Yesterday was the most perfect day! We had a busy weekend filled with kayaking, barbeques, and fishing but, it was not complete without throwing in some diving. The problem was we were meeting friends at a barbeque in the afternoon at our favorite sand bar. Therefore, we needed to get in relatively early. Our original plan was to dive some snags that we found last fall but given the time constraint and the large number of boats out in the ocean we opted for a quick and easy trip to the Double East. As we went out of Little Egg Inlet there wasn't even a wave, which is rarely seen in this inlet and we made the 11 mile trip with ease.
We hooked the wreck on our first try and I was splashing first to tie in the anchor. The surface vis looked great and I decided to bring my camera along. Once I splashed although the vis was good, there was a lot of particulate matter in the water which makes picture taking difficult. As I descended, the wreck came into view at about 30'. Once on the bottom, the anchor was snugly tucked under a plate and was not going to move, so I didn't need to tie it in. The first thing I noticed was the abundance of fish, big difference from my first dive of the season. The fish were everywhere and you had to actually push them away from your face. I did not travel far on this dive, I hung in one small area and played around with taking photos with the external flash and also with natural light. I saw some huge taug, bigger than I've seen in years and they were not skittish. I tried to photograph them but they wouldn't come quite that close. There was no thermocline and the temp at 61' was 52 degrees and the vis was about 25-30'. This time I was not wet at all and I can't remember ever being this warm on a dive including my hands. I really really enjoyed this dive and stayed down for 35 minutes. I did not want to go up but I only had one set of tanks so I needed to save some air for dive #2.
Bill splashed next and he came up with a nice lobster, sea bass and mussels which ended up being out dinner at the barbeque.
We were going to change to another wreck for dive #2 but there was boats everywhere so we stayed put. On my second dive I ventured towards the stern of the wreck where the slabs rose like mountains from the bottom. Bill had seen some taug that he swears were about 15lbs, and I went in search of them. I found them, and I was in awe at their size, we will be back here when the season is open to spear them. I took another round of photos and managed another 30 minutes of bottom time. The perfect ending to this day was when I was all alone on the boat and I saw a fin heading our way and there was Bill hanging on the anchor. I thought, this is a shark and it is heading full speed for Bill. However, the fin kind of flopped back and forth in a strange manner, I then realized it was a sunfish. It swam right up to the boat and stayed next to me and looked at me with his enormous eye for about 10 minutes. There are days out there diving when you have the best dives and are also rewarded with the gift of seeing a sunfish. It couldn't get any better.
We made it back to the dock by 1:45pm with plenty if time to switch to our smaller boat and head out to the sandbar. We stayed out there until the sun set. What an absolutely perfect day!!!
My friend the sunfish!
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