SLS0813A - day five

Don’t forget…for pictures go to www.schoonerconchpearl.com .

The crew survived another adventurous night of sleeping in air conditioning with no anchor watch. ‘High Adventure, Baby’. Florida Sea Base is sometimes called the ‘Club Med’ of high adventure bases. We sleep, eat, dive, sleep, eat, dive, dive, sleep, eat, sleep. That’s a typical day. Today we’re heading out for another day of diving. Hopefully we’ll go west where we had almost no jellies last week.

One thing that’s nice out on the live-aboard is cutting the ties with the outside world. There’s no tv, no current newspapers and no news…except that which comes over the cell phones. Megan and I try to catch up when we return to the base on the weekend but we’re so busy that there’s little time for that too.

We had a cold breakfast then left the dock and started filling tanks. We needed to fill tanks because we used the full set for the night dive. We were headed west to Sand Key but took the ‘long way’ to give us the time needed to fill tanks. Along the way got to see a Coast Guard exercise where a helicopter picked up a person from a boat. When they were finished the helicopter ‘buzzed’ us. When we arrived at the dive site we tied up to the mooring ball and were immediately disappointed. Our friends the jellies were present and in large numbers, running deep too. Megan suited up in her Jaguar Shark outfit and hit the water to check things out. Her report was as we suspected…too many jellies to dive. I agreed from her assessment and the conditions from the surface. So it was lunch instead.

The main facility at Sea Base has suspended all night dives because of the jellies and some of the day dives are also being cancelled. It’s a problem of a magnitude that we haven’t had to deal with before.

After lunch we headed into the Conch Pearl mooring right in Key West Harbor. The crew spent the afternoon jumping into the water, spinning, flipping and doing ‘seal entries’. They kept at it for quite some time. Ah, the energy of youth. A couple of the adults took out the kayak too. During all of the jumping in another group started fishing, catching bait fish called Pinfish. We put a Pinfish on a big rod at night hoping to catch a bigger fish like a shark or barracuda.

Thursday night is steak night. When we catch lobsters it’s Surf N’ Turf. High Adventure Baby!