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!

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!

Sinker Processing.......

Yesterday was just one of those days. The water was looking pretty bad! Maybe three or four seconds on the shell drop. Big Joe yelled at me cause he said I used the biggest shell I could find so we could see it longer.
OJ got everyone to go back to the building and started melting down and making new sinkers for the upcoming fishing flea market. He got the pots going and he had new 16-12-10-8 oz sinkers fly out of those molds. Ali, Linda,Big Joe, Rich and Bob were cleaning them up.

We melted down over 270 pounds, we didn't do as good as past years, but its not over yet!

We ended the day with Chinese food, with Sue K from the first aid learning to use chop sticks.

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Dive Tables....

Sunday was a busy day for the team members, we started out out with a dive tables review class so everyone can their skills shape. Its not about just water skills, members need to be able to think. 

Then it was a dive at the foot of Bay Ave as the ocean was kicked up with the coming storm,(to see pictures of the waves go to the Barnegat Bay Island,NJ Facebook page.) The water in the bay was pretty clear, we had 6-8 feet of visibility. But the water temperature was 36 degrees and even in a dry suit that's cold. Everyone came away with some nice bottles. Linda found a small school milk bottle and Greg got a really nice one gallon jug. (Sue looked it up and found out it was made in Alton,Il in 1932.) Big foot got a nice cream top milk bottle.

Then it was back to the building so OJ could check out the truck and everyone got clean up and got ready for the coming storm.

We also did a birthday greeting for someone Joe knows.

What awful weather we had this week end. Rain, cold, ice and wind you name it we had it. It took Big Foot four hours to get down to the building. Here at the shore it wasn’t that bad, we didn’t have the ice like everybody else had.

The tides were way off so if we tried to dive it would be a low tide dive. So we started sorting sinkers for the upcoming fishing flea market. We did get two full five gallon buckets sorted. I don’t think we’re going to get to 3000 pounds, but we’re still going to try.

With Greg, OJ and big foot we checked the water and said “what the hell lets dive”, so that’s what we did. It was planned as a low tide dive at the inlet. Everyone wants to make 3000 pounds now.

Let us just say it was less than good. As we were packing up the gear it was pouring rain and cold! But at the inlet it had to be 50 degrees and it wasn’t raining and there was no wind blowing. The tide was just starting to move so we got in and found out it was pretty clean for the first ten feet and below that it dropped to two feet and below eighteen feet the visibility dropped to one foot at best. It was a daytime dive that you needed a dive light for. There was a pretty good surge coming down the inlet and it moved you five to six feet. About forty minutes in to the dive you could feel the water movement change, the surge was still there but this was something else. As we surfaced we came in to a hell of a storm, the wind was blowing and it was a driving rain that hurt when it hit bare skin and the waves in the inlet were going every which way and it was now cold!

We made for the exit and got out and with the rain coming down it pretty much cleaned the gear for us! We did find 54.4 pounds of sinkers so it was OK. It was still a good dive.






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Where did the flag go?.......

Sunday the team did not get to do the ice diver training we were hoping for. The ice was not in great shape and it was to soft for what we needed. But that did not stop us from diving, with new member rich we need to get him up to speed and we do that by diving. He does come in with a lot of skills so this will not take long.

The day was bright and sunny and the ocean was flat with a little bit of wind, so the plan was to do an out and around and come up on the beach. We hit the water and found we had good visibility and the tide was just moving out. All was going well until about half way through the dive and the wind started picking up out of the south west pushing the water up the beach and around the front of the inlet. Everyone made the beach but Big Joe and I as we were bring up the rear with the second dive flag. We surfaced and came up the jacks.

Sue was our surface support on this dive and was right there and everyone made it out and up on to the jetty. It was at this point we found out we had lost a dive flag and float, Sue said she saw it an half hour ago and it was heading north with the wind. The flag was seen way up the beach (may be a half mile north of the jetty). We sent 349 back to the building and 347 took off after the flag, we hate to lose gear! We went to the north end of Manasquan and could see the flag was still going north, Greg and Chet took off up the beach and OJ, Big Foot and Nina headed for Spring Lake. We got the flag just as we made it to Spring Lake. The flag drifted over two miles, but we got it back!

It was a good dive. Greg found out you can’t hold the flag line in your hands, Bob and Rich found out not to get to close to the rocks coming around the end of the jetty when you have a south west wind blowing. Joe and Chet found out bring full sinker tubes up the jacks sucks. Ali found out how cold bags suits are and Sue found out her new mittens are really warm.