Testing out my Scuba Gear for 2010

Da fossz called me up last week and asked if I was down for the ceremonial first dive of the year. Of course! We had to do a preliminary check to be sure our scuba gear was in proper working condition for the rest of the summer's festivities. Our gear weighed down my little boat, but it was able to maintain floatation for its trip to the dive spot. We dropped anchor and with excitement we went under the chilly water for our first dive of the year. It was overcast so the normal light on the bottom was cut to almost nothing and I struggled to tell the difference between broken glass and shark teeth. The current was blasting too! In order to move forward, I had to stab my screwdriver into the bottom, grip it with both hands, and kick both of my legs to move forward against the flow. I made it about 50 yards up river from the boat on my first dive using this method. You would think I would be exhausted, but I was more excited to get back on the bottom and finish my dives! We moved the boat up river on the second dive and I used the same bottom crawl method to move myself along against the current, all the while picking up fossils along the way. I saw a freshwater eel who was more than happy to pose for the video! Near the end of the dive I ran across an area that I remembered to be a sandbar from my last trip to this area. This time all the sand was gone to reveal fresh layer all over the bottom. I was out of air and even more out of energy by the time I found this area which stunk because it was the best stuff I saw all day! There was all kinds stuff sticking out of the sticky oligocene formation, including more than one sting ray crusher plate, another piece of the dugong I found several years ago, and amazingly, a giant turtle with its carapace intricately laid out in the bottom, fractured in thousands of tiny pieces but still together. It was easily as long as I am tall, which is pretty big for a fossil turtle. I couldn't get a video because the water was really cloudy in this spot in the river for some reason. A little further on and the water cleared up enough for me to video a whole bunch of whale vertebrae all in a pile in the formation. Needless to say, I can't wait to get back to that spot! There is undoubtedly a treasure trove of fossils to be found!