Belmar Back Bay
Shore dives are among my favorite. I love to poke around and look at things and look under things and just go round and sight see. Kind of like shopping. I LOVE shopping.
Divers Two organized a bay dive this evening and about 10 divers showed to participate. Steve gave a briefing suggesting approximate directions and times to swim about. I was buddied up with Sterling and he quickly learned my lightening quick ability to kit up. Hey, I had to stop and talk to PIR8 (Bob) about his upcoming trip and to Al about Saturdays boat dive and with the car next to mine just because.
We entered the water at the beach and started a surface swim towards the dock, chatting a bit about our dive plan on the way out. The swim was pleasant and effortless, easy, floaty, too easy, weightless even.................(OH!!!!!!! Blonde moment!!!!! ) Luckily Steve was still on the dock and went and retrieved my weight harness, right where I left it. He promised not to tell anyone but we were not alone.
Back on track we continued on out till we were deep enough to drop down.
My navigational skills are legendary so Sterling was to lead the way and I would follow with the dive flag. Unfortunately he had a compass malfunction and we needed to switch roles. I did not let us down, kinda.
I took a heading and off we went. Things are just starting to wake up here in the bay. The water temps were a balmy 48 F, the visibility about 15 feet and the “locals are feeling frisky” if you know what I mean. We got to the pilings and headed south and immediately came upon two horseshoe crabs having a ..........private moment. We moved right along and passed over several more good sized horseshoe crabs moving about. In a patch of sandy bottom was a lone starfish bigger than the size of my hand. In and about the growth on the bottom were several spider crabs and small and medium sized blue claws. As we passed over them they would stop and raise their claws and wave them at us, sort of like you would wave greetings to a passer by. We continued along our way just taking it all in.
We swam around the pilings checking out the stairs that lead to the sailboat school parking lot. What are they there for? And then headed out towards the bulkhead. Unfortunately the water was only about 5 foot here so we headed west following Steves recommendation of 5 minutes so that we did not end up in the channel or past it in the flats.
On this leg of our trip we past over several armies of spider crabs, and this time they were waving at us menacingly as if, by virtue of their numbers, they could scare us off. From what we saw, there will be an abundance of baby spider crabs this season, their little orgies looked like battle scenes from the Star Wars movies with these long legged creatures all scattered and thrashing about.
Just shy of 5 minutes I was becoming concerned since we were again in 5 feet of water. I popped to the surface to get a bearing and............... Well............ Land was pretty far away. My navigational abilities were true to form. I think had we swam another minute we would have been in Lakewood or Ohio maybe. It was getting dark, this was not good. The logical thing to do would be to swim east for 6 minutes and we would be home. Actually, the logical thing to do would be to give Sterling my compass and buddy up with the dive flag but we went with Plan A.
As we traveled back we passed over some more scattered spider crabs and a little poke would send them scurrying and several blue claws rummaging about, we came across another horseshoe crab which I stopped to play with, a cinderblock with a few more crabs making themselves comfortable inside, and a field of teeny tiny baby star fish. They looked like little star confetti and stuck to your glove when you picked them up. And a good sized blue claw crab that bared its teeth at me. It was so cool I poked him and made him do it again. 6 minutes later, with my AAD in full swing and my compass nowhere to be found, we were still not in past the channel buoy but we could still see land, I didn’t have us lost at sea yet. A surface swim was in order to get us back on track.
We pulled into the boat ramp just as the last of daylight was falling away. All in all........a great kick off to the shore dives