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No other stories out there? Has to be, I know there are some incredible experiences out there. To prime things, here's a few from my end, just one liners only from 1980 and before.
- Diving/drilling on the barrier reef looking for Columbus' Santa Maria in a mound of coral off Cap Haitian in 1970's Baby Doc Haiti. - Looking for a scuttled Hatteras sportsfisherman with a load of drugs along the reefs in 90 ft., with dead baby hammerhead sharks laying around on the bottom in lousy viz. - Taking the Florida Secretary of State free diving on a 1830's shipwreck with media. - Filming a crazy french guy with an electronic shark repelling device in a feeding behavior stirred up over the graveyard off Gun Cay in the Bahamas. - Searching for and finding a $1M high definition side scan sonar fish in deeper water. - Being a dive escort for a girl on her family's yacht for trips to the Bahamas at 16, she was crazier about diving extremes than I was too. - A bounce dive to 265 ft. for black coral off Cozumel at 16 into intense narcosis and O2 toxicity. - A bounce dive to 275 ft. because (... no good reason) at 17, fighting off a narc'd out diver and again sliding into O2 toxicity. - Doing a photogrammetric survey of dredging reef damage in 90 ft. with a wetsub. - Night dives in 180 ft. looking for spiny oysters in the sand drifting into the third reef at 90 ft. - Designing a training course for the Sheriff's office for UW drug interdiction at night at 90 ft. using a wetsub in 1977. - Almost getting castrated by a hungry permit while carrying a bunch of bugs in my hands conveniently but unwisely protected by my bathing suit. - Doing a bounce dive to 250 ft. on a wall off the Biminis at 16 with 2/3rds full 72 cft tank, like an idiot. Resulted in a low grade DCS hit, earned that one. and lots of other strange, sometimes unwise but otherwise interesting stuff. So how about it, what strange, interesting and hopefully not too shocking experiences can you relate?
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FKA, Inc. transcribed by: Rick Iossi |
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Here's another diving story, one not listed above, from about 1978. We were bidding on a National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFs) project to study king mackerel or kingfish "fallout" from gillnets as they migrated around the Florida peninsula. Gillnets have a fixed net apertures, fish vary in size of course. If a fish swims into an aperture, it gets "gilled" or stuck when the net catches behind their gills. The net is pulled in and the fish are pulled out into the boat.
King Mackerel or Kingfish From: http://www.landbigfish.com/ If this fish is too large, as in the case of some King Mackerel, it might just get its nose stuck momentarily. This apparently sent some mackerel into something akin to a fish heart attack, killing them on the spot, they "fallout" of the net and were lost. Bycatch was and still is a serious concern related to netting, fallout was another resource depletion issue as well. It wasn't well understood at the time, hence the study was proposed. Gillnets From: Drifting net, http://www.fao.org/ and Secured net, http://www.cnsm.csulb.edu/ The Request For Proposal stated that divers using a wetsub were to document the interaction of larger king mackerel with gill nets, documenting fallout process and estimating quantities of fallout per netting run. We were also to recover fallout specimens for evaluation by NMFS. This was to be repeated around the migration along the Florida coast. As shark have trailed the migration since time began and now having strugging, dying and dead, large king mackerel around the nets boosted the risk of negative shark interactions. NMPS likely anticipated the successful bidder using something like the "Sharkhunter" popular in some areas in those days. The Sharkhunter wetsub From: http://www.psubs.org/ I recall that Walter Stark formerly of RSMAS may have used one of these for studying sharks in off some Pacific atolls. This may have lent some support for using these two man subs in this application. Well, we didn't have a Sharkhunter, but we did have a Rebikoff Remora. So, decided to construct a cage around the diver and propose using this. Talk about flight modification! As you have a power umbilical, you have the added advantage of using surface air supply, a comlink, even video feed to the surface. I seem to recall portable video cameras had yet to come out for UW use. Camera heads with surface feed were still in use. So, it presented some key advantages over the Sharkhunter and a few disadvantages as well. The Remora closely resembled the Rebikoff Pegasus shown above Visualize this, you are motoring in poor visibility, in cold water, in waves, variable current, mackerel are schooling thick about you with all that detritus they expel. The odd shark or pack roils through the school from time to time but largely are invisible due to poor viz. and lots of fish in the way. Then the net shows up, barely. You see struggling fish, sharks again yanking the off buffet item off the net. If you're lucky, you might even see some particularly large mackerel nose in, explode into spasms, expire and fall out of the net. If you're really lucky you be able to keep it in sight without getting netted yourself as it settles to the bottom. There you can pick it up, assuming you don't have to beat sharks off to grab your specimen. Then get the lot including yourself and your Remora safely on the rocking boat. Easy, right? Spent a ton of time thinking this over, planning and on project design. Despite making a good bid, we didn't get it. The firm that did, never put any divers in the water, with or without a wetsub. I understand they towed a video camera with a ruler scale inset, that was the bulk of their study?! Well, they probably didn't lose any divers, then again, they never hired any in the first place. Your public dollars at work, back in the day. In hindsight, I'm thinking, well it would have been real interesting but maybe we lucked out after all in not getting the project? A bit more about the controversy dealing with gillnetting king mackerel appears at: http://www.thefreelibrary.com/40+Yea...g.-a0212034487 and about the mackerel migration at: http://spo.nmfs.noaa.gov/mfr563/mfr5632.pdf So, there's another one, see they don't even have to happen, completely. A good tale with a near miss works too. Over to you ...
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FKA, Inc. transcribed by: Rick Iossi Last edited by ricki; 12-01-2009 at 10:29 PM. |
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