The Tec TriMix dives were – well – great training dives! They were pushed back to Sunday afternoon to take advantage of the decreasing weather patterns over the weekend, as Saturday was blown out. We had big, slow rollers on the surface, so that wasn’t too bad. However, there was a good current in both locations.

The first dive was an attempt to find Neptune’s Wall, which has only been seen once that we know of. We anchored about 100 yards north of the original GPS location and dropped down to 156’. Viz was barely 8’, so we rolled out the reel, expecting sand, and hit benthic structure, some taller than 8’, which precluded an effective sweep pattern. We made a simple attempt, and reeled it up and then did about 25 minutes of deco, from 80’ to 20’. We find that fending off Jellies (Sea Nettles, the nasty ones) at 30’ and especially at 20’ makes the deco time go by quickly. For our Surface Interval we motored over to where the wreck of the Albion was “supposed” to be. Skipper Brian on the Beach Hopper was actually part of one of the recovery attempts, years ago, and knows the wreck well. However, even with his 3 GPS locations, he found nothing on the bottom – just sand. After about 20 min of sonar searching, he anchored on a logical location, and we figured we would just give it a go.

It was now about 4:00pm, so it was getting dark, but after dropping through the red tide from zero to 8 feet it cleared up a bit, but at 60’ I noticed it was getting harder to see Jo and Paul, so I turned on my light. However, it only helped a little, and I kept closing the distance as they were getting fuzzier and harder to see! By the time we got to 175’, Viz was about 18 inches, I kid you not!!! And that’s with a DarkBuster, 21 watt seriously bright U/W light!! (thanks John!)! To give you an idea of how occluded it was, when I held the light at arm’s length and pointed it, I could ONLY see the light if I pointed it at ME! I could only barely make out the glint of the bottom of Paul’s doubles directly ahead of Jo and me, and then only if I was pointing my light directly on them. I started laughing, realizing that under any other situation, especially with students, I would have aborted the dive. BUT, with $54 worth of gas on my back (well, half that, anyway) and the boat fees, and the make-up fees, and the time, and there were no “real” problems, No Way were we going to abort just because we were blind - we just would dive by Braille and do a “simulated” silt-out dive! SO, Paul pulled out his reel, Jo and I took up left and right sides on the line, RIGHT behind him, and he unfurled the line for about 7 minutes. We saw NOTHING other than the occasional Sea Pen in the sand. No wreck, no nothing. We did have a nice current, though, which was what was kicking up the sand and killing the Viz.

At one point on the swim I realized that if I let go of the line, there was a distinct possibility that I would NOT find it again and would have to solo my deco. Not a fun thought. However, the dive went without a hitch (or a hull, or a board, or anything at all!), and I was quite happy about that. We turned around after about 6 minutes, went back to the anchor, and all gave an enthusiastic thumbs-up! LOL!! So, after about 30 minutes of deco (again, fending off Jellies ) we were out of the water, in the dark, laughing our butts off, and we headed back in to port. The GOOD news is that Jo and I completed our 2 TriMix dives using 20% O2 and 27%HE and 53% N2(Tmx20/27) and actually had a couple of good dives under our belts, no problems, and we all even felt comfortable on both dives. Amazing! He and I now only have 3 dives left to get our TriMix certification!!!! Looks like that will happen the weekend of Jan26th. I’m looking forward to it!