Below the surface again.

It’s the end of the summer and I’ve finally decided to return to diving.  I’ve known for a while that in order to get back into the water there would be some dues to be pay, namely equipment maintenance.  The price tag has been adding up the longer I’ve been out of the water, but I was looking at the end of summer, 27 degree forecast, and felt I’d regret not diving this year in Canada.  I knew where to head to get me immediately prepared.

Dive Tech Training Center, Source; Google Images

Brian and Dan were enthusiastic and eager when I pulled out my shopping list.  I’ve experienced the contrast in dive shops between sales people that are divers and sales people that are not.  Getting the first-hand experiences as well as a genuine interest in the sport from people at a dive shop makes purchases easy, maybe a bit to easy.

Feeling great about gathering the needed supplies, I was back in business! Through the Sharky’s Facebook group https://www.facebook.com/groups/417798614905676/ I was able to find some dive buddies for a shore dive to the Gaskin.  It was made clear that the divers I would be with were using large steel tanks such as 130-150ft2.  Having a 120ft2 tank I thought I’d just have to conserve as much as I could so I wouldn’t have to turn around my dive buddies who might have plenty of air left.

Photo By Christian Lloyd-Kohls

Arriving at Centeen Park I actually didn’t know what my dive buddies would look like.  Everyone was quite friendly so I moseyed around asking if there was a Peter around.  I ended up finding Rick who was to be one of the divers in my group.  He told me that Peter had just pulled up.  Great! Peter came down from his parked car and I was now able to put a name to a face.  Peter told me that there was going to be a fourth diver arriving and that would be my partner.  Luckily for me it was a friendly face 🙂  John was diving with a 100ft2 steel tank so this would matched up better with the amount of air I had on my back.

Photo by Christian Lloyd-Kohls

We all got in to the water.  John and I ran through a safety check of each other and once we were all together and ready we let the lead do its work.  It was immediately apparent that the visibility wasn’t great.  Maybe 15′ viz was the best it was going to get.  I was glad to have taken a compass reading on the Gaskin before descending because it was going to be needed. We found and followed the pipes in the ground towards the wreck.  After a couple of minutes we veered off the pipe and on to the line guiding us to the Gaskin.  As always there was a seaweed buildup on the line and John stopped to clean it up a couple of times.

Photo by Christian Lloyd-Kohls

We continued following our trusty line.  10 minutes in and I was feeling the excursion of finning against the current.  It took a couple of minutes before I remembered that staying low and using the bottom to help pull myself along made a huge difference in the battle against the mighty St Lawrence.  I was surprised when the line we were following ended abruptly and I still couldn’t see the wreck.  My buddies seemed to know the way to go so I followed along until the Gaskin was right in front of us.  Yup that’s how bad the viz was!

Photo by Christian Lloyd-Kohls

Can you see the Gaskin bow???  We proceeded to swim down the starboard side.  I’m always intrigued by the work that went into building the ships.  The old wooden ships such as this have such an interesting texture on the hulls.

Photo by Christian Lloyd-Kohls

We made a couple of passes in and around the ship.  I was happy to see that the wreck was in decent shape compared to what I remembered of the last time I dove it (maybe 5 years ago).

Photo by Christian Lloyd-Kohls

On the third time around the Gaskin I signaled to my partner that I was at 1500 PSI which was the agreed upon air pressure we would turn around at.  John understood and we immediately headed out of the front of the ship towards the line.  As mentioned earlier, with the viz being pretty poor, we were guessing where the line was.  So at about 3 minutes into looking for the line it was apparent that we’d missed it.  We were swimming into the current for a minute before we stopped and took proper compass readings.  I was very happy to have taken my bearings before we started the adventure.  With compass’s in hand John and I spun around and started following the proper heading without the assistance of the line.  Praying that my compass skills were correct it was still I was still unsure about where we were going to end up. Would we be able to walk back to Centeen park where we popped up eventually? I could tell that the bottom was slowly elevating.  10 minutes into following our compasses, we found a shoreline with a concrete wall.  I hoped we might have actually found something familiar? The wall took a 90 degree corner and I knew immediately it was part of the Centeen park area.  Phewf we weren’t going to be hitch hiking back to the park!  With the relief of knowing we were where we wanted to be and close to the stairs, we took our time heading back.  I was happy to find some of the concrete artwork that had recently been added to the Centeen scuba park area.

Photo by Christian Lloyd-Kohls

Photo by Christian Lloyd-Kohls

Photo by Christian Lloyd-Kohls

Looking forward to many more adventures under the water!