Sinker Sale 2015 ~Fishermen's Flea Mkt~

Sunday was the fishing flea market held by the Ocean Fire Company #1 in Point pleasant Beach, It is held every February and has been for the last twenty years. Every year the fire company gives the dive team a table so we can sell all the cool things we find under water.

   It’s mostly sinkers but we have sold some funny things in the past, many fishing poles, fishing pole holders, anchors, boat parts, old bottles, tools and one year we had a three foot tall concrete owl that Tom and Sue pulled from the inlet. I never thought that we would ever sell it, but it was the first thing we sold!

   This year we were going in a little light in the sinker department. It wasn’t a great year for sinkers. We had other things we needed to get done and the weather was not always on our side. We finished the year with 1705 pounds.

  In 2013 we had 2579lbs, 2012 we had 2036lbs. and in 2011 we had 2116lbs. I don’t have the other numbers right off the top of my head, but it was always over 2000 pounds. We still did very well and this is the team’s one big fund raising event. Just about everyone from the team was there, new guy Rich, Sue, Linda, Mike, Bob, Greg, Joe(OJ), Joe(big foot) and Paul too. It made the job of getting 1705 pounds of sinkers in to the building and the tables set up for selling.

   The team always has a good time with all the fishermen that we see. It is the same guys coming back year after year to buy their sinkers from us! So now we get to start over training and diving and hoping this year we can get 3000 pounds.

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It's not just "Diving".....

   As a member of the Point Pleasant First Aid Dive Team we get to dive in some really cool places and places a lot of divers never get to go! We also get to dive a lot! Training and other missions takes us everywhere. Beach sweeps, recovery’s just to name a few.

   But it’s not all diving. There is first aid training, driving training, compressor operator training, boat training, knowing your knots and search patterns and the list goes on. But wait there is still more! Let’s not forget cleaning all the dive gear, both yours and the teams and keeping the dive truck loaded and stocked up ready to roll if needed. The dive bay doesn’t clean its self! We have to do that too! You can never believe how fast it can become a real mess, sand, dirt, old bottles and dive gear and wet wetsuits and wet dry suits, all have places to hang or be put into.

   You would think you’re done but you would be wrong! We’re also members of the first aid squad too. Someone has to clean the squad building. There is lot’s to do on an old building. Fixing and painting and cleaning, not everybody is a handyman, but we do what we can, you can clean or you can answer first aid calls so other can keep working.

   There are many jobs that need to be done. Answering first aid calls is number one! Fund raising is also a big job that has to be done, without fund raising the first aid would be out of business in no time! So everything that we can do to save money we do!

Sinker Processing.......

Yesterday was just one of those days. The water was looking pretty bad! Maybe three or four seconds on the shell drop. Big Joe yelled at me cause he said I used the biggest shell I could find so we could see it longer.
OJ got everyone to go back to the building and started melting down and making new sinkers for the upcoming fishing flea market. He got the pots going and he had new 16-12-10-8 oz sinkers fly out of those molds. Ali, Linda,Big Joe, Rich and Bob were cleaning them up.

We melted down over 270 pounds, we didn't do as good as past years, but its not over yet!

We ended the day with Chinese food, with Sue K from the first aid learning to use chop sticks.

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