It’s been a while since I updated this blog..I guess I’ve just been too busy actually diving than arguing aimlessly on the Internet about it.. Anyway I just returned from my annual Memorial Day long weekend trip to Morehead City, NC for diving with a small group of friends. We decided to try a different charter boat this year and went with Tortuga Charters run by Capt James Rosemond. Long story short but Capt. James runs an excellent six-pack charter operation. Hopefully we will use his charter again next year. We previously used Diver Down Charters before Bobby Cox passed away and last year I gave Discovery Diving a shot. Not very happy with Discovery Diving but I won’t get into that here. You can email me if you want details..
We started the drive down to North Carolina on Wednesday, got past Washington, DC and into Virginia. Stayed a a cheap hotel and continued the drive Thursday morning. Rented a nice house in Atlantic Beach, NC like last year. Myself, Annie, Mike W., Josh, Ben and Sang were all on the trip. Myself, Sang, and Mike W. were on rebreathers, Josh was on double HP120s while Annie and Ben were on single tanks.
As it always is the diving down off Morehead City, NC is fantastic. We dove Friday, Saturday, Sunday but unfortunately got blown out on Monday due to tropical storm Bonnie. Still 3 out of 4 days in North Carolina is not bad at all. Capt. James’ boat Tortuga is extremely comfortable and well thought out for divers. He has a very nice swim platform with railings and a heavy duty T-style ladder that makes climbing back into the boat a breeze. Even with the boat fully loaded up with doubles, rebreathers and bailouts we still managed to cruise at around 18kts out to the dive sites. He also has 3 beanbag chairs on his boat that are pretty amazing.; I instantly fell asleep in them for the ride back home. I really enjoyed diving off his boat and the two crew members we had on different days, Joyce and Randy were also great. Once his crew gets to know you a little better, they’ll give you as much or as little help as you need. It’s hard to go back to one of the big crew boats after diving North Carolina off six-pack boats.
The first day of the trip on Friday we dove the Aeolus and the Spar. It was Sang’s first time down in North Carolina and I think he was blown away by all the sharks everywhere. We had two very typical North Carolina dives. Water was approximately 73f degrees and visibility was 60ft+. I didn’t take too many pictures on this trip but I got a couple decent GoPro videos. Josh and Ben have a lot of good pictures from both wrecks. We had the Aeolus mostly to ourselves for the first part of the dive until Discovery dropped a load of 16+ divers on the wreck 🙂 It’s actually kind of funny, I knew it was people from the East Coast Divers trip because I recognized some people underwater.
Me and Sang did a little over 70 minute runtimes on both the Spar and the Aeolus. It is very nice not to be constrained by time requirements of some of the large cattle boats. I think we would have went a little longer but didn’t want people waiting topside for too long and at this point Capt James didn’t know us too well.
On Saturday the winds picked up a little bit but we still managed to get out offshore. We did a double dip on the Caribsea before the seas really picked up. We figured we would stay there for a 2nd dive since Discovery and Olympus seemed to be already crowding the other nearby wrecks. Visibility wasn’t as good as yesterday but still had a solid 40-50ft of visibility with plenty of sharks. I did about 65 minute runtime for both dives.
On Sunday the wind picked up considerably keeping us inshore but we still had some great dives. We dove the Hutton for our first dive. I splashed in first after Randy tied in and did a a couple loops around the wreck running into another group of divers who were tied in at the bow area. I did about a 67 minute dive. The visibility was probably 30-40ft and water temperatures were 69-71f. For the 2nd dive we headed to new two tugs they sank as the James J. Francesconi artificial reef. I believe they had only been down there 2-3 weeks but so there was very little growth on the wrecks. Still these little wrecks were really fun! They were already teaming with schools of bait fish and Amberjacks. It will be interesting to see how they progress over the next couple years.
That about wraps up our short North Carolina trip. We did make an attempt to get out on Monday when all other boats had canceled. We got a little bit out of the inlet before we decided to call it due to unsafe sea conditions. Even though we did not get out I was really happy that we at least tried. There is always next year… Another good trip down, we’ll be back next year..
