Your Most Innocuous, Yet Memorable Dive

[Dish]

This board is loaded with folks that have rather extensive dive resumes. Yet, within those resumes, there are several dives that you remember more than others. Many involve exigent circumstances where intenstinal fortitude ruled the day.

I'm curious about those dives that did not require quick-thinking response, cunning adaptations to the dire circumstances, or just pissed off sharks, but rather a simple dive that sticks in your memory as a cool dive... as mundane as it might be.

Since I brought it up, I will start.

After I graduated from the Naval Academy, I was "stashed" in the sailing program until I was scheduled to start my Naval Aviation career in Pensacola. One day, while tying up our training yawl, my glasses fell off my head into the water. Being a certified diver, I figured that I would simply grab my kit and retrieve said glasses. (This was my only pair of glasses, which my myopic friends will understand) How I got into the sailing basin (or back out, for that matter) is beyond me.

However I did it, I ended up by the hull and descended. This was my first experience with 1 foot visibility, which I found very intriguing. Once I found the bottom I began my search. Too my surprise, I found a pipe fitting, many bolts, fish, some crabs, some bottles (we are the Navy, mind you), my glasses and a shoe. Of course, I'm somewhat taken aback by finding a shoe, but with my glasses retrieved, I made my way to whatever exit I required and lived happily ever after.

Like I said, mundane, but I still remember that dive to this day.

What's your most memorable, non-life threatening dive?

BTW, this may be the most unexciting threat in Scuba Board history.

 

[shoredivr]

I wanted to dive the wreck of the Gargantua, near the Cabot Head Lighthouse on the Bruce Peninsula, Georgian Bay. The Gargantua sits in eight feet of water in the Wingfield Basin, a shallow anchorage now for pleasure craft. The pin shows the wreck, which while sitting on the bottom, also sticks up above the waterline. Small shrubs have taken root on the remains of the wooden steamer, which sank in 1952 after being towed into the harbour.

Gargantua (Barge), abandoned, 1952

The Ship Wrecks of Cabot Head Light Station

To get to the wreck, I drove out to the old lighthouse, spotting a black bear en route along the 11km gravel road that hugs the limestone cliffs and cold blue waters of Georgian Bay.

I geared up in the parking lot, and hiked for about ten minutes to the access point which is the point on the top right of the map. The point where the Gargantua lies is all private land, so the lighthouse was the only shore access. It was late August and the water in the shallow Wingfield Basin was an unbelievable 78F, so I was a tad overdressed in a drysuit. I submerged and swam across the bottom of the boat channel at 10ft. This gradually rose to 8ft, which I followed west towards the wreck. I found the hull, and poked around in the weeds, disturbing small fish.

The viz was about 8 ft, and the sunlight was coming down pleasingly on the wooden hull and green weeds. I decided to make a complete circuit of the Gargantua, hoping for a few photos.

After about 10 minutes I was at the bow when a furry form dive bombed me. It took a few seconds to realize it was a beaver. It made another dive right in front of me. The warning was clear. Beavers have teeth, I thought, and there must be a den nearby. I did not get a photo.

I turned around and swam back the way I came, and headed for the surface. There, I discovered the beaver had a mate, and both were slapping the water with their tails and screaming at me in beaver.

I surface swam away from the wreck and the beavers followed me for some distance, still shouting about "get off my lawn and stay off". Later I found out that locals knew about the beaver den on what's left of the deck of the Gargantua. I laughed all the way to the exit point.

The wreck is not all that spectacular, but the journey and scenery are great. Think I'll do it again some time.

 

[Kharon]

My first dive at a secret location on Bonaire. Easy entry, not too difficult swim path through coral heads, and tons of fish. At one point, many schools and individual fish all burst together converging on one area and then filed past me. It was like the finale of a fireworks display.

 

[Hoag]

I would have to choose two dives, but they were back to back, so I'll list them both.

I was a part of a group on a Live Aboard trip to the Socorro Islands. We were diving just off of Roca Partida, a little rock in the middle of nowhere. We back-rolled off of the Zodiac and as we did, passing right under the Zodiac was a school of Hammerhead Sharks. Hammerheads tend to be shy, and they don't really like divers, so the school simply opened up to a huge donut around us. They were close enough to see, but not close enough to get any pictures of. It didn't take long before they went their own way and left us far behind.

Thinking that that dive couldn't be topped, a few of us were joking before the next dive that "Well that will be the best dive of the trip. We might as well go home now." We were wrong. Again, right as we back-rolled off of the Zodiac, at about 30ft below us was a very friendly Whale Shark. She not only "hung out" with us for the whole dive, but when we went back to the Live Aboard, she followed us and did a couple laps around the boat as is to give us one last chance to see her.

In both dives, if we had been a hundred yards from where we did our entry, or if we entered 30 seconds before or after when we did, we would have totally missed these two amazing encounters. It looks like luck was on our side that day.

 

[stuartv]

I was diving with my buddy Drew off Oahu. A pretty generic reef dive. Drew had just put some Hydro-Tac stick-on gauge reader lenses in his mask. We were swimming along a bottom that was kind of a rolling terrain. Drew was to my left and just a little in front of me.

As we were swimming up a very low "hill", I saw a turtle appear in the distance as we both were approaching the crest of the hill, coming towards us. I looked at Drew to see if he saw it, too. Drew was clearly looking at his crusty old Cochran dive computer, tilting his head up and down to compare how it looked through the gauge reader lenses to how it looked without. I unclipped my GoPro and started filming our head-on collision course with the turtle. He never knew it was there until the moment the turtle b****-slapped him right across the face. LMAO!

And the proof:

 

[mdb]

A solo night lobster dive off Wind N' Sea Beach in La Jolla, CA..

Went in just after midnight on the opening day of lobster season.

The Beach had very little diver traffic, too far from the harbor, a small offshore reef.
Only a few locals were ever diving the site.

I lived three houses in from the beach.

The reef was less than a 100 meters offshore.

When I reached the dive site the bottom was crawling with lobsters, almost a lobster parade
marching about on this moonlit night.

I hovered and watched for awhile in amazement.

I finally took one nice large lobster-take what you are going to eat.

It was a mild dive about 60 FSW, little current or swell, but memorable.

 

[KevinG58]

Several years ago I was diving in Cabo san Lucas, Baja. On one of our dives near Lands End, the DM led us through a passage through the rocks from the Sea of Cortes to the Pacific ocean.
While the surge in the shallow, narrow passage was strong, it wasn't particularly challenging; hug the sandy bottom and keep kicking. In my mind it was very cool to go from one body of water to the other.

 

[SeaHorse81]

What a great question, OP! Mine is too boring to even write about, but it fits the challenge perfectly.

I was on a liveaboard for a week where things had not gone well all week long. Crappy diving, multiple boat maintenance problems, bad crew morale, cold showers ... you name it, it went wrong. On the last dive of the last day, they chose a "wreck" that was more like a large piece of garbage in the water. It struck me not so much as a dive site as just a place to throw us off the boat and claim that they'd fulfilled their obligation to provide diving for the day.

Despite all of that, I was very aware that it would be my last time in the ocean for a year, so I just focused on being completely there, noticing everything there was to notice about the experience. I was just one with the water for almost an hour, not distracted by any visuals since there was nothing worth looking at anyway. I just enjoyed being neutral, watching the little particulates go by, casually noting the activities of the other divers. It got very Zen, actually, and the time passed quickly. Too quickly. I was the last one back on the boat, trying to make the experience last as long as possible. It still amazes me that it worked out that way, and is one of the dives I remember with the greatest clarity even though it happened nearly ten years ago.

Yes, I've purposely looked to recreate the experience as often as possible ever since, but this one was special because it was the first, and was completely unexpected.

 

[Brandon]

Keeping with the spirit of the OP's theme:

Before I moved out to Unalaska (Dutch Harbor), Alaska, I recall pouring over the marine charts for the area, excited to be living by the sea and all of the diving opportunities it would provide. Marked clearly on the charts, a stone's throw from the center of downtown, was a chunk of rock called the Iliuliuk Reef nestled in between a channel.

Photos I could find of this area showed seabirds nesting on top, sea lions hauled out, and pods of orcas cruising past. I surmised that this would make for an excellent dive, and how convenient, too!

Shortly after moving there, I became acquainted with a number of local divers who scoffed a bit at the prospect of diving Iliuliuk Reef. Some two years later, my good friend/dive buddy Jennifer and I decided to check it out for ourselves on a uncommonly windless November day.

With thin pancake ice above us for most of the dive, we explored the reef for all of about 25 minutes. Max depth was 12', and we would have needed a shovel to get any deeper. After a thorough review, we determined that Iliuliuk Reef was barren of life and nothing more than a chunk of rock rubble.

It did give birth to our rule that all potential dive sites are worth diving at least once...

 

[DiverDownD3]

Back in November I did a double dip on U-352. First dive there was a few sand tigers starting to show up, but conditions were nice for that site 65' viz and a very light current. During our surface interval, owner of Olympus did a solo dive and when he came back up he informed us there were now a ton of sand tigers on the wreck. He said that was the most he had probably ever seen on the sub and that it's very rare to have even more than a couple down there. When we got down there for our second dive, I counted more than 30 of them. Sand tigers + sub made for a good day.