2,501 lbs. of Sinkers in eleven months!!....

Sunday looked to be the day we get the 2500 pounds of sinkers the team has been trying for. An hour and half before high tide the water looked really good. We checked it with a shell drop and we could see the shell go down for over ten seconds. So it was back to the building and get geared up for today was the day !!

Linda C, Joe (OJ) S, Joe S., Greg  M, and I were the divers and Mike B., Bob S. were our surface support and Sean M. was our first aider. So we were all set for a big day. When we got back to the inlet and ready to go in something happened to the water! It was mud brown!!! We dropped a shell in and we saw it hit the water and that was it! It was pretty funny watching everybody just standing there looking at one another. Well this is what we do, so it was gear up and get in and get the job done.

   I was going to go in and set up a line so everybody could get to the sinker spot. I hit the water and it was lights out, below ten feet it was so dark you couldn’t see anything! It was a night dive! Even with a dive light the visibility was 6 inches to maybe a foot. It took me ten minutes to find the sinker mount and tie off to it. Everybody started getting in and you just could not see a thing.

   Joe and Linda worked the sinker mount and OJ and Greg worked a new spot that I started working. After an hour divers started coming out of the water and we saw how bad we did. We only needed seventeen pounds to make twenty five hundred pounds. It was not looking good!

   Joe S. was the last one out and he worked his way out along the seawall, picking up what sinkers he could find. It was a good thing he did! Cause when we cleaned the sinkers we found out we had eighteen pounds. We had made it by one pound!!!!

So in eleven months we got twenty five hundred pounds of sinkers!

   Some sinker facts

       60 dives to get 2501lbs

      5 gallon bucket holds 260 lbs

     Best day was 191 lbs

     Sinkers came out of Manasquan inlet and shark river inlet...

     Over 1300lbs came out of one spot that was no bigger than ten feet by ten feet...