Tempus Frigid

On Sunday January 26, The Point Pleasant Dive Team was able to take advantage of the cold temperatures affecting the east coast. The temperature stayed below freezing long enough for ice to form on some of the local waterways. The conditions looked perfect for some Ice diving training.

Ice can form quickly in the local waters if the conditions are right. This beautiful formation can be dangerous as it presents an enticing new playground to walk across or play upon.  Many times the ice can be deceiving. Weak spots can form near pilings or cracks can be hidden just under the surface. These can cause the unsuspecting victim to plunge into the water or under the ice without warning. The Dive Team must be prepared to respond to these emergencies, so when we get the opportunity we train in the surrounding areas waters.

We headed out to a quiet spot in Bayhead. This area presents a perfect place for the team to train. It is off of major roads and the terrain offers many areas of interaction with the ice pack.

Chief Nesley led the day reviewing the many techniques specific to Diving and Rescue Procedures on Ice. Four divers took turns falling thru the ice into the frigid waters. There is nothing like feeling first hand your body falling thru the ice and the feel of the ice cold water shocking your body. Even wearing the appropriate exposure suit the cold can quickly zap the strength from your fingers and extremities.

Ice diving requires specific techniques be applied for the safety of the divers and support personnel. One of the most important is the use of Line Communications. As each Ice Diver is required to be tethered via a line while under the ice, communications to surface personnel are executed via a series of line pulls. Each one letting the Line Tenders know of the divers’ current situation or needs.

Joe, Linda, “OJ”, and Bob each took turns diving under the ice while the others acted as surface support.  While under the ice, each diver practiced Navigation and/or Search and Recovery techniques. As well as tasks like finding our Chiefs foot stuck thru a hole in the ice.

It was a cold day both under and above the ice. However, each of our divers will walk away with just a little more understanding and experience of the local waters during the winter.

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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...

New Years Dive ~2014~

New Years day mean many things to many people. Some sleep off a night of partying, to some it means football. But for the members of the dive team it means it’s time to dive! Every year since the team was formed it has had a New Year day dive.

   So think back on some of those New Year days, some were cold, some warm, some were rain and some were snowed covered and a few were very cold!! But we never missed a day. High tides, low tides and a few beach dives, we went in the water. The team could be called any time day or night any weather and we need to be ready to go and this is a fun way to kept everybody ready to go!

  This year was not bad.  We had eleven divers and six surface support people. It wasn’t really that cold for the support people and the water was 39 degrees and in a dry suit that not all that bad. This is what we have to work in so you do get use to it. Some divers can handle it better than other. You do what you can!

   We did dive in the area of the sinker mount that we have been working for the last few months with the visibility at over ten feet we did do some sinker recovery with some of the divers. We’re trying for 2500 lbs of sinkers for the year and we came up one hundred and twelve pounds  which gave us two thousand four hundred forty five pounds and five more weeks to go. So it is a safe bet we’ll make that total.

Sometimes mother nature throws us a surprise, this year it was a slack tide that ran almost two hours late. The tide chart said the slack should be at around 1300hrs. At that time the tide was still running really hard, so we waited and waited, around 1400hrs it had slowed down and we all got it the water. Well it never stopped! The last diver came out of the water one hour and twenty minutes later and the tide was just stopped then. Well the swimming everybody had to do helped keep them warm.

The team had a tag along from the NJ scuba web site and he had never dove the inlet before and even he had a good dive! So Troy lets hope your next dive in the inlet will be better!

                                            Just facts about other new years day dives

  -5 air temp/ with chill of -17

  60 air temp

  Two feet of snow

  Snow storm

  50 feet of visibility

  0 feet of visibility

Manasquan Beach & Inlet webcam

Webcam for Manasquan Inlet....

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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"Treasure"....

I don’t remember how it started but it was many years ago. We always saw sinkers on the dive teams training dives and I started picking them up and the next thing you know everyone was doing it. We got buckets full of sinkers now what are we going to do with them!

 

Someone from the fire company said sell them at your fishing flea market in February and that’s what we did. The fire company gives the dive team a table and we sell everything we find underwater. Sinkers, old bottles, lures, fishing poles and reels, boat anchors, you name it we’ll sell it. One year Tom and Sue found a three foot tall concrete owl and it was the first thing we sold that year!! A concrete owl!!!

 

 

 

The money we get goes right back into gear for the team, ( IE, underwater still camera and a underwater video camera, dry suits, whatever the team needs.

 

 

 

 

We help the fishermen by cleaning up the snags that cover the bottom in the inlet. We also get to show them the stills and the videos of what’s on the bottom. We do get to free up fish that get hung up in the fishing gear that is hung on the bottom.

 

So when you see us out there with those PVC pipe tubes that what we’re doing, training to work underwater and getting sinkers and making the inlet just that much cleaner.

 

 

 

In 2012 we recovered 2264lbs of sinkers and that is not counting the few hundred lures we also had or the fishing poles.

In 2011 it was 2154lbs of sinkers  and lures. Every year we get over a ton of sinkers and lures. It’s like a never ending job. As fast as we clean up a snag we find another one. I know we been doing this for  over  ten years and we always get over a ton, so if you do the math that’s ten tons recovered.

  May be we should say you can rent them cause we only get them back again later.

 

We don’t always keep what we find, we have returned phones, rings, watches, pocketbooks, fishing poles, car keys.

 

Chet Nesley

Chief Diver

 

Bay Head FD ~100 Years~

Today was the 100^th anniversary of the Bayhead Fire Department! The Point Pleasant Dive Teams truck was specifically requested for their celebration because it is an antique! Yes, this is true our 1985 truck was the third oldest there, right after Bayhead’s fire trucks.

Chet, Bob S, Gibby and a tag along Liz, met at the building at 1030 and prepared the truck for its departure. We cleaned it, and Chet spent some time detailing it, specifically where the truck needed some extra attention.

We arrived a few minutes to noon and watched as they dedicated two large granite monuments with the names of deceased members. Unfortunately, a few nights ago they were vandalized by being tipped over. However, this did not stop the celebration, their spirits were very high!

After the dedication, the Chief of Bayhead FD led all the invited towns’ fire trucks through Bayhead in a parade. There was food and drinks when we returned and we spent the remainder of the afternoon enjoying the company of many locals and firefighters. Congratulations to the Bayhead Fire Department on One Hundred Years of Service!  

 

Gibby