We arrived at the boat ramp at about 8:30 AM and Oliver was there with Avid Diver waiting for us. The morning started out overcast and raining but by the time we made it to the inlet the rain had stopped. The air temp was in the 80's and seas were nearly flat with vis of about 70 feet or better. We did a live drop on the wreck with Eric (mempilot) handling the line and chain, Raphael (chimie007) splashed next and I brought up the rear. The mast came into view at about 75 feet and the first thing I noticed is that the wreck is covered in soft corals. I haven't seen a wreck in this area with this much growth on it. Beautiful! We tied off to the mast at about 110 feet, the ascent line sagged to nearly 125 due to the fact there was no current, and then dropped into the cargo hold. There isn't much in the hold besides several bundles of old tires. At a max depth of 159 feet we swam around inside the hold looking into several small rooms. After 6 to 8 minutes we moved up to the mid deck at about 140 feet. Again we went inside near the bow, there is a large room that runs up one side across the forward end of the room and back out the other side. Eric and Raphael went into the left entrance and went into the right. Once inside I crossed over to the left side through a small doorway that was kind of a tight fit but I was able to make it through by turning on my side. We joined up near the end of the left side of the room and swam through the hallway at the end and exited out the door on the right side I had entered. We then moved up to the upper deck at about 130 feet. We swam around the wheel house and looked inside but there is alot of growth on this wreck and some of the doorways are blocked off by soft corals so entering is impossible without distroying the marine life, something I'm not going to do. We were nearing our planned bottom time of 30 minutes so we headed back to the mast to untie and begin our ascent and drift deco. Eric and Raphael united from the mast and secured the line to itself as we started to slowely drifted away on our ascent. My first stop was at 99 feet for 2 minutes so the wreck was still in site. As I hung there watching the wreck slowely pass below me I thought this is a great day, I'm diving today instead of working, we have decent weather, flat seas, good vis, a great wreck and I'm diving with good friends. It doesn't get any better then this. The rest of the ascent and deco went as planned and we surfaced right on time at 69 minutes to the boat following us and in position to pick us up within minutes.
This was the first real tech dive I had done with my VR3. I had done several lite deco dives with it but haden't taken it on a full blowen deep deco dive like this. I was wondering how it was going to preform as I cut my tables using VPlanner and use the computer as a back up only. The VR3 seems to give much longer shallow stops then VPlanner so I figured I might bend the VR3 by sticking to my VPlanner tables. As it turned out the computer cleared me to surface just 3 minutes before the VPlanner tables did so everything worked out perfect. If I had actually made a dive to 160 feet for the planned 30 minutes I most certainly would have bent the VR3 by following the VPlanner tables. The only thing that kept that from happening was the fact that we didn't spend the entire dive at 160 feet so the VR3 calculated a shorter deco profile. I'll be interested in seeing if this holds true on future deep dives.
All in all this was a great dive and everything went exactly as planned so you can't ask for much more then that.
