Varanger-Blow Out 7-11-10

Bill and the kids went away camping for 3 days and I stayed home so that I could dive the Varanger today. I have dove this wreck a lot over the years and was looking forward to getting more photos of it. In my opinion, you can never dive the Varanger too much..it is a very large wreck and has a lot to offer from hoards of fish and lobster to great artifacts and history. My dive buddy for the day was going to be Geoff Graham. The forecast was not looking good Saturday night (4'-7') for offshore. When I arrived at the dock, we decided to head out into the Atlantic and see what the sea conditions were. We had a full boat, Geoff Graham, Jeff Heim, John Priestly, Andrew Nagle, Kathy Ondrasik and 4 other divers that I did not get a chance to meet as of yet. Once we broke the inlet there were some rollers but not too bad and no chop. After we drove for a while the rollers grew in size, were closer together and there was some chop. Therefore, it was decided that the sea conditions were not conducive to dive the Varanger. I then thought we'd hit something inshore but, there were several divers that were diving Trimix whom did not want to concede to a shallower dive thus, we did a u-turn and headed back into Atlantic City. We all had a nice breakfast at the cafe next to the dock and called it a day. A bunch of us will meet again as we are heading to the Offshore Paddlewheeler on July 25th. There are so few days to dive, I did not want to give up hope that we'd get out and dive something today. As the saying goes...better safe than sorry!