Ice Dive ~2015~

Sunday was the Point Pleasant First Aid Dive Teams monthly drill and with all the stories around about kids and trucks going through the ice it was a good time to get the divers ready to in the ice. We don’t always get ice in this area so every time we get ice we get the teams out on it and under it.

   Sunday turned out to be good day for it. We had 5 inches of ice and SNOW! That’s right we started our drill just as it started snowing. Well it’s never a nice day when we get called anyway. So the drill went on.

    We did surface rescues with victims falling in the ice and the rescuers going out to them and getting them out of the water. Going over ice safety and ways to get to the victims and ways to get the victims out of the water was just half the drill, the other half was going under the ice in full dive gear and searching for a lost victim.

   Being under the ice is not for everyone, it is easy to get lost and you just can’t just pop to the surface. You have to be able to find the hole you went in. This is why no divers go in without a line and a tender on that line. The tender can guide the diver using line pulls and search an area looking for a missing victim.

   Our two newest members are half way to be ice diver certified just like the rest of the team. We never know what is going to happen so we have to be ready and that is why we are always out there training! It is better to train and not need it, then to not train and come up short when called!

CPR Certification....

Every year the team has to recertify in cpr and many other skills. This months training drill was our Cpr recert. This year Linda C. dive team member was our training instructor and she did an outstanding job.

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Day of Recovery...

The team got to try out some of their recovery skills on Sunday. We were asked a few weeks back to remove some sunken dock boxes out of some boat slips, which we did. We moved them into an area out of the way of any boats knowing we would be coming back for them.

Well Sunday was the day! Divers Joe (OJ) Ali, Linda with Karen and bob for surface support recovered the boxes. The water was 62 degrees, we knew we would be working so we all broke out the wet suits and that was a good call, cause after an hour and a half in the water no one was cold. The visibility was 3-5 feet right up till the time we started moving the box’s around then it was 0.
One box was over 8 feet long and the small one was 4 feet long. Joe and I started digging the box out of the mud that big Joe put the box in. I don't remember putting the box that deep in the mud. While Joe was digging Ali and Linda found the top to the long box and took it down and around the bulkhead to the boat ramp. Not an easy job as at the end of the bulkhead they were in the current that was running at over two knots.

While Joe was digging out the box’s some people in the marine who were watching us asked if we could find a pair of glass’s that were dropped off a boat a few weeks ago. I told them I would give it a try and swam over to the boat that they were dropped off. The bottom under the boat was so soft that anything dropped would be under the mud! So they should still be there. I started out doing a pass over the area staying just off the bottom so I didn’t mess up the visibility. Nothing ever goes straight down so I started there and worked out from that point searching up current and down current moving out as I went. After six passes I found them under an inch of mud. You should have seen the faces of the guy and his wife! They couldn’t believe I found them. They did ask how I did that and I told her “this is what we do!”

Once we got the boxes up on to shore we went back in the water to check out the area and see what we could find. OJ came back with a really nice round bottom bottle and Linda and Ali got some nice soda bottles. I came back with a case milk bottle and a round tape top milk bottle in pretty good shape and a brand new ten inch pipe wrench.

We started cleaning the boxes as best we could right there at the boat ramp and finished cleaning them at the building. OJ and Karen did a great job on the boxes, with a little from Bob and his power washer. All the bottles will take a little more time to clean. We did get one bottle that none from us have ever seen.

So it turned out to be a really good day, we recovered the boxes and found the lost glasses and found some nice bottles and answered some first aid calls and did our dive duty crew. Everybody did a really great job working with no visibility and a strong current and still had fun doing it!!

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"One of these things is not like the other"...

Always one in the bunch somewhere...

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~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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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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