Guest dive report from Rob today...
Kevin, Jonathan and I met up at BW today at the crack of dawn to try to repair the line to the barge. You may recall reading that Allison and I discovered last week that the line was cut or had broken, and were unable to find our way out there.
The plan was to go out as a 3-man scooter team and locate the near end of the line, and then take a heading and try to pick up the loose end of the other line, and then drag it back for repair. The first part of this worked out ok, and we quickly tied in our search spool to the near-side screw. The screw and metal bar on the near side are in good shape, and have < 50' of line still tied to it running in a generally Northerly direction. We then got back on the scooters and hit the trigger hoping that by moving 3-abreast, we'd be able to see the line. In the worst case, we expected to hit the barge, and backtrack from there.
After 10 min. of scootering, and ending up in almost 70FSW, we realized that we had missed the mark, and headed back on a parallel course to the West. We missed it on the way back again, and wound up back at the wall, near the first safety spool. On our second attempt, we were able to (dumb luck?) find the barge, so we quickly located the landmark that we had decided to use on the barge, and I tied off my reel.
I let out about 100' of line toward the South, and we then swung and arc 45deg in both directions to no avail. We backtracked the line again the barge, and repeated the exercise, and used the scooters (while keeping in contact with the lights) to widen the search. Still, no luck at all in locating either the line or the screw. Since we were sh*t out of luck, and running low on gas, we called it and headed back for the wall.
On the way back, I spotted a dead sea lion covered and being eaten by a couple dozen bat stars. We picked up the spool and headed for the beach. We didn't manage to find the line, but it was still fun (though perhaps we should have punted for Lobos.... :P)
69ft, 91 minutes, 51F. Early lunch at Turtle Bay, and window shopping at Backscatter :P
2 comments:
I'm glad you had fun diving (scootering no less!) and eating at Turtle Bay, while I was schlepping to work sans carpool lane, sitting in a meeting, and schlepping home sans carpool :P
This allison chick is a real downer and a serious nag. Is there anyway to ban her from posting here?
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