Davey Jones Tooth Locker

I am a bit behind on this - a month late or so.  So I am finally catching up here.

About a year and a half ago I tried to take an offshore dive trip. It seemed like a nice change from the usual 3 inches of visibility - instead they promise 50 foot of vis.  What they don't tell you at the travel agent is that unlike river diving when you get about about 99% of the time, the offshore trips seem to have a rate closer to 50-50. The first time I went down for it we got cancelled both days.

This trip looked bad in the weather forecast but I headed down anyway with hope.  When I got down on Friday night I found out that the groups scheduled to go out that day had been cancelled even though the weather had been pretty good that day.  Saturday we got up and headed out with a good report.   There were 2 vets who came with underwater propulsion devices, 1 other veteran and 3 offshore newbies (myself included). 

You get 2 dives and we dive nitrox due to the depth.  We hit the near-shore ledge which was about 93 feet deep.  The first dive was basically a 'get acquainted' dive - trying to figure out how to find the area, how to find the teeth, and use the reel appropriately.  I failed at two of those 3 on the first dive .   I had lots of trouble finding the bed and worse trouble with my reel - I'll use the 'first time with a reel' excuse on this one.    All I was able to find was 1 tooth and it was sitting in someone's hole completely exposed.

Of the newbies, I was the only one who scored a tooth though - and I quized the guys with the personal propulsion units who both scored a pile of teeth.   Seems the secret is to bring one of those and blast the bottom with it.  Digging by hand is not as fast of productive, but as I found on the 2nd of the dives, it does find the teeth.  I headed straight for bed on the second dive - no screwing around just starting digging hard.  Within a few minutes I hit gold - a parotodus - my second of the year already.  Soon after a nice 5 and 3/8th was in the same general hole.  I kept digging and was finding more stuff - but the time was ticking on the dive clock. Time to head up. 

Day 2 got cancelled which means I am not batting 1 for 4 on off-shore trips. It was just as well because I seemed to have picked up a bad case of food poisoning at subway for dinner.    The ride home was a blast with all the stopping at rest stops on the way - especially when my battery died on one of the stops.