Afternoon Dive at Ginnie
Drove from Neptune Beach down to Ginnie Springs for an afternoon dive. Traffic on the road was light with most celebrating Easter at their favorite church.
The Easter egg hunt was in full swing with the entrance covered with eager participants.
The Pavilion parking area was surprisedly empty with a few OC teams and a mixed team gearing up. Jim Wyatt who was teaching a class of three and Bert Wilcher was doing a dive for 'giggles' due to a cancelation of a class. A mixed team was entering the water as we were dropping bailout bottles at the steps. One diver on an Optima had a dry suit leaking and exited to repair the suit.
We decided on a plan to ran a reel through the Eye to the Main line in the Gallery swim to the Junction Room and install a jump reel to the Right (Bone Room?) follow back to the Main Line at the Maple Leaf installing a jump reel and heading down the Main Line.
After our rebreather checks and gearing up we clipped on our bailout bottles. Bubble and light checks and we were off.
As I dropped down to run a primary reel at the Eye I noticed that the temporary/permanent line was in place with a note that it would remain until the tannic water receded. I stowed a bailout O2 bottle in the Eye and proceeded to swim out to the Ear. The tannic water was well over the Ear and it was limiting the ambient light.
One nice benefit of the tannic water was the reduction in flow of the System. It was an easy swim with some pull and pull to enter the opening. After verifying the permanent/temporary line was attached to the Gold Line we proceeded with our plan.
Flow was significantly less than 4 weeks ago (3/21/09) and was a pleasant dive. There was little need to pull and glide and I was able to swim most of the way to the Junction Room. We followed our plan turning the dive around 1500-1600' on the Main Line and as I was watching the deco creep. (I was running a set point of 1.2 on the Meg Li on the Evolution at 1.3) Instead of following back through the Bone Room Line? I pulled the reel and we continued back on the Gold Line.
We encountered a team other than Jim Wyatt's class under instruction doing a lights out drill using touch contact. We ghosted the team keeping our lights from illuminating the way and followed them to the Junction room where I pulled our jump reel and shortly caught up with the class if front of us in the Gallery. The Instructor was nice enough to wave us on but we were not in a big hurry and continued to linger back until the exercise was completed. We followed the temporary/permanent line to the Eye:
With a short deco stop of 1 min at 30'
2 min at 20'
15 min at 15'
Max depth 95'
Run time 99 minutes
We exited the System heading to the steps at Little Devil. Parking lot was much busier with more divers on-site. During the gearing down spoke briefly to a diver from Nevada diving a Sport Kiss (Sorry forgot the name) and we talked Shop about mCCR's and value of Canadian currency as well as other fun stuff.
Cheers
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Originally Posted by zdiver
Ick!
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