Wreck Valley to the Stolt September 17 2006

Woody Allen once said he owed all his success to showing up 15 minutes early. I can't quite claim the same, but I did make it on the boat trip by showing up early for the 7am departure that was really 6am. Oh well, a frenzied load-in, Mario Andretti-style parking and the Wreck Valley charter cast off for the Stolt.

Besides Captain Henrik, we had Ernie and Nick crewing, and for passengers Jack, John, Carl, Sunny, Tony, Bruce, Elliot, and Dan, with me rounding it out to a still-not-cramped 11 divers. Bubble watching was Ann, Nick's Significant Other. At the last minute Jon had to bail on us, but his spirit was with us (his spirit also got its chops busted rather mercilessly, and could be seen slinking below to hide.) Wetsuits, drysuits, single tanks, double tanks, rebreathers, ponys, stages, air, nitrox, trimix, you name it, we were quite the cross-section of northeast diving.

The sun was so strong you'd hardly believe autumn was four days away, and the seas were only a foot or two. It didn't matter, this group meant business, with seasickness patches spotting the necks of nearly everyone onboard. A number of folks had never been to the Stolt before, so it especially nice for them to experience it under such pleasant conditions. The surface current was pretty fierce though, and Ernie found himself being promptly pushed to the stern when he rolled over to tie in. I like how Henrik handled it though, he just reversed enough that Ernie could grab the grappel line, and then reduced the scope after we were secure. Slick as shit through a goose, I was impressed. In my eagerness I rolled over before the carolina line was in, and can attest that I had to work hard to get to the bow. I appreciated them throwing it then, as I was resting with one hand on the keel wondering how I was going to make those last exposed 6 feet (I appreciated even more not getting that big-ass lead weight in the back of my head.) Viz was very respectable, 30' at least (which was about 3 times what I was expecting.) I would urge all rebreather divers to splash as early on as possible, there as so many fish that scatter when open circuit divers hit the wreck. Case in point, a school of dozens of pollack surrounded me as I descended to the rudder, their silvery 3' bodies reflecting the light in flashes. Tying off to some debris by the propeller, I swept out into the sand, bagging scallops as I went. There weren't too many, but I managed to fill my bag with 2.5 dozen, as well as a decent size bug. I found an abandoned trap about 300' out with two more in it, one huge, the other tiny; unfortunately the wrong one was dead. I was also amused to come across one of the newest artifacts on the Stolt, the broken lights from the Stingray we had cut down and pitched off the previous week. Someday a diver will be excited to come up with genuine light from the Stolt. There were four or five nice size bugs under the hull at the stern, but I didn't have a tickle stick long enough to tease them out, and was looking at 39 minutes of deco at that point anyways. There was quite a queue heading up the line, divers everywhere but all getting along. The seas had the occasional roller coming through, and when they did it looked like the Nurnberg rallies ("Sieg!" - line goes slack. "Heil!" -everyone's right arm shoots straight out.) Returning to the stern, I was surprised to see an underwater tag line extending out, but all made sense when I saw the Independence sharing our mooring.

Back on board Henrik fired up the grill, and we chowed on sausage, steak and burgers while swapping stories. Carl and Sunny are starting to enjoy the full benefits of diving ccr, and had a combined runtime of 2.5 hours for the day (which, combined with their Saturday at Dutch, put another 6 hours in their logbooks.) Bruce was also diving a Kiss unit, and hunkered down for a while to photograph the cunner up close and personal. Several divers made penetrations, and Nick came up with tiles from one of the heads. John unfortunately had an equipment problem and decided to bail, a difficult decision that I respect him for making. Bruce too had an issue, in the form of his regulator cap disappearing - not the dust cover, but the threaded metal part that protects where you adjust the intermediate pressure. Dive gear failures are like Tolstoy's unhappy families, there are just millions of ways for them to express themselves.

I began dive two by going out into the sand by the cut and scooping up another 3 dozen scallops. I then caught and released a nice bug, totally by accident. Those 2#-ers know the value of twisting and thrashing while you are preoccupied with getting the bag ready, and when I turned around he was gone gone gone. After swimming through the engine room I exited by the stern, and interrupted my ascent long enough to dart into a hatch and come out with two more bugs. Later on the line I had a visitation from Murphy myself, when my fizzy lpi started to burp out a bit more vigorously. Eventually I just unplugged it, but was astonished to see I had 50 psi left in my diluent tank. Good thing it was on ascent, it would have been a pain in the butt to have to blow gas into my loop and bc from my offboard bailout. Doable, but far from preferable.

We didn't leave the Stolt until after 3, and the ride back was a busy one. Several divers brought up mussels. Lots and lots of mussels. More mussels than there were clams on the Beth Dee Bob. There was a while there when I was cleaning scallops that I began to fear for my life, as the wolves were definitely circling (I think Dan's offer to "help" with his dive knife had two meanings, if you catch my drift.) We had quite the mussel cleaning assembly line there for a while, cleaning and bagging them to drag behind the boat. There were so many in fact that the last bag didn't come back aboard until we were crossing the jetty for the inlet. Somehow though we still managed to fit in the Gentlemens' (and Lady's) Cigar Smoking Club on the transom, which is swiftly becoming an integral part of the Stingray dive experience (rather to Henrik's dismay I'll bet, the poor guy quite two weeks ago.) My suggestion that load out be the mirror image of load in (ie Carl and Ernie help haul my gear) was grossly misinterpreted to mean I should carry their stuff off, so I shut up fast.

There are no dues for Wreck Valley, but that does not mean we are without responsibilities. So please, call me and take some of these mussels before refrigerator collapses.