Wow what a day!!! We left Tampa around 7:00 am (sorry 8buck, I'm a lot closer) and arrived in totally fogged out Venice around 8:30. I think there was more daylight in Tampa when we left then Venice when we arrived!!! Anway...
The morning started with an incredible 19 divers and 6 non-divers!!! Of the 19 divers only four had ever dove Venice and successfully found a shark's tooth. Sounds like the beginning of a very long day... So how do you turn a long day into something a little more enjoyable???? You start spinning a story... (Most of you don't know me well enough yet but I thrive of practical jokes; especially with new divers.) Everyone wanted to know why are there so many teeth located in one spot. Well, being the smart@$$ that I am, I went into this lenghty explanation of how centuries ago the Indians living in the area had a very sacred "rite of manhood" ritual. It was to perform shark dentistry on the local populace of sharks. Hence all of the teeth. Imagine the smiles once they realized that I was spinning a yarn. I can be very believable when I want to be.
Now back to the diving. The water looked great until you actually walked 1/2 way down to the water. The water was a light olive green and murky white. I've always wondered what St. Patrick's Day milk would look like....
The great news is that this was only from the beach out to the sand bar. At the sand bar the viz was much better; it was at least 5 ft. The water temperate was hovering around 73 degrees. Most everyone was in the water and out within 40 minutes. I guess they are still thinking this is a boat dive and they have a time limit. The seasoned pros stayed in for much longer and found most of the teeth for the first dive. Unfortunately no megs.
The second dive was about the same except the visibility was starting to drop off. In some areas it was 2 ft or less but in most areas it was still around 5 ft. We tried to split up the divers into teams, putting teeth finders with non-teeth finders to help show them how it's done. No wonder they weren't finding anything. They just swam around 3 ft off the bottom chasing fish. I guess they were trying to do some of the denistry stuff I told them about.
All in all we had a great day and I hope some of them return to do it again.
). Family reunion. I'm going to try to make it on the 17th (been a while since I caught up with Walter).
