Doot - Doo Doot - Doo Doot - Doo Doot ........Do you think they are stalking me? I am back in Florida for a few days so I figured I would squeeze in a dive. I have played dive tag with several people I met over the winter and missed 2 dives already so I am going out on a 3 tank from Cortez on my own. What is it with Florida dive boats? No benches, no captains chair and no head? We leave the dock under clear skies and 3 inch seas. The first dive is an unidentified steel wreck called the South Jack. Sound familiar? Last time they told me it was a wooden schooner called the Skip Jack. It is scattered debris and intact boilers in 70 feet of water, 16 miles out in the Gulf of Mexico. The mate sets the hook and comes back up and announces that the water temps have cooled to 77 F in the last 2 days and the viz is pretty bad at about 40 foot. I am buddied with a local diver from Sarasota and Ed, an older man who just got back from Bonaire. Conditions are a little disappointing to Ed, he thinks he may have brought too thin a suit for the dive......me? My last dive was 47 F and 15 feet of visibility. Woo Hoo!!!! It’s all relative. Our Sarasota buddy is wearing a shorty and eventually ends up getting stung by some tiny jellyfish during one of our hangs. We splash in, I am wearing my 3ml, BPW and 6 lbs of weight and an AL80 rental tank. Not sure how this will work but we will find out. We go down the line and the wreck comes into view. Yup, I have seen this before. But it is covered in stuff I don’t usually see so we set out to look around......and then.....there it is.......about 20 feet way.....do I swim over and poke it? You know me, I love to do that, but I think not. It is a nurse shark, about 6 foot long. It looks at me and turns and slowly swims away. Doo Doot....Doo Doot....Doo Doot..... I can hear the music playing in my head. We turn and swim on to see what else is hanging around. There are quite a few sea urchins both black and purple, tang in both blue and yellow, red grouper and the mandatory giant grouper. Most weighing in at about 200 lbs. A lone barracuda makes a pass and disappears into the haze. There are many small fish which I recognized back in January but now have forgotten the names. I will have to look them up. Then, tucked in an indentation along the wreck, not very well I might add, is the real thing. About 400 lbs real thing, a giant giant grouper. He is in absolutely no fear of us and simply ignores our presence. Like royalty he is being groomed by a nice sized remora. No....I didn’t poke him either. Our next stop is a coral ledge they called Bull Shark Ledge. 79 F and 70 fsw. We go down the line, I am still not sure how I feel about the weighting. There are times early going down the line when I think that I will be too light when my tank empties and then times late in the dive I still feel heavy. We head out to check what we can see looking high at the coral and anemones and low at the local residents. There are giant grouper, red grouper, spade fish, wrasse, tang, butterfly fish and some yellow, black and white stripe fish that I know I should know the name of. And then I see one. Oh yeah.... A really big sized spiny lobster, just sticking his head out of a hole in the coral. My two buddies are smiling and pointing and I just reach in and grab that puppy by the antennae and start to yank. These guys are strong! Don’t be fooled. The problem is, they don’t have any claws so there is nothing else to grab on to. He pulled so hard the first time I heard my tank bang on the ledge above. I started pulling back and the tug of war began, sand flying up and visibility disappearing. I finally lost my grip and he retreated beyond my reach. This has happened before to me. But I have been trained by big clawed Jersey fighting lobsters. I wait patiently and the water clears and I see the antennae sneaking on out and taking a peek. I give one more quick grab and again I have a hand full of antennae and we tug and wrestle again. But I lost my grip and he was gone again. I am walking away from this one. It isn’t lobster season anyway and I cant take him onboard but I gave him a good scare if nothing else. We swim back to the line, Mr. Bonaire is getting cold, oddly I am not the warmest either. We are on to our final site. Docs Barge. This is 75 feet of wreckage, an old barge broken in half by the current and shifting sands, sitting in 60 fsw off the coast of St Petersburg. Cant believe it, another familiar site. This was the one covered in bait fish so thick I couldn’t see anything and I had to navigate around the barge with one hand on the wreck so as not to get lost when I was on it last. When we tied into the site there was a resident barracuda that circled the boat several times, checking us out. With about 40 foot of viz I could actually see the relief and wreckage. It would be a different dive after all. As we came down the line there was a grouper weighing in at about 200 lbs. backed into a crevice mid wreck, just watching us to see what we would do. I have never seen sooooo many sea cucumbers. I have never seen such big sea cucumbers. They are big, ugly, pooping machines and they are everywhere. I really didn’t want to poke them. But what I did have to play with were cleaner shrimp. They look like long legged spiders but have a colorful tint to their body. I played with quite a few of these, chasing them all about and of course poking them. There were a couple of giant grouper (50-100 lb range) lazing about and snuggled up against the wreckage. I poked those too and they took off definitely perturbed at me. Some others weighing in a bit larger I left alone. There were many sea anemones, coral and sea urchins, along with some smaller tropicals. The barge is broken in half and you can swim into each end where many fish have congregated. You will only do this once when you swim in and you realize you are not alone. It is you and a 400 lb grouper and 700 little bitty bait fish inside with only one way out. In a race to get out....I am pretty sure I will loose. I decide to stick to the outside and chase a school of fish trying to grab their tails. There are several small schools of fish...or maybe they are bait balls, what is the difference? They dart about and are amazing to watch, like synchronized swimmers they all turn, and veer, and roll left and right and change direction in unison, hundreds of fish at a time. 3 humans together couldn’t walk in a straight line on a bet but these fish do an underwater ballet. 61 fsw, 77 F and 46 minutes later we are the last group to leave the water. As I leave the line and swim under the boat towards the ladder I see our friend the barracuda again swimming around in ever tightening circles about us. Just before I get to the dive ladder he is circling rather close by and hesitates and I see him give me “The Look”. Mark knows the look I mean, he gives me the look and swims on making another pass as I go up the ladder. It is 91 F on the surface and we lay back and enjoy the ride in...... As much as you can after 3 dives on a boat with no head
Florida - June 2007
Doot - Doo Doot - Doo Doot - Doo Doot ........Do you think they are stalking me? I am back in Florida for a few days so I figured I would squeeze in a dive. I have played dive tag with several people I met over the winter and missed 2 dives already so I am going out on a 3 tank from Cortez on my own. What is it with Florida dive boats? No benches, no captains chair and no head? We leave the dock under clear skies and 3 inch seas. The first dive is an unidentified steel wreck called the South Jack. Sound familiar? Last time they told me it was a wooden schooner called the Skip Jack. It is scattered debris and intact boilers in 70 feet of water, 16 miles out in the Gulf of Mexico. The mate sets the hook and comes back up and announces that the water temps have cooled to 77 F in the last 2 days and the viz is pretty bad at about 40 foot. I am buddied with a local diver from Sarasota and Ed, an older man who just got back from Bonaire. Conditions are a little disappointing to Ed, he thinks he may have brought too thin a suit for the dive......me? My last dive was 47 F and 15 feet of visibility. Woo Hoo!!!! It’s all relative. Our Sarasota buddy is wearing a shorty and eventually ends up getting stung by some tiny jellyfish during one of our hangs. We splash in, I am wearing my 3ml, BPW and 6 lbs of weight and an AL80 rental tank. Not sure how this will work but we will find out. We go down the line and the wreck comes into view. Yup, I have seen this before. But it is covered in stuff I don’t usually see so we set out to look around......and then.....there it is.......about 20 feet way.....do I swim over and poke it? You know me, I love to do that, but I think not. It is a nurse shark, about 6 foot long. It looks at me and turns and slowly swims away. Doo Doot....Doo Doot....Doo Doot..... I can hear the music playing in my head. We turn and swim on to see what else is hanging around. There are quite a few sea urchins both black and purple, tang in both blue and yellow, red grouper and the mandatory giant grouper. Most weighing in at about 200 lbs. A lone barracuda makes a pass and disappears into the haze. There are many small fish which I recognized back in January but now have forgotten the names. I will have to look them up. Then, tucked in an indentation along the wreck, not very well I might add, is the real thing. About 400 lbs real thing, a giant giant grouper. He is in absolutely no fear of us and simply ignores our presence. Like royalty he is being groomed by a nice sized remora. No....I didn’t poke him either. Our next stop is a coral ledge they called Bull Shark Ledge. 79 F and 70 fsw. We go down the line, I am still not sure how I feel about the weighting. There are times early going down the line when I think that I will be too light when my tank empties and then times late in the dive I still feel heavy. We head out to check what we can see looking high at the coral and anemones and low at the local residents. There are giant grouper, red grouper, spade fish, wrasse, tang, butterfly fish and some yellow, black and white stripe fish that I know I should know the name of. And then I see one. Oh yeah.... A really big sized spiny lobster, just sticking his head out of a hole in the coral. My two buddies are smiling and pointing and I just reach in and grab that puppy by the antennae and start to yank. These guys are strong! Don’t be fooled. The problem is, they don’t have any claws so there is nothing else to grab on to. He pulled so hard the first time I heard my tank bang on the ledge above. I started pulling back and the tug of war began, sand flying up and visibility disappearing. I finally lost my grip and he retreated beyond my reach. This has happened before to me. But I have been trained by big clawed Jersey fighting lobsters. I wait patiently and the water clears and I see the antennae sneaking on out and taking a peek. I give one more quick grab and again I have a hand full of antennae and we tug and wrestle again. But I lost my grip and he was gone again. I am walking away from this one. It isn’t lobster season anyway and I cant take him onboard but I gave him a good scare if nothing else. We swim back to the line, Mr. Bonaire is getting cold, oddly I am not the warmest either. We are on to our final site. Docs Barge. This is 75 feet of wreckage, an old barge broken in half by the current and shifting sands, sitting in 60 fsw off the coast of St Petersburg. Cant believe it, another familiar site. This was the one covered in bait fish so thick I couldn’t see anything and I had to navigate around the barge with one hand on the wreck so as not to get lost when I was on it last. When we tied into the site there was a resident barracuda that circled the boat several times, checking us out. With about 40 foot of viz I could actually see the relief and wreckage. It would be a different dive after all. As we came down the line there was a grouper weighing in at about 200 lbs. backed into a crevice mid wreck, just watching us to see what we would do. I have never seen sooooo many sea cucumbers. I have never seen such big sea cucumbers. They are big, ugly, pooping machines and they are everywhere. I really didn’t want to poke them. But what I did have to play with were cleaner shrimp. They look like long legged spiders but have a colorful tint to their body. I played with quite a few of these, chasing them all about and of course poking them. There were a couple of giant grouper (50-100 lb range) lazing about and snuggled up against the wreckage. I poked those too and they took off definitely perturbed at me. Some others weighing in a bit larger I left alone. There were many sea anemones, coral and sea urchins, along with some smaller tropicals. The barge is broken in half and you can swim into each end where many fish have congregated. You will only do this once when you swim in and you realize you are not alone. It is you and a 400 lb grouper and 700 little bitty bait fish inside with only one way out. In a race to get out....I am pretty sure I will loose. I decide to stick to the outside and chase a school of fish trying to grab their tails. There are several small schools of fish...or maybe they are bait balls, what is the difference? They dart about and are amazing to watch, like synchronized swimmers they all turn, and veer, and roll left and right and change direction in unison, hundreds of fish at a time. 3 humans together couldn’t walk in a straight line on a bet but these fish do an underwater ballet. 61 fsw, 77 F and 46 minutes later we are the last group to leave the water. As I leave the line and swim under the boat towards the ladder I see our friend the barracuda again swimming around in ever tightening circles about us. Just before I get to the dive ladder he is circling rather close by and hesitates and I see him give me “The Look”. Mark knows the look I mean, he gives me the look and swims on making another pass as I go up the ladder. It is 91 F on the surface and we lay back and enjoy the ride in...... As much as you can after 3 dives on a boat with no head