Blown out weekends = quarry/mine
I haven’t really been posting too much on here since the past 3 weekends has had me out of salt water action and up in the quarry/mine working on the Esperanza Mapping Project. Prior to that we had an excellent long weekend of diving up in the St. Lawrence River.
I spent Friday and Saturday up in Vermont giving my gear another good fresh water rinse. Clearly my gear desperately needed some salt water immersion and Sunday finally came through on that.
Sunday Funday
We had fantastic topside conditions despite the offshore hurricane and high winds for the past for 4 days. The winds dropped down to 5kts N overnight and the seas calmed allowing us to run both Sunday AM and PM charters. The ocean was flat calm with a mild swell. A huge change from the past few weekends.
It was also a beautiful day underwater as well, shockingly. A lot of divers were worried that the underwater conditions this weekend were going to be measured in inches or centimeters in the single digits. I’m happy to report that this was not the case at all!
Divers reported approximately 10-15ft of visibility this morning at Big Fantastic Wall and poor-ish visibility (5-10ft) on the Chester Poling. The Poling visibility was to be expected due to it’s proximity to shore but we were all pleasantly surprised with the visibility at BFW.
Later on in the afternoon we visited Halfway Rock and Newcomb Ledge (Big Fantastic Wall is part of Newcomb Ledge) where we enjoyed 20-25ft of visibility at both dive sites. Matt was able to sneak in a quick dive at Halfway Rock and gave his estimate of 20-25ft of visibility. For the 2nd dive we rotated and I got in a dive at Newcomb Ledge in a pathetic attempt to beef up my lobster count for the season. Lots of bugs but unfortunately the majority of large ones I measured were full of eggs. I only managed 2 keepers. It was however a beautiful dive with good visibility. The surge at Newcomb was slightly annoying if you were shallower than 30ft.
