Hey all. Planning a trip with the family to this area and wanting to dive on a site or two. This will be the first time I have organized a trip for diving and taken my boat. I will have my cousin who is a very new diver and myself who is an IDEA AOW certified but I have not been in three years.
The site I want to hit is in 27 ft of water called the VAMAR. It is off the tip of Cape San Blas. I have been out in the St. George Sound and my boat handled that quite well. I have also been to PC Fl a few times and while the cut does get pretty rough, I learned how to negotiate it after stuffing my bow once. That was entirely my fault and a result of a steep learning curve. The biggest problem I have found so far in my boat is a following sea. It tends to dig the bow in hard if I get on the face of a swell. We were coming back in off of PC and had some pretty large swells. Don't know what size and if I said, I'd be guessing, but they were big enough I could not see over the swells when we were in the trough, while I was standing up. That made me a little nervous coming in with a following sea that pitched the stern up a couple of times.
This site I want to go to is just a few miles off of the tip and apparently in pretty calm waters. Anybody been there and can offer advice?
Yes, it is a Bayliner. I know they get a hard time on here, and most of the time for good reason. Just remember, Bayliner did to boats what Ford did to cars. They put a lot of people into boats that could not and would not have been able to do it otherwise. This one has a lot of big boat features like 9 scuppers that drain the deck almost immediately. I found this out the hard way when I stuffed the bow in PC coming over the wake of a trawler. It covered the deck with about 4" of water and cleared within about 5 seconds. Most of it went right out the bottom of the transom door. There wasn't any in the hull. I know of two that sank off the coast that are this same model. One was boat pilot error and resulted in a fatality. The other was a freak series of double waves on a chartered boat that resulted from a storm that blew in. The captain there did everything right supposedly and got everybody off without incident. The boat simply took too much water over the side and dropped the bow too much to recover from what I understand.
Anyway, not wanting to claim this is an offshore boat by any means. But, given fair weather conditions and the above knowledge, would it be feasible to use this unit as a platform for short dive destinations?
Thanks
The site I want to hit is in 27 ft of water called the VAMAR. It is off the tip of Cape San Blas. I have been out in the St. George Sound and my boat handled that quite well. I have also been to PC Fl a few times and while the cut does get pretty rough, I learned how to negotiate it after stuffing my bow once. That was entirely my fault and a result of a steep learning curve. The biggest problem I have found so far in my boat is a following sea. It tends to dig the bow in hard if I get on the face of a swell. We were coming back in off of PC and had some pretty large swells. Don't know what size and if I said, I'd be guessing, but they were big enough I could not see over the swells when we were in the trough, while I was standing up. That made me a little nervous coming in with a following sea that pitched the stern up a couple of times.
This site I want to go to is just a few miles off of the tip and apparently in pretty calm waters. Anybody been there and can offer advice?
Yes, it is a Bayliner. I know they get a hard time on here, and most of the time for good reason. Just remember, Bayliner did to boats what Ford did to cars. They put a lot of people into boats that could not and would not have been able to do it otherwise. This one has a lot of big boat features like 9 scuppers that drain the deck almost immediately. I found this out the hard way when I stuffed the bow in PC coming over the wake of a trawler. It covered the deck with about 4" of water and cleared within about 5 seconds. Most of it went right out the bottom of the transom door. There wasn't any in the hull. I know of two that sank off the coast that are this same model. One was boat pilot error and resulted in a fatality. The other was a freak series of double waves on a chartered boat that resulted from a storm that blew in. The captain there did everything right supposedly and got everybody off without incident. The boat simply took too much water over the side and dropped the bow too much to recover from what I understand.
Anyway, not wanting to claim this is an offshore boat by any means. But, given fair weather conditions and the above knowledge, would it be feasible to use this unit as a platform for short dive destinations?
Thanks
