Sunday, April 7, 2013

SLSU033113A – Tuesday April 2nd, 2013


Day 3 – “Are you sure it’s Tuesday?”

 

As I said before, I’m never sure what day of the week or what date it is. They say it’s Tuesday, I have to believe them. I’m an extremely early riser. I get up during the night and check on the anchor watch and to write this blog. I haven’t caught the anchor watch sleeping in  a long time. I guess Denny’s orientation speech does a good job of getting through to them.

The crew woke up to an absolutely gorgeous morning. It was looking like a great day for diving. It was a comfy, slow wake-up; not like the old days where we came down and did the “wake up, we’re going diving today!” thing. We finished breakfast, dropped the ball, put up the sails and headed for Sand Key. On the way out of the hardor we passed two cruise ships moored at the Key West piers. It would be a long ride to Sand Key giving Captain Denny the opportunity to fill tanks while the crew fished.

Sand Key is a key (island) that is almost completely washed away. It is marked by a large, Civil War era light house.  We switched tanks, geared up and got ready to splash. The ball we usually tie up to was gone so we took the next ball. This is significant because the missing ball is over a huge cluster of coral heads with a nice deep channel running through the middle. The next dive was also at Sand Key, but at a different ball. Different ball, different reef.

For the next dive we moved to a reef called Western Dry Rocks, not to be confused with Rock Key or Eastern Dry Rocks. They weren’t real creative when naming these keys. The visibility was holding and it was another nice dive; lots of structure here. The day was getting on so we finished the day dives and went about planning for a night dive. Night Dive! Woo Hoo!!!We moved back to Sand Key. You always do night dives at a site which you had seen during the day.

We did on orientation, fitted everyone out with lights and got in. It was just after sunset and still a little light underwater. We enter at dusk and dive as the night settles in and makes everything dark.

The night dive went well, without a catch. We went in, went on a tour and made it back to the boat without surfacing for direction.

After the dive we had a long ride back. A lot of the crew started on the deck, watching the stars, but that didn’t last long as one by one everyone ended up in bed.

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