This was one strange day. As usual, I get to the site early to scope it out. I happen to run across a couple of park rangers making their rounds. I ask them, "Is this beach the dive site?" They look at me like I have 3 heads. One of them says in the closest thing he has to a Buford Pusser voice, "Negative. Absolutely not." I ask them where the dive site might be then? "Not in this water," he says.
One of the other Neptunes (Eric) is on his way up, and we had been texting amongst a larger group of interested parties. Rob called BS. Says, "Is it posted anywhere? Call the State Police to see if the site's really closed."
I'm not a big fan of even talking to law enforcement, So I was ready to bag it and go home. Eric asks me to wait up, so we can make plans. He's on site a couple minutes later and offers to make the call. He works with law enforcement regularly as part of his job. "Go for it", I tell him. Sure enough, he's got a guy in the State Police who refers him to the Environmental Police. Couple of minutes later, he gets a call back. They tell us we can jump in.
I go to throw my gear together. Set my tank on the tailgate, slide my BCD over the top, then F***! I left my regulator hanging up at home. I've never seen anybody quite this unflappable. He says, "go home and get it, I'll wait". I didn't set any world records from Southie to Weymouth and back, but traffic was kind. I put my gear togther and we got the show on the road.
This is not a pretty dive. It's tan colored silt on top of black mud. The bottom is carpeted with tiny half-inch long fry, and punctuated with the occasional hermit crab. We also saw a fair amount of mussels and clams. Things were going smoothly until Eric had an equipment issue. Seems like his brand new tank band, upon getting wet decided to also come loose. We tried to solve the issue on the bottom, but trying to work on that strap in 3 finger mitts proved to be a challenge. We took it in to shore to resolve. Funny thing about it, Eric even handles that without a fuss.
I had about 1700# of air left (I think Eric had well over 2k), so after getting the strap tighted, we headed back out. I was trying to film something that looked like an old mooring, when I noticed that my camera was no longer blinking. At that point I was happy to just look at stuff underwater. We practiced our underwater nav skills for a bit, then called it a dive. Oh, and on the way back, I think I saw Eric hitting on a mermaid, but that's another story.
For the log book geeks: 2 dives 15 minutes each, max depth 14', water temp 41ºF.