Dive 1: South Seas & Princess Britney

Jody gave me the visual map of where the wrecks lie on the GPS. Instead of taking coarse and bearings I went with a simpler west, east, north, west pattern to get between the wrecks. Knowing the depth and being at that depth since Miami is a gentle slope works better than trying to keep a course. Jody is slowly teaching me his secrets for “smelling” out wrecks. I already know how to tell if I’m close, no I have an idea on how to get close.

Charlie dropped us right on the Southseas and I let out lots of line on the surface marker. scootering around this wreck makes it seem quite small, hard to believe I spent entire dives on it.

For my first navigation exercise I had to scooter to Princess Britney. I started off a bit west and then straight North. In less than two minutes the toothy cuda residents greeted us. Then seem to drop out of the water column to check us out right as we appear. The Britney with its tall masts at the bow and stern is perfect habitat for them. A couple hundred Bar Jacks also swam through.

The screw was 7 ft off the sand and I thought I could dip down and under it, before I remember I had a line to the surface attached to me. So I took a wide turn around the stern. My scooter began to slow down and I saw a flash in the sand. It appears I tried to wrap the wreck up and I was loosing. I took a wide trip back around and Jody managed the line. Now we had quite a bit of slack line in the water around us. I scootered towards the bow to take out the slack and tie the float off so we could have some fun.

I saw the flash again from Jody; the white line glared against his all black scooter prop. He got too close to the line and sucked it into the blade. Well, time to see how good Dean’s scooter class was? First step was cut the line, the splice the float back to the spool. That cave class does come in handy! Then he unwrapped and cut line until we were down to the bit of line that was in the shaft under the prop. He gave up, I tried to unwrap in it several directions and to no avail. We had a dead scooter and we had drifted off the Britney.

It was time to tow for real. Jody secured his scooter and grabbed on to my crotch strap. I hit the anchor chains, which led us back to the boat. Navigation tip number two, before a lot of ships are sunk, their anchors are put down. The depth equals the amount of chain you have to swim to get back to the wreck.

We tied off the line and the dead scooter. I swim with mine for grins and we toured the wreck. Algae have started to grow all over, but few fish besides Hogfish and Cuda call this reef their home. We picked up our gear and ascended after 35 minutes of bottom time.

–Matt