Scallop Diving, August 19 2006

My family is an insatiable beast. Fish, lobsters, mussels, scallops, all get consumed by their ravening maw. Especially scallops. With my son's birthday approaching on Sunday, and 40 people coming over, I knew I had to deliver to keep the beast at bay, or risk being grilled myself.

When I contacted Henrik he was four-square behind it, and had just the spot in mind. Thus on Saturday I was out with the Stingray, to an undisclosed location, at an undisclosed depth (just don't call me Dick Cheney.) A Captain is judged by his numbers, and Henrik has some winners there, as we came up with a bonanza. We also all learned a few lessons, some painful, some less so, but all worth learning.

Lesson #1: at 5am, there is just no quiet way to empty the ice tray from the freezer into the cooler. Small handfuls, cushion the blow, doesn't matter, ice cubes are inherently noisy. Best you can do is the band-aid method: dump it all at once and get the hell out, so if you do wake up any family members you still have deniability: "Oh was I being loud? Sorry I had no idea!"

Onboard was Captain Henrik, with Dave and Mark crewing. Passengers: Me. So we all had a little room to stretch out and relax. Lesson #2: dive gear follows the laws of entropy and diffusion, meaning however large or small the space, your dive gear wants to fall down, spread out, and fill it all. No matter how much I shoveled it back into its basket, I'd turn around and my mask would be sunning itself on a bench right near a wobbly tank. Perhaps next time Henrik will let me bring a sheepdog or llama to keep the herd corralled.

After chugging out for an undisclosed period of time we dropped a buoy, and Henrik and I rolled over. There was a layer of schmutz around 50' that cast a pall deeper, but it was still pretty clear. Scallops were thick on the ground, so I pulled out my bag and started stuffing them in.. There were so many that any ones smaller than my hand I skipped. The first bag was filled in 6 minutes, and the second 8 minutes later. I could easily have kept going but didn't have any more bags on me, a mistake I won't repeat. Per our plan I clipped them both to a bag and shot it, then followed my reel up. The nice thing about diving a buoy is that the boat was able to pick us up. Truth to tell though, there was so little current we could still have swam to the boat even after our deco stops.

We all learned a couple of more lessons after Dive One: neoprene dry suits are really freaking buoyant, and require obscene amounts of lead. Also learned: Lift bags are best used when you are there to monitor them, otherwise they have a horrible tendency to dump. There are many bags of china that made a round trip on the Doria for this reason, and also a full bag of scallops somewhere off NJ, with a beloved lift bag and tangled reel still attached. There is just nothing like the bottle-neck restriction of a surface marker buoy to keep floaty things floating. So long as the captain knows its not an emergency, an smb is my tool of choice for sending things up.

Dive two I went looking for Fred the Beloved Bag, but to no avail. My search did put me in a very nice spot though, and I bagged up three 2# bugs in 5 minutes (there was a fourth, but she was eggy.) I didn't find so many scallops for a while until near the end of the dive, when I hit the motherlode. I was glad then I had resisted the temptation of the smaller ones, as I knew my chops would have been busted mercilessly. I had one of those large yellow mesh bags, and at the half hour mark it was crammed to bursting and hooked up to my lift bag ready to go. I couldn't just leave though. I had tons of gas (rebreather, duh), a still-reasonable deco obligation, and everywhere I looked was scallops. Scallops to the left. Scallops to the right. Scallops underneath me, for chrissake. It was crazy. Two minutes, I promised myself as I pulled out my red bag. Whatever I can grab in two minutes and then up I go. It worked perfectly, although I did feel like the crazy housewife on one of those tv game shows. In two minutes flat I had the bag packed with another 25, hooked them up, and up we went.

There was much rejoicing on board on the way back, and we all hunkered down for some cleaning. In the final tally I had 135 scallops plus the three bugs, which came to 14# of scallop meat. Dave had a similar number of scallops, and Henrik and Mark had a bag full each (as did Fred, R.I.P.) If I had to guess, I'd say the total was about 350 scallops for the boat.

The final lesson? When asked at the party how you got them all, talk about what hard, difficult work it was, but how you had to do it to keep food on the table for your family. Just don't expect anybody to believe you.