My weekend began with a phone call on Saturday morning inviting me along on a dive trip planned for the next day. In my book, that's always a great way to start any weekend! The plan was to meet Sunday morning at 11:00a at the marina, then dive two (possibly three) of the more interesting dive spots in Ft. Lauderdale. So I downloaded my favorite Ft. Lauderdale dive spots from DiveSpots.com (of course) to my hand-held GPS and packed my gear for the trip.

We met at the marina as planned, and by noon we were anchored over the Mercedes wreck, our first planned dive of the day. We all geared up and my three dive buddies quickly made their way into the water and over to the anchor line. That's when it happened. As I opened my air valve, I heard the awful sound of air rapidly escaping from somewhere on my first stage. It didn't take long to figure out that the o-ring on the hose leading to my pressure gauge popped. I didn't have a spare (idiot!) and I had no repair tools handy (idiot!), so I told the group to go on down without me and tossed my camera to David so he could snap some photos of the wreck.  I sat on the boat and rolled and pitched in the 4-foot swells.

They came up a while later going on about how cool the wreck was, about the huge grouper they saw, and about the awesome amount of marine life.  Meanwhile I'm trying not to toss my cookies.  Ugh!  But it's all good -- Mike found me a wrench and I went to work on the reg.  I got it fixed -- that made me happy. 

So we moved on to check out the Copenhagen, a nearby shallow wreck in just 30 feet of water.  I decided to free-dive, took a few pics, snorkeled, and waited patiently while my dive buddies got some surface time after their last deep dive. 

Soon we were on our way to Spotfin, a drop-off in about 50 feet of water a couple of miles south.  This spot is known for it's beautiful ledges and larger fish (check out the fish David bagged).  We anchored, I carefully opened my air valve, and ... pop!  I worked on it a little more and tried a couple of o-rings Mike had on board.  I finally got it working and decided to give it a try.  But I was in the water maybe 30 seconds when I decided to abort.  The visibility was horrible and my left brain won out on a heated argument with my right brain.  It made no sense to risk a problem at depth given the poor visibility.  It just wasn't worth it.

But hey, it's a day on the water, we got some good photos, and we confirmed the GPS coordinates.  Still a good day!

Comments:

	Posted by lockrobster, Aug-5-2005 @ 08:57 AM CDT Sorry to comment; a bad day diving could be the worst day of your life!!!
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