Beach Clean-up...

It was a very busy week for the first aid and the dive team, with the storm that blew through Saturday afternoon and just about sunk the town that didn’t stop calls from coming in. But the first aid started it off with a diver coming in to Coast Guard Station Manansquan with a diver with demcompression sickness. The first aid crew had to load the patient and drive him over to the school ball field to wait for a Coast Guard helicopter to land.

After loading and seeing the patient off, it was back to many heat calls and other calls coming in. Then the storm came with in strong winds driving rains and two lighting strikes on the beach.

It was after the storm had passed that the dive team got called to try to recover all the umbrellas and beach chairs that had been blown in to the swimming areas up and down the beach. The dive truck was loaded up and headed down to the foot of Broadway to start the recovery effort. The chief diver and team member Rich G suited up and started at the inlet and headed south covering from 8 foot deep water out to 12 foot area. With the good visibility the divers were able to see over ten to fifteen feet making easy to see and recover anything they came across. 

The team members Joe (OJ) S, Ali B and Evan S followed in 346 and came right down on the beach with the truck giving the team away to move all our equipment down the beach. Debris started coming up in minutes, whole umbrellas and beach chairs and parts of both were everywhere. One team would search and the others would come out and pick up what was recovered so the divers didn’t need to come up the beach.

The first team covered half way to the pier at Martel’s and then the other team went in and covered the water down to Martel’s pier. 24 beach umbrellas four beach chair many pairs of sun glasses and reading glasses were also recovered. With the coming darkness the team made one pass of the end of the inlet jetty to make sure that any debris would be a problem with boat traffic.

Most team members were just making home after getting all the teams gear ready for the team to return in the morning to finish search the beach’s for debris before they opened for swimmers. But after midnight a call came in for mutual aid to the Boro for a car in the Point Pleasant canal. All the same divers and Sue L returned and were ready for whatever we were need to do. But after a few hours we were released and no divers were needed to go in the water.

Sunday morning the team returned to the beaches and the inlet to finish the search for storm debris. With Both Joes, Greg, Andy, and Tommy Lee the searches were finished with many more umbrellas and beach chairs came up. Many thanks to the life guards who kept the swimmers out of the area until we could finish our sweeps and make the areas safe.

You would think that would end our busy week end, but you would be wrong a few first aid calls and as the dive duty crew was sitting down by the foot of Broadway a first aid call for a person in trouble on the jetty came in and you couldn’t have picked a more remote spot. To get the patient into the ambulances it took a team effort of the Jenks life guards, a Jenk’s guard on one of their quads two first aiders and two divers to carry the patient out to where the divers pulled down a fence to get the quad closer to the jetty and the patient. We did find out that the new 340 can go on the beach in two wheel drive.
So ended the busy week end, thanks to the many first aiders and divers who came out to answer all the calls. 

Boat Races....

Sunday was the offshore grant prix boat races in Point Pleasant Beach. The first aid squad and dive team were on duty to cover the races and the general public who lined the jetty and the beach to veiw the races.

The First aid had all four ambulances at the foot of Broadway ready to respond to any calls for the racers or for first aid calls in town. This was a good spot for with all the traffic and the construction going on at the Coast Guard Station it gave them a clear was to respond. Luckily it was a uneventful day. With nothing happening during the race.

The dive team was stationed all along the jetty with surface rescue gear ready to respond to anyone falling into the rocks or the water. The team also had first aid equipment and full sets of dive gear in the squads 5 ton army truck which was on the beach right along side the jetty.

The weather wasn’t looking that good first thing in the morning but cleared up as the right around race time. Large crowds of people lined the jetty from the parking lot at Channel dr all the way out to the end of the jetty. They stayed on the jetty untill the race boats passed and then climbed down the rocks to the beach and  walked down to watch the race from the start finish line and did the same for the second race.

The squads army truck was a big hit with the public. Many pictures were taken with kids sitting in the driver’s seat and standing in front. The truck is an important piece of equipment for the first aid and the dive team as we can drive right from the road right on to the sand and drive down the beach carrying anything we need.

Two of the teams divers were on the Coast Guard Auxiliary launch 5 patrol boat as back up divers for the Coast Guard and in case something bad happened and more drivers were needed. Launch 5 is a 52 foot patrol boat and is a ideal platform for divers to work out of.

The race was run and no one fell or was hurt so it was a great day.

Lost & Found...

If you have been diving long enough you will find things, Old bottles, sinkers, fishing lures and if you’re lucky enough good things too. Like old coins and paper money, jewelry and dive gear. Some of these things we do get to keep, but we do to try to return the things we find.

We post pictures and stories on our blog site and face book page of the things we find and sometimes we get to return them. In one case a pocket book was recovered from the inlet and was turned over to the police and was waiting for the owner when she came to the police headquarters to report the lost.

 A week later the team was down at the inlet getting ready to dive and this same woman came up to thank us for recovering her pocket book.

 In another case that happened just a few weeks ago and a spear gun was recovered from the inlet. We took some pictures and we posted them and low and behold the owner contacted us and we were able to return it. Luckily the owner had marked the gun with red paint and you could still see the paint on it. The spear gun had been in the inlet for months.

After hurricane sandy team members Steve K and Joe S and I were on Gull Island and came across the remains of some benches and found these brass plates embedded in them. We recovered the plates and posted pictures of them and the pictures got posted to New Jersey Hurricane news also. A few weeks later we got a call about one of the plates and we were to meeting up with the owner and return one of them. We also found out the benches were from Spring Lake boardwalk.

There are times the team gets asked to try and find things lost in the water, we do our best to find the time and the divers to go have a look. Once the coast guard station at Manasquan inlet asked us for some help in looking for a wedding band that was dropped in the water at their dock. I answered the call that day and spent four in the water looking. The bottom there is very soft mud so it was a very slow search. Having used up what air I had I told them I would be back tomorrow with more help and we would do our best to find it.

I returned the next day with Sue L and Joe S and then team member Brandon C. This time we were able to talk to the guy who dropped the ring and found out the true area to look in. I had spent the whole day before in the wrong area some twenty feet from the rings location.

But Sue and Joe had no trouble finding it and were in and out of the water in maybe twenty minutes and returned it to one very happy and surprised guardsmen who thought it was gone forever...

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It’s not always small things either. After a northeast storm the team was asked to try and find a large section of steel pipe lost behind a house on Inlet drive. The owner had divers out looking for it but they came away with nothing. After checking out the area we planned a search pattern and found the pipe three quarters buried in the sand. Not only did the team find it, we recovered it and raised it out of the water and set it back in the owners yard.

The best one was a call for help by someone who lost his ice boat in the ice during one of the years that the bay iced over. On the way to the marina we would be working out of we came up with a plan to find the ice boat. After getting geared up we headed out to the water and found that finding it would be no problem at all, as the sail was sticking up out of the ice by seven feet. The hard part was chopping the boat out of the six inches of ice.

The weather was not helping us out. The air temperature was 5 below zero and the wind was blowing over twenty miles per hour. But we got the mast and sail down and off the boat and chopped a hole in the ice big enough to get the boat out. As we put the boat down on the ice the wind tried to blow it down the bay, but quick thinking by Doug H, Tom C and Sue L stopped it before it got too far.

These are just a few of the thing we have done over the last nineteen years. We do try to help out and we never ask for pay, if they want to make a donation to the team that’s OK. To us this is a way to show off what we can do and it’s good training for the team.

Shark River pre-Summer

With the coming of summer things change at the shore, you have to pay for parking, if you can find a spot, so many fishermen on the wall and the rocks and as of May 1st you can’t dive in Shark River Inlet during the day. So this last week end before the band the team headed up to Shark River to get in one more Sunday dive.

It was a good call as we had the south side of the inlet to yourself, no fishermen, tide just slowing down and bright sunshine and fairly clear water. 10 maybe 15 seconds on the shell drop. Big Joe was our surface support today, Lisa from Middletown Twp SAR was diving with Sue L and Rich G was teamed up Evan S and Joe OJ and I round out the divers in the water.

Getting everyone in the water down the jetty rocks is a lesson in team work and this is something we work on constantly. As everyone got in and headed down the tide went slack and we had a good hour of current free diving.

Sue and Lisa were first down and headed towards the mouth of the inlet. They didn’t have a tube so this was a look around and check out this area dive. Rick and Evan were next down and headed out behind Sue and Lisa but they had a tube so for them it was looking for sinkers. Both of them are fairly new to this so this is training on how and where to look. OJ and I were last in and we both knew where we wanted to search. 

In the past we have covered an area from the bridge out to about a hundred feet down the jetty so we headed farther out the jetty into new areas and we were rewarded with easy pickings. There were sinkers everywhere, we got so many I had to get a second tube as I fill the first one. OJ filled his also and had a fight with a lobster who though the sinkers were his. All together we came away with 143 pounds of sinkers.

After an hour and twenty five minutes under water it was time to come up and make that climb up the rocks. With all the training we do we know what to look for in an exit point. It all so helps to have people up on the jetty to pull up the sinker tubes. Rich and Evan and Big Joe all helped getting both tubes up the rocks and Evan found out just how slippery the rocks can be.

Everyone had a great dive, Lisa said she never saw so many fish in her life, two days ago you couldn’t find a fish and now they are everywhere. The water was 50 degrees down to twenty feet, below that it dropped a little. Visibility was 10-15 feet and as the tide turned it got a little better.
It was a surprise to see how many fishermen were on the rocks when I came up, but all worked out as they stayed away from the divers.