I had the rare pleasure of diving with my oldest son, Matt and his wife Jen last Saturday. We joined a group of ne'er-do-wells (just kidding) on the Scubateer's dive boat. As always, Rob and Aaron were great hosts. Among others on board were our good friends Stnichols, his nephew and Sea Princess.
We headed out to the breach on the old dam. After a dive briefing we donned our gear and splashed in. I realized someplace between giant and stride that I hadn't inflated my BC. No worries. I'll hit the ol' inflator button. What IS that strange gurgling noise? Why am I still having to kick to keep from descending? Hit inflator again. More gurgling. More kicking. Something was amiss. Swam over to the boat and Aaron told me that my inflator hose had come unscrewed where it went into the BC.
I was wearing my 3mm and only ten pounds of weights so I wasn't in imminent danger. After handing up my new bright yellow fins I started up the ladder with a BC full of water. I learned something very important. While water is neutrally buoyant in water. It's dang heavy when you're trying to scamper up the ladder on a dive boat. Talk about water weight gain.
We inspected the BC and found that the seal between the inflator hose and the BC bladder went diving when the hose came off. We tightened it up as best we could and I gave it a try. I keep very little if any air in my BC when at depth. Even though the seal was missing the leak was pretty minimal and didn't even show up until my BC was well inflated. Not an optimal situation but since I was already in the water again...
The dam was great. Some very cool folks had strung a line across the breach. Sans that and it would have been a 240+ foot midwater swim in low vis. My kind of diving but that's me. Matt and Jen appreciated the line. I called for a pressure check before we started across. I was the low guy (wonder why).
There were a few divers hanging out at the far side of the breach when we got there. The structure of the dam is awsome. We stayed on the shallow side and descended more or less as a group to about 95 feet as we swam along at a 30 degree heading. I obviously kept a keen eye on my presure and turned with my two dive buddies after using 1/3 of my beginning pressure. There we immediately ascended to the top of the dam, about 65 feet, and followed it back to the breach. Called for another pressure check. Everything looked good so on we went. The anchor line was tied off at the west end of the breach where we started our ascent to safety stop depth. Matt had requested an extended safety stop so we hung out at 20 feet for five minutes. All I needed was an occasional toot of my inflator button to control my buoyancy all through the dive. Obviously I wouldn't have continued if the leak was too bad.
Next dive was at Tec Island. Here we decided to stay shallow and check out all the nooks and crannies around the boat. The vis at Tec Island was great. We probably had near 30 foot vis in some areas. We saw several schools of fish. Steve got some dandy pictures. We looked for the swim through but couldn't find it. Maybe next time.
