Memorial Day Almost on the City of Washington

Poor is the nation that has no heroes.
Shameful is the nation that has them and forgets.

It is Memorial Day Weekend and while visions of Bar B Q and watermelon, hot days and clear blue water, nekkid ocean diving and good friends danced in my head, I also took time to remember. Remember those who served and those who are serving, those who returned to their homes and families and those who did not. There is a plaque on a monument..... in Tennessee I believe.... it reads....."Poor is the nation that has no heroes. Shameful is the nation that has them and forgets." I believe in that......and I believe in good times and good friends and so I plan to round out my weekend with the latter.... in Key Largo.

Becky is a good friend..... she opens her home, with its two young boys and 3lb dog to me and my 90lb shedding wonder whenever I call.... without question..... good friends are a blessing. She is also almost as good at directions as I am, but more about that later.

I arrive in the evening, a jumble of clothes, dive gear, soda and chips and we awaken the next day to clear blue skies and warm air. I told Becky I wanted to see one of the Keys wrecks.... reefs abound down there but I am missing my Jersey diving. She obliges me with plans to dive the City of Washington for me and a reef for the others. Life is good. Sometimes......

We head out with Garden Cove Divers onto flat seas and light breezes, a day filled with promise and adventure. It's always an adventure when we two get together.

Just to show how truly small the world is, there is a new captain and crew on the boat this trip and they are from NJ, Atlantic Divers I think they said. A small taste of home which I am missing. We talk Jersey diving and divers and soon we are there.

The City of Washington was an iron hulled, masted brigantine ship launched in 1877 and aquired by the Ward Lines for passenger and trade hauling between New York and Cuba.

On February 15, 1898, she was moored in Havana Harbor near the USS Maine when the Maine exploded. The City of Washington suffered some minor damage but sent out its lifeboats to rescue the crew of the Maine. The captain and crew of the Washington testified at a Naval Court Inquiry which concluded the USS Maine was destroyed by a submarine mine which was attributed to Spain and shortly after Congress declared war and thus began the Spanish American War.

She was immediately chartered by the US Army for use as a transport ship for the invasion of Cuba, and paid $450 per day, our tax dollars at work.

In late 1898, the ship returned to passenger service between New York and Cuba and was retired in 1908. She was purchased by the Luckenbach Steamship Line and refitted as a coal barge and on July 10, 1917, the City of Washington and another barge, the Seneca, were being towed by the Luckenbach 4 when all three vessels ran aground near Key Largo, Florida. The other two vessels were refloated but the City of Washington broke up and was not recovered. She now sits in approximately 40fsw, laying in a north south direction off of Key Largo and we were about to dive her.....maybe.

Becky lives and dives in the Keys, a year round wonder of warm clear tropical waters and crayola colored corals and fish. She also has a GPS and a sense of direction akin to mine. With that in mind and the vision in your head of two women who are not yet done with their conversation, giant striding off the back of the boat, you see us entering the water laughing and talking without missing a beat. We slip beneath the water still laughing and signaling as we end our conversation and begin our dive. Becks is in the lead and as I stop to peek and poke I begin to fall behind and swim to catch up. Here lies the anchor chain, still leaning propped upon the metal walls of the wreckage which is broken into groupings of low lying walls and coral groupings.

I give the chain a moment of my time and motor to catch up passing by the most gi-normous conch shell I have ever seen. The size of a basketball..... this little beauty would have given one of Barts moonsnails a run for its money in the ring. I only poked it a little....it was pretty big.

Soon the sides begin to give way to more coral and I wonder why they have been covered so much more here. Actually encased compared to the first pieces we saw. I catch up with Becky and she taps her gauges. We are in water a bit deeper than we should be and she signals up.

We are about 150 yards off the stern of the boat....we should be about 100 yards off of the bow. Hmmmm........ I tell her I am not following her anymore! She is like a bad GPS...... and we can barely stay afloat laughing. But we have plenty of gas and a compass..... Becky has her compass...and takes a heading. I wish there were mussels in Florida.... I wish we had taken her compas and smashed open the mussels and fed the fish. We should have ran a wreck reel. We would have been better off.

Becky is worse at directions than I am if that is at all possible. We looked about on the reefs, taking notice of any damage done by the winters cold spell, seeking out the inhabitants in all their color. As for the reefs, they are recovering slowly. The purples seem to be the color returning first, they are the most abundant. The fish are about, no eels and no shrimp or sea urchins but small colorful fish and the beginnings of soft corals and sponges. BUT.... the water is still getting deeper....

We once again surface and we are now about 400 yards off the stern of the boat, the boat a small dinghy in the distance. Channel markers are nearby, as are fishing boats, no doubtably bait in the water. I search the waterline for signs of a fin while I rattle off my opinion of her navigational skills..... she pees in her wetsuit she is laughing so hard. I wonder if that draws sharks too.

Let me just say.... I have NEVER once in my diving career missed the anchorline. Never once deployed my SMB. Never once had the captain begin S&R for me. I surely was taught better. And here I sit, heading for Cuba, bobbing on the surface in gamefish waters with little Miss GPS. And I pull out my marker and begin to inflate.

We turn on our backs and begin to kick towards the boat, markers flying high. By the time the boat reached us we are once again talking and laughing just as we had been when we first stepped off the dive platform. One big circle from start to finish.

Since Becky works for the dive shop, the captain and crew are convinced we did this on purpose. A test of sorts to see how they would react. How they would handle a diver emergency. We told them no..... it wasn't... but they didnt believe us and we just shook our heads and laughed as we headed out to our next stop, the Fingers just off Elbow Reef.

The Fingers are a series of linear reefs, one after the other, in rows, like fingers of a hand and you follow them like the outline of a glove from one end to the other, up one side and down the other. I led.

And for a third dive we hit a shallow reef not far from there.... and I led again....

Great day on the water, great friends, great adventures..... gotta love it. And someday.... I may even see a wreck out here..... maybe even the City of Washington.