Mike
Contributor
The hardest currents are on the Skycliffe off Boynton on fast days, or the 280 foot hopper barges off Singer Island....The current on the Hopper barge was once so bad that I found myself drifting in with 100 foot vis, 40 feet off the bottom( 240 feet deep).....with nothing but blue in all directions, my buddy Nigel at my side, with me holding a line to a huge red Float ball we would attach to the wreck so the captain could track us...this was before I discovered the torpedo floats..this was around 1995, and deep air.
So Nigel and I are just litterally FLYING over the bottom 40 feet below us...it was like we were airplanes...We could see valleys and blowouts in the sand below us, from "intense underwater storms" much like the effects you might see in a desert wasteland with monstrous dunes in some places.....The reverie goes on for about 20 seconds( really a long time when your mind is on 1000% adrenaline for this) , and then Holy Sh*t...look at that wreck zooming up at us.....It begins as a tiny spec at the furthest reaches of what you can see, and then rapidly begins to fill your horizon.....I look for a good place to eddie out of this huge 5.5 mph current, the top surface is very littered with junk, so being close is not a smart approach plan....and then I see one of those huge ropes the big boats would tie up with...a Hawser--maybe 3 inch diameter...it is floating up off the deck...and we are moving so fast, I realize even at 20 feet before the ship, we may have waited too long to make it to the deck and out of current....I begin sprinting forward to get slack on my line to the ball, and down, and in 4 seconds my hand is on the Hauser....Without that big rope, I would have overshot and would have had to bomb to the bottom and then go hand over hand in the sand till reaching the eddie and still water near the hull on the lee side....
So I have the hawser, and in the next second, the hawser is taught, I have moved as far downcurrent over the deck as it will allow, and the line in my hand to the monster mooring ball, has spun me 180 degrees and the mooring ball is now downcurrent of me instead of behind me, and it is pulling HARD .... I almost feel like my arms and shoulders will get separated.... Nigel had grabbed on to the mooring line also, so I was holding him and the mooring ball against the pull of the current....At first, I could hang on, but not pull down....then in the next 10 seconds, it began getting to be less of a pull. What I did not know, was that the moment the line went taut, it sunk the monster ball....and then a few seconds later, at a depth of 50 feet, it hit our Safety Diver, Jim Abernethy, in the back....and he thought he had been hit by a big shark in that instant
From then on, the ball headed down, collapsed, and the drag lessened....I was able to pull myself down to the deck...where I hooked off the tines of the hook on the line...and Nigel and I began moving along the corridors out of the current...About 10 seconds later, we saw the tines on the hook straighten, and the line blew off the wreck....So we figured we had maybe 8 minutes we could spend before we would incur too much deco penalty to get up to a depth where we could shoot a bag with a spool. This ended up being easy --the boat over us from us at 30 foot stop on...The dive plan had been 25 minutes on the wreck, but NOT without the mooring ball --which we imagined could be miles away with the boat following it...so we decided caution was better than the original plan.....he actually had an important mission on this dive, or it would have meant an immediate abort, given the expectations of the captain....
As to the dive, you could feel the interface between the fast moving water blowing over the ship, and the water in protection of structure...It was like a barrier of sorts...you could put your hand up and feel it.... You could grab the side of the ship, hold yourself, and stick you head up into it...but, doing so was going to auto purge your reg, and if your mask was not dead straight, pointed into the current, and a good fitting low volume mask, it would be gone in an instant....but you really knew this, so it was not like this was a danger--you just would not do anything that stupid--even with our pathetic deep air IQ's at 280....
We would move with caution, using hand holds most of the time, even when apparently out of the current....just in case movement got us into an eddy that we did not see coming--an eddie on and eddie....
It was nice moving along the length of the ship in the down current direction, we would not want to have moved up current, even in the protection...We saw plenty of 400 pound Warsaw Groupers, moving along in the out-of-current areas, and we copied their movements to a large degree...they had lots of experience in these eddies, and were masters of "not working" here.....
Had we tried up current, or into an eddie, there would have been work load, and on deep air, you can't let yourself work....that makes CO2 buildup, and that KILLS....So everything we did, except for my initial grab of the Hauser, was not aerobic or work...This was a learning dive...we learned that you can't use a big monster float ball on a high current tech wreck....it is begging for a CO2 blackout, and we would never do this again.
We would either use torpedos after this, or shooting an smb with an overpressure relief valve after we left the wreck.
Even the torpedo is marginal at 280 in the big current, as even the cave line will begin to PULL against the current over the huge scope that is payed out....on a 100 foot deep wreck, the torpedos don't really have enough scope out, to build up much pull, so they will work fine for even the highest current days on these shallow wrecks.
On this particular deep dive on the hopper barge, we were not penetrating....on most of the ships that you can penetrate here, once inside, there is no current, even on the big days....though if you come to a big hole in the wall some place during your penetration, you would need to be thinking about where eddies might get created, and if there is anything sharp you could get knocked into by the current coming in to the hole--if there is current coming in. You just have to be aware.....It makes it all the more fun, having to read the terrain, and plan your path...like kayaking whitewater or skiing moguls.
Again, this is the condition of the full Gulf Stream intrusion...you don't get this on the 100 foot deep wrecks.....on the worst day ever, maybe 4 mph for a couple of the 100 footers...usually 2 to 3 mph....and 2 to 3 mph, while too fast for a diver to swim against, is easy to drift drop, and navigate around on in the protection of a wreck.
And doing 30 or 40 dives like this, just gives you the ability to know every thing you need to about the faster current days or deeper wrecks with bigger currents. It might also help you to decide on a pair of fins you can do your "blast to the protection" with....whether jets or Force fin, or just a nice large pair of standard paddles. Freedive fins are not the ideal fins here....I can make them work, because of so much time in them on wrecks, but they can catch eddies when you don't want them to, and your feet are suddenly getting pulled....or, there is always the penetration you might want to do, and freedive fins are so long that they can scrape the ceiling and knock silt off the ceiling--which may be a problem---or not....but with Jet's or Extra Force Fins, you would not have this to concern yourself with. For the very short sprint interval, there is no speed advantage at all with the freedive fin. In fact, with the soft freedive fins most scuba divers would use, the jets will outsprint them in the first 5 feet of sudden explosion in a sprint...which goes to - "will you overshoot" , or, will you make it to the sweet spot
I'd spend my time at the pool reading a book before doing any of that. Choosing diving like that is like choosing to wear a sand paper condom everytime you have sex, don't see any point to going through it.
