by Capt. Jim Kalvin
People have asked me in the past, “why do SCUBA divers roll off of the side of the boat backwards?” My response has always been, “because if they rolled forward, they would land face-first on the deck of the boat!” Kind of a no-brainer if you ask me, but I try my best to educate those who are unfamiliar with the sport.
On the serious side, summer is in full bloom and the water is warm and clear – for the first time in almost a year. As yet, there is little sign of the water quality issues we were experiencing last year, so now is the time to make the most of your sub-aqueous opportunities.
I was reminiscing with a buddy of mine a week or so ago about a trip we took out to the Black Hole many many years ago. For those of you who don’t know, the Black Hole is a sink-hole in 70’ of water that goes down to over 230’. It can be a spectacular dive during the right time of the year – featuring everything from goliath grouper and turtles to great spear-fishing for amberjack, grouper, and snapper. The bull sharks are a constant and are always around even if you don’t see them. I was using a Loran-C to find my way there. In case you’re not old enough to remember this bit of space-age technology, it was not a slam-dunk that you could get where you wanted to go. Bad weather, sun-spots, cloud cover, or electrical anomalies aboard your vessel could affect the signal reception, and you could drive in circles for hours trying to find your spot. With every “blip” in the signal, you had to re-enter the coordinates you were looking for. 14028.5 43864.3 are the LOP (Lines of Position) numbers. I remember them to this day because I had to punch them into the machine so often!
Back to the story, we were sitting on the spot, readying our dive gear, and a boat pulled up that moored across the basin from us back at Boat Haven. It was a Well-Craft cuddy-cabin with two Mercury outboards and I vaguely knew the owners. We said “Hey” as they circled our boat. They were there to fish and were dismayed that we were gearing up to dive. We promised we wouldn’t run all of the fish off and we would even set their anchor for them if they wanted us to.
They agreed to that offer and came up along-side of our boat. As soon as he put the engines in reverse, there was a strange noise and commotion from the transom and we all looked overboard to see both of his stainless-steel propellers spinning in separate spirals down to the bottom. The engines had just been serviced, and someone forgot to put the prop nuts on the shafts after the work was done! As long as they were going forward, it was no big deal. But as soon as the gearcase went into reverse, off they came.
So, our spear-fishing trip immediately turned into a salvage operation. We recovered the props as they – luckily – had not gone down the hole, but had come to rest about 30 feet from the rim. We rounded them up, brought them back to the surface, and put them on the engines for the gentlemen. The spacer rings and nuts just happened to be in the splash-well where the tech had left them.
So…. we did our good deed for the day and still made our second shallow dive on the way in. Our fuel was paid for by our marina neighbors – along with a nice tip. And my educated guess would be that whomever was sitting in the Service Manager’s chair at Boat Haven got more than earful!