"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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Ongoing beach inspections...

On the morning of Sunday May 26, 2013, the Point Pleasant First Aid and Rescue Squad diver’s Michael Bond, Bob Schmidinger, Milton Rodriguez, Joseph Sinkus, David Gibson, and Chief Diver Chet Nesley met at the squad building with no real plans to dive. However, knowing that a west wind had been blowing hard for the prior day and a half, everyone was curious to see what the water conditions were like. Was the waters visibility atrocious? Perhaps the biggest question in mind was whether the ocean was flat and clear to continue our beach surveys as requested by Point Pleasant Beach, Bayhead and Mantoloking? At 0800 we made our traditional ride down to the foot of Broadway to gage the beach conditions and then to the Manasquan Inlet to check on the water clarity. The water was “lake surface” like and was definitely conducive to shore entry by divers because of the lack of waves. Better yet, it was determined that Rescue 34, our zodiac and jet ski would be great assets in the underwater survey by pulling the divers along behind.

We went back to the building and got our gear and vessels ready for our mission. Our plan was to launch the vessels at the end of Bay Ave, Point Pleasant Beach and have the vessels go through the Point Pleasant canal and Manasquan inlet to meet us just off the beach at Trenton Ave, in Point Pleasant Beach. Dive Unit 347 carried our equipment and divers to the beach, while our first responder vehicle towed and launched our rescue boat and when finished was utilized on the beach to move gear and divers.  To make our plan work we had to make a few phone calls. After all, this was very spur of the moment decision but we could not pass up very good diving conditions. We contacted the squad captain, Sabrina Fioretti who had access to the squad’s first responder vehicle 346, which has four wheel drive and EMT Jerry Meaney who also has a beach capable truck.

As planned Rescue 34 and the jet ski, towed two divers behind underwater. Both divers held onto a line one hundred feet behind the vessels. Every time a diver found a large piece of debris that posed a danger to swimmers, they came up and signaled to the beach surface support on shore. They in turn marked the area in which the debris was found by positioning the vehicle on the beach directly in perpendicular with the divers. By doing this the divers had a point of reference if the object was dropped before recovered. Surveying was done in water depths of as little as three feet and as deep at twelve feet. In the 2.1 mile of Point Pleasant Beach and Bayhead beaches surveyed we found scraps of metal, a sign post, a bed frame and small chunks of masonry blocks which is not a lot for the area we covered. The area was surprisingly clear of debris. 

The safety of our beaches is an ongoing concern and we will be continuing when the conditions both sea state and the visibility underwater allow and manpower is available. As of today, we can say there is no large debris from Manasquan Inlet to Mount Street in Bayhead. Everything is being done to make the beaches as safe as possible by the Townships, Dive Team, the Point Pleasant First Aid and Emergency Squad, the lifeguards, and all the beach owners. No one can guarantee that anything is totally safe. Everyone is doing the best they can.

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7-11 Support....

 

The Dive Team presented a plaque to Jay Patel who is the owner of the 7-11 store on Broadway in Point Pleasant Beach...

 

Over the years Jay has been a great support to the team by providing aid to the team in many different forms while they return from incident calls and training sessions....