Hi All,
So sorry to be a bit negligent about this... especially since I started the whole thing. Thank you Solo Diver for the organization! This sounds fantastic.
Unfortunately I may have been a bit over excited to get in the water and jumped the gun on trying to plan a dive. The weather on saturday look to be a bit chilly...and the water is even colder. Although my wetsuit is thick..im not sure it will be able to hold up to the cold this time of year. I think I am going to hold off on this weekend and make my first cold water dive on a slightly warmer day! I hope you all have a great dive, it would be great to meet and dive with all of you soon.
Best
-T
Hi Trevor -
One of the important rules of scuba is that you should never be afraid to call a dive if you have any doubts at all. I see several reasons for you to call this dive [new to diving, never done a cold water dive, never done an ocean dive on your own, don't know the sites, will be with a bunch of inst-buddies you don't know, full moon tides with possible unusually strong currents, lack of confidence bcause you don't have a lot of experience.] These are all legit reasons. But I don't really think the wetsuit issue is one of them. You have an Aqualung 8/7 semidry. That is going to be way overkill in the middle of the summer. That's a cold water suit. I did my first 2 winters with a Henderson 7/5. Granted it was a shock for the first minute getting in 37* water at Back Beach one February day [walkling to the beach in 8" of new fallen snow] and I could only deal with 45 minutes before I got the shakes, but it was doable - once I got past that shock and the suit got saturated I was ok - I wasn't warm and comfy - but I was ok and really enjoyed many other dives with the winter viz, lack of tourists, parking issues, etc. A little trick I learned was to wear a thin dive skin [lycra or polyolefin] to the dive site with the heater turned up so that I worked up a layer of sweat and saturated the diveskin. Once at the dive site I'd jump into my wetsuit real quick and it would be premoistened against the skin so that I didn't need to pour the hot water down my suit that only wets a small portion of your body anyway. I also bought a thick, plush, ankle long bathrobe at Target that I wore as soon as I got out of the water. It made a BIG difference in keeping me warm long enough to undress. Also wear a thin pair of topside glove liners so that your knuckles don't freeze up and your hands become useless.
The air temp is not the issue - in fact I am glad it is staying down in the 50's and wish it was even colder for the drysuit donning. I really work up a sweat getting into it and it
IS an effort. In fact I am tempted to bring my 7/5 if we do a second dive. The water temp is what you need to be concerned with. It is still in the low 40's but it is starting to rise slowly.
I might suggest that since you live nearby and haven't much to lose in gas and drive time --- why don't you bring your suit and at least give it a try. We are going to be doing a very easy dive in shallow water the first dive just to get acclimated to the area. I don't trust the currents associated with this full moon so we aren't going far from shore. You can jump in, wait a couple minutes and if you are too uncomfortable, get out and go home and still have the afternoon to yourself.
Whatever - it doesn't matter to me - it's just that you live
THERE. Year round diving is awesome. It's in your backyard. At least give it a try before the winter season ends and see how you fare.
That's my story and I'm sticking to it............Joe
---------- Post added April 6th, 2012 at 10:46 AM ----------
So far it is just your party and myself that wants to rendevous and brave the N winds of Cape Ann. The weather report has remained pretty consistent most of the past week --N winds, 10-20kts, 2-4' seas. The more I read up on the sites there, the more I am thinking Back Beach will be the place to go. We will go check out Folly, Cathedral [I don't think we should dive here w/out a local guide but I want to look at it and you may want to come back another day next week if you are staying near Boston for a while.]
Some other places that might work are Loblolly, Magnolia, Bass Rocks, Pebble Beach but I really would like to stay in Rockport. I don't want to waste a lot of time driving around searching out sites. I want to get our dives in around high tide and slack tide to avoid any abnormal long shore currents caused by large tidal volume and full moon. Definately don't want to be off shore at mid-tide where we don't know where the rip currents are then.
Back Beach is a fun dive where we might be able to get out of the N wind waves by staying near the jetty. It's a good place for you to get your weighting and trim adjusted for salt water and see a few flounder and sculpin.
I'll see you tomorrow at 10:30. I'll be driving a red truck, NH plates, with a bicycle hanging on the back end. It looks like it might be a nice day sunny-wise.
