Well, the weekend didn't turn out exactly how we wanted due to the weather, and the tides weren't in our favor for shore diving. We wouldn't have been able to shore dive anyway due to the 5-7 ft waves that were crashing into everything.
-
Saturday morning we arose from the dead at 6:30am and packed up for a trip to Morrison Springs. Awesome, Awesome, Awesome! This is a must dive for anyone that likes visibiliy. Over 100' viz, out of water air temp was somewhere around 70 with winds making it feel like 60-65. Water temp at the surface had to be in the low 60's, temp at the mouth of the spring was about 64 degrees. We ended up getting 2 dives at Morrison. Had to go over to Vortex to get an air fill after dive 1. Honestly, we weren't impressed with Vortex (didn't dive it, but looked around).
-
Sunday morning we arose from the dead at 5:30am, thinking it was 6:30am, gotta love daylight savings time! Anyway, we were booked for a boat dive with Viking Diving from Pensacola. I must say, we really enjoyed diving with them! It's a small operation and it shows from the hospitality that they show. Captain Tim Thorsen was great!
First dive we went to Russian Freighter, about 10 miles off the coast. She's a 400 foot long ship that was sunk on the way to Mobile Bay for repairs. I had a bottom time of 20 minutes with a max of 82 feet. Short time is due to a equipment malfunction on my buddies air system (I'm sure you guys will get the story soon from him). This was an awesome dive, I've never seen so many schools of fish!!! I'm too new to diving to know what fish is what, but I do know we saw spades, blue angels, toad fish, and alot more that I don't know the name of. Viz was about 20', but due to being surrounded by fish, viz was about 5' (seriously, we were surrounded by a wall of fish!)
Second dive we went to some tug boat or something (I'll post the name when I find out what it was). Viz was about 15' on this one. The storm from the couple of days before really screwed up the viz. Bottom time of 25 minutes with a max depth of 70 feet. I came up with 2000 left in my tank, but mike was at 500 when we hit the surface. This didn't have as many fish, but we did see a massive barracuda and a 1 foot long cucumber.
More to come as I think about the weekend
