I will admit I was a little nervous, and excited, about my first shore dive - but when the foreman of a fishing pier asked if my buddy and I could do some recovery work, my enthusiasm really took off. We recovered six ~12-foot sections of scaffolding walkways by scouring the bottom for them, then tying them up for the pier workers to hoist up. Watching them go up (from a safer distance) was a bit of an awesome, yet emphemeral, experience that I'd like to repeat.
That earned us enough cash to fill our tanks
and get some brewskies. eyebrow
I just knew I'd love goal-oriented diving (like, "go find stuff!"), and I got paid on my first try. Not a bad start, eh?
We've found plenty of stuff due to the hurricane(s), thus the junk isn't worth mentioning here. But I did get a neat chisel hammer off of the bottom a while back. On that same dive my buddies loaded my side-pocket down with over eight pounds of lead fishing weights they had found around a pier. Talk about an awkward trim angle - my right fin kept sinking to the bottom, and kicking back with all that weight was a killer workout, lol. ... maybe my 'friends' were trying to tell me something? (I know how much they all want to inherit my old-school mask.)
Then, yesterday off of Pompano beach, I used my shears, then my Dive Rite lift bag / safety sausage to get this:
http://www.countryvue.com/Pictures/anchor.jpg to the surface from about 45 feet (the second reef). That was a comical find... once I got it to my dive buddies to see, we all started laughing (again, at 45 feet). Someone might even have a picture of me with it down there. OK, OK,
not a treasure, but it is certainly a 'disposable' that I will use without regret if I, too, have to cut it off at some later date. :14:
Best,
Mambo Dave
