|
Some of you may have noticed the TABS V Buoy
hasn’t been transmitting for a while. It
broke free in early February and we found it
fetched up on the East Bank February 8. With
the buoy still attached, the chain and cable
were doing some significant damage to the
reef below, so the Flower Gardens sanctuary
manager hot-footed it out on a big
commercial boat and snatched the buoy off
the chain to stop further damage. Because of
the depth, he left the chain and cable on
the bottom for a different dive team to
recover. So the crew of the mighty vessel
Spree headed out Saturday night to take
advantage of Sunday’s nice weather for a
chain and cable rodeo.
Only part of the hardware was on the
reef—the buoy had left it’s railroad wheel
anchor and drifted until it found the
western edge of the East bank where it
tangled itself up in about 140 feet of
water. Wound around various coral heads were
approximately 60 feet of 5/8 stud link chain
and 180 feet of plastic-coated 3/8 wire
rope. Capt. Frank came up with a plan to
float the hardware so we didn’t do any
further damage to the reef, and the plan
went off without a hitch (whew!).
Dive 1 was to find the chain. When the
commercial guys took the buoy off, they
marked the end of the cable with a teeny
tiny float and 15 feet of ¼ poly that ended
up at about 130 ft—not exactly a big help.
So we threw a spot buoy on Frank’s numbers
from February and it landed 3 feet from the
chain! Kenny was the next thing over the
side, tasked with marking both ends of our
project. Dive 2: rig the hardware. Team 2
discovered that swimming down with 3 huge
lift bags is not exactly the easiest thing
to do, but they were successful in rigging
the 3 bags to the chain and cable. Team 2
recovered our spot buoy too! Dive 3: get the
chain unstuck and send everything to the
surface. With the constant supervision of 2
enormous marbled grouper, team 3
successfully convinced the chain to come
loose, untangled the cable, inflated the 3
bags, and watched as everything blasted to
the surface. Then we followed our floating
treasure to the surface, spending our safety
stop being watched by a confused collection
of barracuda and a tiger shark. Yes, tiger
shark. Of course we had a tiger shark—I was
diving with CP. Nothing like drifting stops
with a tiger shark.
Recovering our floating treasure was an
all-hands iteration on the swim platform.
Thankfully, we had plenty of beef to wrangle
the chain onto the deck and the cable
followed behind without any trouble. As
payment for our success, Capt Frank took us
all diving on HI-389 for an afternoon dive.
Plenty of young silkies were hanging out,
and amberjack that made the sharks look
tiny! Then it was off to Stetson to recover
the remnants of our sideline from our last
weekend rodeo. I recovered our remaining
scraps of sideline and the guys had a good
time following huge lobsters around the reef
until they turned blue from the 64 degree
thermocline on the wall—so with our intrepid
dive team recovered and our treasure
securely tied to the swim platform, we
headed for home.
Melanie Wasson
M/V Spree
|
