If you have been
diving long enough you will find things, Old bottles, sinkers, fishing lures
and if you’re lucky enough good things too. Like old coins and paper money,
jewelry and dive gear. Some of these things we do get to keep, but we do to try
to return the things we find.
We post pictures and
stories on our blog site and face book page of the things we find and sometimes
we get to return them. In one case a pocket book was recovered from the inlet
and was turned over to the police and was waiting for the owner when she came
to the police headquarters to report the lost.
A week later the team was down at the inlet
getting ready to dive and this same woman came up to thank us for recovering
her pocket book.
In another case that happened just a few weeks
ago and a spear gun was recovered from the inlet. We took some pictures and we
posted them and low and behold the owner contacted us and we were able to
return it. Luckily the owner had marked the gun with red paint and you could
still see the paint on it. The spear gun had been in the inlet for months.
After hurricane sandy
team members Steve K and Joe S and I were on Gull Island and came across the
remains of some benches and found these brass plates embedded in them. We
recovered the plates and posted pictures of them and the pictures got posted to
New Jersey Hurricane news also. A few weeks later we got a call about one of
the plates and we were to meeting up with the owner and return one of them. We
also found out the benches were from Spring Lake boardwalk.
There are times the
team gets asked to try and find things lost in the water, we do our best to
find the time and the divers to go have a look. Once the coast guard station at
Manasquan inlet asked us for some help in looking for a wedding band that was
dropped in the water at their dock. I answered the call that day and spent four
in the water looking. The bottom there is very soft mud so it was a very slow
search. Having used up what air I had I told them I would be back tomorrow with
more help and we would do our best to find it.
I returned the next
day with Sue L and Joe S and then team member Brandon C. This time we were able
to talk to the guy who dropped the ring and found out the true area to look in.
I had spent the whole day before in the wrong area some twenty feet from the
rings location.
But Sue and Joe had no trouble finding it and were in and out of the water in maybe twenty minutes and returned it to one very happy and surprised guardsmen who thought it was gone forever...
.
It’s not always small
things either. After a northeast storm the team was asked to try and find a
large section of steel pipe lost behind a house on Inlet drive. The owner had
divers out looking for it but they came away with nothing. After checking out
the area we planned a search pattern and found the pipe three quarters buried
in the sand. Not only did the team find it, we recovered it and raised it out
of the water and set it back in the owners yard.
The best one was a
call for help by someone who lost his ice boat in the ice during one of the
years that the bay iced over. On the way to the marina we would be working out
of we came up with a plan to find the ice boat. After getting geared up we
headed out to the water and found that finding it would be no problem at all,
as the sail was sticking up out of the ice by seven feet. The hard part was
chopping the boat out of the six inches of ice.
The weather was not
helping us out. The air temperature was 5 below zero and the wind was blowing
over twenty miles per hour. But we got the mast and sail down and off the boat
and chopped a hole in the ice big enough to get the boat out. As we put the
boat down on the ice the wind tried to blow it down the bay, but quick thinking
by Doug H, Tom C and Sue L stopped it before it got too far.
These are just a few
of the thing we have done over the last nineteen years. We do try to help out
and we never ask for pay, if they want to make a donation to the team that’s
OK. To us this is a way to show off what we can do and it’s good training for
the team.
