Our gripping tale starts on a fine day in Lake Ontario. The day is Saturday, August 13. The wreck that we intend to dive is the St. Peter. This is a three masted wooden schooner that foundered in a storm in the late 1800's. Of the seven people onboard, only the Captain lived.
Anyhow, the fisherman keep stealing the mooring bouy from the wreck and you have to be careful when you drop anchor to avoid doing anymore damage to this lovely wooden wreck with a deck about 100 ft. and the mud at 120 ft. .
So, we have 1-2 ft waves with a couple of rogue 4 ft. waves and some whitecaps. Not terrible conditions, but I have been out in better. We have a couple of people starting to get a tad green and I am one of them. I have double 130's filled with tri-mix and a deco mix. My buddy for this dive is similarly equipped.
My buddy gets a little ill from something that he had the day before (to eat, not to drink) and tells me that he isn't going in. My normally preferred dive buddy is also here, but she is in recreational gear with nitrox (single eighty).
The plan is this (to my understanding at the time), the buddy team of Rick and I (now just me) will go in and make sure that the anchor is near the wreck. At that point, I will pop a lift bag to give the divers on single eighties a more straight shot down to the wreck.
I am starting to overheat in the drysuit and heavy gear, so the water is a relief. I grab my stage bottle and head into the depths. The first thing that I notice that we have one heck of a current. The vis is about ten ft., if that. I am able to swim against the current (as indicated by the anchor line direction), but I can't find the shipwreck (Yes, the captain had the right GPS numbers). I swim around for a while and start drifting up. I am hoping that the visibility will get better. First clue to myself that something isn't right is that the wreck is in 120 ft. of water. The bottom where I am at is only a little deeper than 102 ft.
By now, I have realized that with the current involved and the bottom being the same all over, I won't find the anchor line any time soon. At eighty-five ft., I can't see the bottom anyways. So, I unclip my dive reel and fire off a lift bag as I have about ten minutes of deco to kill off. At that point, I simply have to hope that the boat sees the bag and doesn't watch me drift off. Thirty-seven minutes of run time have elasped by the time that I hit the surface. I am safe and sound but starting to overheat again as the lake has turned and I planned on forty degree water. Thank God, that I am diving fresh water. That stuff is great to re-hydrate with while one waits for a boat.
It turns out that three other divers tried to the locate the wreck as well, but got down there and turned back when they saw the vis. One had a problem with her drysuit neck seal and thumbed the dive. The heroine that my preferred dive buddy is, she acknowledged the thumb and went up with her. The guy didn't get the point right away but followed up a couple of minutes later.
Everybody from that group boards and the boat pulls anchor to get me. The captain barely helps me over the transom before I am feeding fish like a couple of others before me today. But, I am safe and sound and on my way back into shore.
For many of the divers involved, this was a dive where Mr. Murphy poked in his foul head. We all acted within the limits of our training and no major incidents happen. All of those times that I have practiced lauching a bag and reel in mid-water and following it up to do my deco paid off.
For the other divers, they followed their training and aborted when they felt that things were getting uncomfortable (even though one jumped in just fast enough to kill off her seasickness).
But, any of these cases can lead to major incidents if training is not done and followed. Training bailed out every diver on this charter when the dive plan went to you-know-where.
Oh, and the next person diving that wreck from the same boat that I am on who mentions the curse on the St. Peter from Martha gets thrown overboard as a sacrifice to the hungry curse.
Nobody could understand where those waves that we were dealing with were coming from. There was nearly no wind that day.
