| Limey Diver |
Cessna (Catalina Island) July 4th, 2007We decided to celebrate independence day in style with a couple of dives before the drunk crazy boaters made it out onto the water.Sadly, the captain of the boat vetoed our #1 and #2 spots before we'd even got our gear onto the boat (we wanted to do the Caissons and the Moody, both in 140-160, but local conditions apparently were not going to allow it). However, the mysterious swell that was going to come up later in the day never did materialize, and we could have easily done these two spots. Our first dive was on Shiprock (again -- the standard backup for when the local conditions suck). The water on top was nice and blue, which gave us a good feeling, but things got progressively darker as we descended through 70 feet. At 150, vis was maybe 10 dark feet, which normally is OK, but the only real "good points" of doing this as a tech dive is because the vis is usually decent, and a lot of the structure and schools of fish can be seen. Not this time. Two of us had come equipped for a recreational dive as the second dive (for just this eventuality), but then someone suggested we do the Cessna. I've meant to do it before, but never quite gotten around to it (and it's pretty small, so the bottom time is pretty short). The captain anchored up. We had been joking about a particularly bad piece of anchoring we'd been on the wrong end of (on more than one occasion) by another local boat. Evidently our current captain had been eavesdropping as he suddenly put on something of a sheepish grin, and started giving disclaimers about how close (or not) he might have anchored (more on this to come!) The Cessna is in about 130 feet, and pretty much sits on its own in the middle of nowhere. Since it's so small, we figured a 20 minute runtime ought to do it. I began to get a sinking feeling as we dropped down to 120, then 130, then 140 on the anchor line, finally ending up at 150 with not the best vis, and the chain going up and down 2-3 feet. I swore under my breath at boat captains in general (although this is not an easy one to anchor on as it's not very high off the bottom, and you dont want to snag it with an anchor as it's quite fragile) Andy tied off the reel, and we began making circles, looking for the plane (after going up to 130 -- making for a rather ugly dive profile I am sure). After 10 mins, we were about to give up, when Andy signaled to me to have one last go at it. Sure, I thought and signaled him in an arbitrary direction. Finally, something started to go right as we found the wreck about 2 mins later (a good 70-80 feet away from the anchor) Andy ties the line in.  The fish like to look out of the windows ...  Moving around to the nose, the propeller is still present    Andy and Kim started "discussing" something quite vigorously ... not sure what.  The engine cowling seems to be missing.  The pilots seats are also still intact    Since we knew we had to follow the line back down to 150, we cut our time quite short.   The deco was a bit ugly, with 4 of us on the line, the chain bouncing up and down and a current running. We ended up stacking in pairs, me calling the deco and Pete signaling to Andy/Kim who were just below us. I added a couple of minutes to account for the time at 150, and a 6 min ascent. All in all, not quite the days diving we had hoped for ... 7:11 PM - 7/19/2007 - post comment
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