I went out with PCDC on the 27th. It was our shop's last OW class of the year and even though they didn't need a DiveCon, I decided to tag along. DeWayne had a class on board also.
Our first site was the Black Bart. The bottom temp was 80 degrees and the viz was 20-25'. I had a good time exploring the cargo holds and wheelhouse and found an intact sand dollar on the deck. Bones (the skeleton) is all busted up now. I found his pelvic bone and an arm bone, but I don't know where the rest of him went. About halfway though the dive, my buddy and I dropped over the side of the wreck and went to the sand bottom at 85'. We rounded the prow of the ship and were swimming along the port side of the hull when I looked to my right and saw a blacktip shark, about 6' long, with a couple of pilot fish swimming along with us about 10-15 feet away. I looked back at my buddy and he was not looking in it's direction; so I stopped, got his attention, and pointed out the shark. By time I did this and got my camera up to take a picture, the shark turned away and disappeared into the murk. Due to the distance, viz, and range limit of my flash, I probably wouldn't have been able to get a picture anyways. I guess I could have tried to chase him down to get closer, but it didn't seem like a good idea at the time; so we waited there for a moment to see if it would return, but we never saw it again. Unfortunately, the class, which was limited to staying on the upper structure of the wreck, did not see the shark.
The second site was Hathaway Bridge span #14. Viz was a little better here at 30-35'. We dropped down to the road deck at 75' and proceeded along the deck to the far end. When we reached the far end, I started swimming up along one of the tressels. That's when I noticed that following us along the deck was a Goliath Grouper surrounded by a swarm of bait fish. He looked like a Volkswagen Beetle rolling along the bridge road. I managed to swim above him just as he came off the deck over the sand and took a picture. Unfortunately my stobe picked that time not to fire. I'm including what little of the picture that did come out with the pics I'm loading in the gallery. It is the one that is solid green. If you look closely, you can see the grouper's silhouette. So that makes two large fish in one trip, neither of which I got a good picture of.
I'm going to load the pictures from this trip in the gallery. The quality isn't that great due to the large amount of parrticles in the water. I believe if I had angled the strobe away from the camera a little more, they would have come out better. Oh well, there's always next time.
