Headed south with Lynette for a watery adventure today. Upon landing in Fort Lauderdale, we’ll be meeting Mitch and Rrr who are driving down from Gainesville along with David Bayes who is traveling from Bellingham. Lynette will spend a few days exploring the Miami area with the kids, while David and I head further south to Key Largo where we meet up with Carlos Lopez who will be joining us in the wreck diving class. (We meet Carlos and his daughter Sara last year on our Galapagos trip.)
Day 1: Key Largo. Carlos checked into our hotel earlier in the evening so we were able to go straight to the room when we arrived around 1:30 a.m. We got up to the alarm a couple hours later and headed down to the boat where we met our dive instructor Dina. Being slightly stricter than we were used to, this guy company refused to let David take the wreck diving class cuz he hadn’t finished his advanced class yet so he enrolled in the advanced class so Carlos and I would do the rectangle class in parallel. David also did his nitrox training in parallel. So it was kind of a cluster.
The seed was rough on our way out to our first dive. We’re headed to the Dwayne. When we arrived, 2/3 of the divers jumped in the water to evaluate the current but it was but we had a problem with the tagline going under the boat and getting tangled with the prop a captain of the boat decided it was too too rough and too much current in the wrong direction for the day so we aborted the three 2/3 of the people climb back on board we headed over to the Spiegle Grove.
On our first dive there Dina just had us identify dangerous elements of the shipwreck, and look in the doorways to see what we would be doing if we were actually shipwrecked divers. Then we return to the surface. We then untied and headed over to the Brentwood reck. On the way over I got very dress sick and ended up skipping that dive and stayed on the boat feeding the fish while David and Carlos explored the wreck.
Once back at the hotel, David gave me one of his Sculpamine patches so I was good to go for the rest of the trip. Carlos and I then signed up for a night dive, and headed out to see just before sunset. Be arrive back at the Brentwood rec and jumped in the water just after the Sun dipped into the ocean. We didn’t do any training on this dive just explored looking into things at the lights and stacking for nocturnal life forms. The Brentwood was sunken in fairly shallow water due to a collision with another world war II ship as they ran with their lights off to prevent detection by submarines and crashed into each other and the Brentwood sunk in place, well the other ship the Tuttle sank a few miles later. However it was in such shallow water that it became a navigational hazard so they used it as target practice, then mowed it even lower by dragging chains over it. So the wreck really isn’t a shipwreck it’s more of just an area filled with ship litter.
Day 2:. Once again attempted to dive with dwayne. This time the current was so strong that the buoy balls were being pulled underwater and we couldn’t even find them on the surface. So we bailed on that again and headed back over to the Spiegel Grove. On our first dive my training objective was to map out the wreck, so I used a slate and Drew all the features that I came across. Well Carlos took his reel in line and laid it out and then faces laying back to the origin. Well David’s advanced training was just sightseeing.
For a second day of that day we went back to the Brentwood again. This time Carlos and I both laid out our lines and retraced her path and Carlos did a squeeze through so he went into a cabinet section turned around and came back actually he went through it that was too advanced for me having only had two red classes. Can you read the sarcasm in that?
After lunch we went back out for two more dives on the coral reef playing channels and I was pretty cool I did the South side of the north side. Lots of divers there David did his navigation training Carlos and I just circled around going through some narrow channels when we came across them.
After finishing up the dives for the day we drove out to Key West no we spent another night there and then we drove out to Key West. After one last breakfast of Carlos we split up and David and I finished the drive to Key West where we walked around Duval Street until our hotel room is ready and then we walked around Duval street again for shipwreck in the morning.
Day 2:. So we missed an hour of sleep at night overnight because of daylight savings time. But we hardly noticed it. Got up in the morning drove down to the boat and met our guide derek. And all of the rest of the crew who were awesome. And we headed out to the Vandenburg wreck.
This was to be our deepest dive of the trip. Having the highest deck at 90 feet deep. Visibility this morning mesquite the seas were extremely flat there was no current the visibility was fantastic. We followed the followed the tag lines down cruised around the high features of the wreck which included a lot of swim throughs and platforms and it was extremely fun. This was the first dive that I brought my GoPro on and I think I got some pretty good shots but I did Miss Davis Titanic pose on the bow so he hasn’t forgiven me for that yet but we did some simple swim-throughs and and focused on watching our computers since this was weird to date.
For our second dive on the ship the boat stayed over to the same buoy and we just went down in the same on the same boring line. But this time we did a swim through from one side of the ship through the other side which is probably 30 years maybe more feet crossed so that
was really cool. Then we did a couple more multi-level penetration dives under the bridge and through the Asian room I think. That he even went into one entrance way that we refuse to go in then he came back out just continued cruising around very very fun we saw some huge groupers large barracuda and just went to the limit of our no decompression limits before we service again. Captain’s corner dive shop is by far our favorite in the keys.