Sinker Dive for Flea Market...

Sunday was a busy day for the team, we sorted and separated all 2100 pounds of sinkers for the coming fishing flea market. We separated the one we can resell and the ones we sell for scrap and then by size. With everyone pitching in and doing a job we were able to get the job done in just over three hours. Loading the sorting table with sinkers and sorting and emptying the bucket as they filled and weighting and marking the full buckets we had a job for everyone. We may not get to the 3500 pounds we had last year, but we still have over a ton and we still have a few weeks to go before the flea market

After finishing with the sorting we had time to get a dive in, so we checked the water at Manasquan Inlet and saw it was pretty good so we geared up and headed to Shark River Inlet.

  By the time we got there it was already raining and the wind was just starting to blow, but the ocean was not all that kicked up yet. We checked and you could see the bottom and we made plans to start out by the mouth of the inlet as the tide was still coming in. Rich G. Joe S, Joe S Greg and I headed out to the end of the jetty with Brandon B. as our surface support.

    Getting in was what we have been training on the last few months and it showed today, everyone got in with no problems even with a three foot swell rolling in the inlet. Once in the water and on the bottom it turned out to be really nice, we had visibility around 5-10 feet and some surge but nothing that we couldn’t handle.

This was a sinker dive right from the start and everyone hit good spots and sinker tubes started fill fast. In an hour the tubes were full and lift bags deployed and recovered. Rich G had wanted to try to recover a rail post from the old boardwalk that is still sitting on the bottom and with all the team working he got his wish. Not only did he get one, he got two!

Joe S and I wanted to hit a good spot that I had found, so we both geared up and headed back in. As we were getting ready the two bridge tenders came down and were talking to us about what we do and what’s on the bottom, so the team made some new friends we got a picture of all of us all together

   Joe and I headed back to where we entered on the first dive and got back in. By this time the weather was starting to pick up, with the raining coming down harder and the wind blowing stronger and the waves starting to pick up and most of all the light was starting to fade. But with what little time we had left we filled our sinker tubes and headed up to get out.

   Joe went first and I waited on the bottom so the guys on the surface only had to work to help one guy out at a time. I started swimming down the inlet to get away from the surge and the swells that had by now picked up. As I hit the surface Joe was out of the water and I threw the flag line with the tube and lift bag up to Rich and he pulled it in leaving my hands free. By now it was dark and time to go.

   But in those two dives Rich got his rail posts and the team got two hundred and ten pounds of sinkers and we made two new friends in Katie and Katie our bridge tenders

I think we may need a bigger table. The new sinker total is now 2406.4 pounds

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!

~2014 Sinker Sale~ Point Pleasant Fire Company Fishing Flea market...

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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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...

Training with a "Hefty" Return....

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.

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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!

 

Joe, Joe and Greg stayed with the mount and worked getting it rigged to lift it out of the water. They moved the lift bag half way down the mount and filled it so the mount was free of the bottom. The winch pulled the mount up and over the sea wall and in to the parking lot. It had to be almost twenty feet long when we laid it all out.

 

 

 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.

 

 

 

 

After all the cleaning was done the team walked away with one hundred and eighty three pounds of sinkers. But we also know that that part of the inlet is now free of this snag, the fishermen will not be losing any more of their gear and fish will no longer be getting hung up and dying there!

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!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chet Nesley

Chief Diver

 

 

 

 

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