We found some explosives on a Sunday morning dive in an old quarry we had never visted before. Didn't know what they were at the time, but it was my very 1st dive with my new Ikelite case and S95, so I took a few photos. My buddy called early that evening,said a neighbor's kid was now a young policeman and that Mr. young policeman would really like to see my photos. So I sent the photos by email about 7 PM. Several hours later I had 3 different police agencies phone me, the last one at quarter to midnight! And it was a real tragedy because they
demanded that buddy & I both skip work on Monday and go diving again. Public service should always be such a sacrifice: forced to go diving instead of sitting in our offices on a gorgeous summer day. The next morning we drove back out and met a couple police and fire units at the quarry. We and were asked to go in first to locate the sticks (some stuff inside white plastic, about the size of roadway flares) and mark the locations so the fire dept divers could find them. We left reflector slabs next to each spot, set an SMB in the general area and then got out to let the Fire Dept divers do their thing.
The fire dept divers went out and packaged up the stuff in some manner (didn't bring it out with them, IDK why). Then they got lost on the way back. Yep, got lost in a relatively square quarry hardly 1/4 acre in size. They wandered into a small pocket-like area just to the side of the exit ramp and simply could not seem to figure out what went wrong. I guess their compasses said the exit should be in this corner, so they kept running back and forth along 6m of wall as we all stood around looking down straight down on them hardly 5m away and their boss rattled away trying to explain the navigation problem to them over their mask radios. You could tell they were pros because they stayed down discussing the problem the full 15min it took to get them otta there. A recreational diver would have just gone 2m up and
looked, but serious divers apparently don't peek.
When we left to go home, the cop in charge said there was likely to be some explosives residue in the water, so we should rinse our drysuits quite well, and probably not try to carry them on any flying trips (i.e. past explosive-sensing dogs) in the next several weeks
Just to be safe we decided to rinse the suits immediately: we went diving at a 2nd location on our way home, unfortunately extending so much time on this official police business that I hardly made it in to work at all.
Unfortunately the police remained a bit upset about that site and ended up draining the entire quarry to make sure they found everything. My sincere apologies to the resident fish. I certainly never meant that to happen.
Drysuit has since flown several times with no problems.
Can't think of anything else I've found that was nearly as interesting.
