Training can only go so far. You need to show the many different
ways that the teams training can be used during incidents and service to the
community. That is what happened on Sunday
for the divers of the Point Pleasant First Aid Dive team. The team was put to
the test of trying to recover a large sinker mount from the bottom of Manasquan
inlet. This is a mount of fishing line, sinkers and lures and anything from old
t-shirts, fishing poles, and reels along with anything rolling across the
bottom for the last twenty years.
Some
of the team members have been working on this mount for the last few weeks,
cutting and working it free from the bottom and grabbing what sinkers that they
could find. Over the last few weeks about six feet of the mount was worked free
and three hundred pounds of sinkers have been recovered.
Last
Sunday we tried to pull the mount up but it was not coming up, we ran out of
time and visibility as the visibility dropped after the tide started running
out. So the team made plans for this Sunday for another attempt at removing
this debris from the Inlet floor…
This
Sunday we were ready for another try at the mount. This time it was a test for
the divers to use all their skills learned over their training periods. Under water knot tying (try tying knots with
wet suit gloves on) running line for lifting and rigging lift bags. Everybody
had a job to do and for this to work and everybody needed to do their job. The
team was working against the clock, as we had a small window of slack tide to
work in.
Once
at the parking lot we got the dive truck set up so we could use the winch on
the front of the truck to pull the sinker mount up and out of the water. A
ladder was put in the water and made safe so the divers could get in and out of
the water without having to swim very far. The lifting gear and lines were laid
out so they could be ready to go.
.
The first teams job was to recover the line
we used for lift last week and bring that to the surface, Ali. B and Sue.L did
this in just minutes and had the line and all knots needed for the lift ready
to go. This line was hooked up to the winch on the dive truck and pulled tight.
With this done Joe(OJ). S and Joe.S could use this line to take the lift bag
and lines down to the mount and get it rigged up for the lift. With this done
Greg.M came down with a tank of air to fill the lift bag and began to fill the
bag.
Once the lift bag was full, we had five hundred pounds of
lift pulling the mount up and the winch pulling it from shore. But the mount
only came up so far! Now it was time to start cutting any fishing lines that
held the mount down. Knifes came out and the cutting began! As the teams
started cutting more and more lines free, more pull was applied from the winch
on the dive truck and slowly the mount started to come free.
Most of the cutting was done with little or no visibility.
As the sinker mount broke free of the bottom it kicked up the mud and silt from
all those years of sitting on the bottom. But that’s how we train, to work in
anything! With Joe and Joe and Greg cutting the lines it got to the point that
Joe reached in to grab more line to cut he found nothing! The mount was gone!!
Then he looked up and there it was floating free of the bottom. Not all of it
was floating, we had pulled so much out that part of it was still dragging across
the bottom.
From the surface the
team working the winch just saw the lift bag pop up and just kept pulling it in
with the winch. Once a check was made to see everyone was OK, we got Ali and
Sue out of the water and into a nice warm truck. It was anything but warm both
in the water and on land. The water temperature was around fifty degrees and on
land it was twenty nine degrees with a wind chill of nine degrees, It was cold! But that’s what we have to work in!
It was so big we
had to cut it up into six parts to load it up in fifty gallon drums to get it
back to the building to go through it looking for sinkers and lures.
The team would like to thank Alex’s inlet bait and tackleshop on inlet drive for pointing out this obstruction and asking if we could do
something about it. Without this tip we may have not found this spot and for
him to offer the warmth of his shop and bathrooms for the divers on a very cold
and long day!
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