Out on the water with Cape Ann Divers

So this weekend I drove with my dive buddy Mike (a 23 year old scuba instructor navy guy from Groton who already graduated from college in Pennsylvania) up to Gloucester, MA. Gloucester, if you've never been there, is an incredible old fishing village (featured in the film "The Perfect Storm" if you've ever seen that) that turned into a touristy-style beachy town. We met up with my friend Hilary, the current president of the UConn Scuba Club (remember, that club that I started back in Fall of 2010?). We stayed at the Samarkind Inn, an awesome little bed and breakfast literally parked right on a huge stretch of beach. It was great to be up there right before the real start to tourist season. It was a really sad weekend for Gloucester though, as a little two year old girl got swept out to sea and never found. More information about that here: http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2012/04/22/mass_police_suspend_search_for_missing_toddler/ So we got up there late Friday, and Saturday morning we met a whole bunch of other divers from UMass and UNH (New Haven, not New Hampshire). The boat was packed with 17 divers, all college students except one older guy who was really awesome. He dove as part of Project DEEP, which is a nonprofit organization that gets college kids more involved with diving. Supposedly he's going to put pictures of us up on this site, but he hasn't yet. http://www.projectdeep.info/index.html So Saturday we went out and dove the Chester A. Poling. The Poling was a Kerosene tanker that sank heading into Gloucester Harbor. Some more information about that boat here: http://www.northernatlanticdive.com/shipwrecks/chester_poling/chester_poling.htm It split in two, and we only dove the stern of the boat. The stern is in 100 feet, which was great because I'm only certified to dive up to 130 feet. The bow of the boat is in 190 feet. We ended up going down a stairwell into the boat, and Mike ended up turning a corner to check out a room full of bunks. Personally, going into a wreck at about 90 feet deep (it sits about 10 feet up off the sand) the first time I've ever seen it in pretty poor visibility is pretty scary. Thus, we had a great time. Hilary dove with Tyler, the president of the UNH Scuba Club who was just as qualified as Mike. At the bottom, the temperature was only 34 degrees, definitely the coldest dive I've ever done!! After that, we dove Picket's Ledge, which is a series of vertical rock outcrops, that you can either swim down into the trenches between the rocks, or over top of them perpendicular to the trenches. We swam down into the trenches, and very quickly went from about 20 feet deep to over 60. I've never seen as many sea urchins, starfish, or lobsters (over twenty, all legal size!) in my life. Boy was I sorry I didn't get a lobster license before we went out there! All of the colors remind me of New Zealand!! Also keep in mind you can click on the pictures to make them bigger! I'm not sure if the pictures will get added in order, but here's a couple of descriptions: in one picture that looks like just blackness, focus on the top of the picture- there's a really pretty ctenophore (type of jellyfish) in the top middle). in the picture of spindly threads with pink ends, those covered the mooring line that we went up and down. There's also a picture of the boat (verrrrry hard to photograph due to all the divers kicking up silt) There's a picture of the edge of my dive computer, the top number is the depth and the bottom number is the temperature! Anemones... There's a really silty picture of some stairs on the shipwreck There's also a picture of part of the ship with a lobster right in the middle of the screen, with a communications box on the bottom right side of that picture.... We picked up some old line while we were diving the ledge...