It is still before 8AM and I’m procrastinating going on my next dive by eating breakfast and catching up with the blog entries. 4 tanks so far and no luck and I’ll give it another 2 tanks this morning and then debate whether I should give it up as a lost cause and do without my swim ladder for a while until the replacement part gets sent to St. Martin. It is tough to give up, since the ladder can’t be more than 100 feet from me!
For the first dive I tied my dinghy anchor about 40 feet from the original anchor and did a couple of search circles up to about a 60 foot radius. The inner circles go quickly, but the outer ones take a long time and I came back up, empty-handed with just about 100 PSI left in the tank. For the next dive I’ll move off to another direction before doing my circles and perhaps I’ll finally hit the jackpot and be able to either relocate or at least lengthen my chain (the winds are picking up and I’d like to add some extra scope but another boat has anchored rather too close to me to allow me to do that.
Two more tanks and still no luck, although I have found a couple more small items. The visibility remains very low, in parts I can barely see my hands and in others I can swim higher over the bottom to see 10 feet or so in either direction. I can hear my fridge compressor working while diving but on some circles I was directly below the keel and couldn’t see it, just detect that it was darker above and hear the whining of the fridge at high volume. I am going to fill two more tanks tomorrow morning and do a big circle or two in a last attempt to find the ladder, then I’m going to give up.
I dropped by Rocking B in the afternoon to loan them my U.S. sized wrenches, but nobody was home so I left them on the doorstep and returned. I’m going to thaw out a steak tonight and have two baked potatoes as my reward for hard, albeit fruitless, searching below the waves.
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