opp. The viz was around 40 to 50 ft with a little less on the bottom. It took me all of about 5 minutes to complete the mission. I was thankful for the bright yellow snorkel. It was good to sharpen up on my search and recovery skills. We had minimum current if any at all. I had a max depth of 90ft lasting 35 min at a minimum temp of 84deg. I started to take a few photos when I noticed some water intruding into my camera housing. I quickly turned off the camera. I drained the water from the camera housing and retired photographing for the day. During the SI one of the other divers said that he had lost his snorkel when he rolled off the boat. Now I had another mission and since photography was out, it gave me something to do. This one would be a little tougher since it would be off the wreck a little bit. I used the anchor line as a reference and took a heading towards the boat. It was not hard to spot the bright yellow snorkel. This dive was to a max depth of 92ft for 39min. We had two very nice dives and two happy divers. We finished off the evening with a meal at the Ore house and watched the LSU game. On day two we headed over to Ft Pickens and I splashed in at 6:45am for a 60min dive. Its great to have a night Owl pass since the gate has a code now. Dive two was 35min, three 38min and dive four for 20 min. I brought the camera down again after carefully examining the housing. Well it still leaked and this time I fried my camera. I now have an Excuse to purchase a new and better camera. I might go with the Sea and Sea Dx2. We also found a brand new AuqaLung Sling shot fin. There were no takers on the surface, so one of our divers said that would be a great gag gift for his twin brother who has only one leg and thought that he would love diving. Not a bad find for that purpose. I introduced them to Scuba board and they have campsites booked for Vortoberfest. Here are the few pictures I was able to take.
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