It took the team eleven and half months to get 2579 pounds
of sinkers and five and a half hours to sell every one. This week end was the
Point Pleasant fire departments company #1 fishing flea market and as in the
past they give the dive team a table to sell all the stuff we found throughout
the year. Sell we did!!
Two thousand five
hundred seventy nine pounds of sinkers, hundreds of lures, many fishing poles,
anchors, and old bottles all for sale, and everything was recovered from
underwater. We do clean the lures and
the sinkers of old line and any debris that hangs on to it.
We were ready for
the doors to open and the mad rush of people looking for deals! Well it didn’t
happen that way! People did come in but not like in years past. Sales were OK but
kind of slow and it was not just us. Nobody was doing very well. There just wasn’t a lot of people.
Our sales did pick
up late in the morning and we started moving a lot more sinkers. Paul D. had
his hand truck and was kept busy taking half buckets of sinkers out to the
parking lot. Half of bucket here and a half bucket there and we well on your
way to getting cleaned out, One sale took all our bigger sinkers. Another sale
took over half our lures and that’s how the morning went.
By 1:00 we were pretty
much done, most of the vendors were packing up, we had two half buckets of
sinkers left and looked like they are going back to the building with us! But
wait!!! As we were loading it on the truck one last customer came up and took
everything we had left. Nothing but empty buckets and one fishing pole were
going back with us.
It was a really
good day! We sold everything. It was the best we ever did and the most we ever
made. “If you bring it someone will buy it”.
You would think
after working all day selling sinkers we would take a rest, but you would be
wrong!! We checked the water and it was
really clear so it was off to get gear and hit the inlet.
So Ali, Bob, Joe,
OJ, Greg, Linda and I all suited up and jumped into the inlet with Paul and
Milton as surface support. Being on call 24/7 we have to be ready at all times
so this keeps us on our toes!! The water was COLD! I could feel it on my face
the minute I hit the water, but the visibility was so good with over 10-15
feet. Everybody teamed up and started looking around.
The inlet is always
changing, sand moves here and sand moves there and you never know what you’re
going to find. The find of the day goes to Ali, she found a brand new watch and
it had the right time on it!! Joe followed that up with a nice silver ring!!
Linda and I came out with a full sinker tube and some quarters and a clip of
30-06 bullets and Linda got a nice bottle too. Joe out did us on the bottles
also! He got a bottle I have never seen before.
After over an hour
the divers started coming out and checking out our finds. It’s really nice
having surface support to help the divers getting out of the water and helping
the divers out of their gear. Paul saw Joe’s bottle and got on his I-phone and
found out it’s a soda-milk bottle from the 40’s. With the last diver coming out
an hour and twenty five minutes after going in, it was time for coffee and to
head back to clean up and start the next year’s great sinker race again!
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