Because the marine forecast called for high winds 20-25kts SW with gusts up to 30kts Matt decided to bag the charters for Saturday. Instead I met up with Brie and Scott on their rebreathers to do a nice long shore dive at Old Garden Beach. Me and Matt were originally supposed to drive the Daybreaker down to Scituate to dive the Pinthis but that would have not been a fun ride in a 10kt boat in those conditions. In fact it would have been long and miserable.
Anyway, not wanting to skip diving entirely I opted to do a local shore dive. Both Brie and Scott are new rebreather divers and are looking to build some hours on their rEvos. This can be surprisingly difficult in New England when every other charter gets blown out and water temps keep dives “relatively” short.
We met at Old Garden Beach a little after high tide and started gearing up. My plan was to do a 2-3 hour dive depending on visibility and conditions.
We ended up having a really nice 2 hour and 1/5 minute dive at Old Garden Beach grabbing some bugs/scallops. We only really turned the dive because Scott was starting to get a little chilled. I think me and Brie were both fine but of course we were both running drysuit heaters. I also think his wife might kill him since his words were he was going for “a quick dive.” As most of you probably know, quick and diving should never be used in the same sentence.
Dive Site: Old Garden Beach
Max depth: 70ft (it’s a LONG swim out..don’t do this unless you’re wearing doubles, a rebreather)
Visibility: 20-30ft (20ft in shallow and closer to 25-30ft at depth).
Water temp: 47f
Runtime: 2 hours and 15 minutes
All the New England critters were out. Giant lumpfish (but of course I had no camera), couple large sea ravens, a bunch of sculpin, three large 9-10lb lobsters, and a half a bag of scallops. We probably could have got more scallops but honestly it’s a really shitty swim back with a heavy bag. I have made that mistake many times before. We also had the tide going out which was not helping our swim back.
Unfortunately I did manage to lose my wrist compass as I took it off at the end of the dive and put it on a rock to get a lobster out of a hole. Luckily we weren’t too far from shore so I “knew” how to navigate back and Scott/Brie both had compasses. It’s starting to make an updated Petrel 2 or Perdix with integrated compass look a lot more attractive to me. One less thing on my wrists..
Funny thing, as we were coming out of the water we noticed there were no swimmers. Apparently the life guard had closed swimming because of a shark sighting earlier in the day. I guess swimming doesn’t apply to divers or we were already in the water before they stopped us. Someone said it might have been a blue shark but I guess they weren’t taking any chances. In any case it felt like a scene from Jaws where nobody wanted to go in the water.
