These are pictures I took on my dive trip I went on last saturday... I have a story to tell about this dive too!! You'll have to excuse some of the fuzziness, I forgot to wipe the bubbles off my lens :isorry
Does anyone know what type of fish these are? I thought they looked sweet
An occupied lobster trap (or dinner) which ever way you want to see it
Close up of the lobsters
Not sure what type of coral this is but it was really bright!
See if you can find the fish? Theres nothing wrong with the picture...
MONDO Angelfish. This thing was like 1.5-2 feet long
A big pufferfish, I didnt know they could grow so big this guy was around 8 inches
Peekaboo!!! This was a moray eel that was about 6 or 7 feet long, it looked like a snowflake eel up close
School of yellowtails
This was my favorite picture of the entire dive. I took it while penetrating the hold, it was really dark and a good thing I brought my flashlight. It looks kind of like a ghostly staircase that leads nowhere...
So anyways the title of this story describing my diving adventure is called don't speed in manatee zones (itll make sense in a minute)... Here goes:
So I went diving Saturday on the Tortuga which is about 110 feet down and was sunk in April, 1995 for the movie Fair Game. It is a 165' freighter vessel. This vessel is the best penetration wreck of the area if you are ever diving in Miami. (For the advanced diver only!). So at the end of the dive we were going to make our ascent and do our safety stop at 10 feet which is to decrease the likelyhood of getting the bends (especially after a 110 foot dive). On the way back to the anchor line, we could not find it for the life of us. So since we werent on the anchor line we were just drifting underwater, and for some reason I thought I felt the current picking up a bit...so we surfaced to see how far away from the boat we were, we got sucked about 150 feet east of the boat which isnt too bad; definatly swimmable. The next thing I know I look left and see this HUGE white boat hull inches from my head coming right over me. So my buddy and I shoved off and just started kicking as hard as we could away from the boat so that we wouldn't get caught in the vortex created by the propellers.
The minimum birth that vessels are required to give to a commercial divers down flag is 300 feet, and at that speed they are required to go at idle speeds. Failure to do so (as this boat did) is called "buzzing" the dive flag and can result in a $1000 fine and/or up to 6 months in jail. Anyways back to the story...
So we pop up behind this boat (which happened to be a 60 foot sport fishing boat) and I realize that they are trolling with four lines in the water. THEN I realize that there is a monofilament fishing line within arms reach. So I grab that and guide it through my hand to make sure that my buddy and I dont get snagged. When the hook approached I tossed it in the air clear of both of us... next thing I know my buddy is whizzing away behind the boat and couldn't reach his dive knife. So I began swimming really hard to catch him and cut the line with my dive knife. So now we are safe bobbing up and down behind the fishing boat watching all the fishermen look at us in awe... they never stopped or asked if we were alright. We waited for the dive boat to come get us as we were both to exhausted to swim back. When we get back on the boat, Mike, the captain, tells us that he was watching them come at us and was laying on his horn and hailing the fishing boat on the radio to no avail. When I went to South Beach Divers (the dive shop that I use) I was telling my friends Sam Jon and Mike about what had happened and they told me that if I had been three feet under water I would have been sucked into the prop without-a-doubt. So apparently Captain Mike, who has been running dive charters for 11 years, has had some close calls with divers and boats but I was the FIRST to actually be hit. He filed a report with the Coast Guard and the hit and run boat will be hearing from them.
Moral of the story: Don't speed through manatee zones, getting hit by a boat sucks!
