Prep wrecks for Doria?? Suggestions??

dive2dive2000

To say a dive to 240' that is typical of limited Viz, strong currents that flow in different directions at different depths, and is noted for conditions that change rapidly and drastically (+ the fact you are 90+ miles off shore) is a piece of cake.... Did I mention the amount of time and money you will invest for a dive that has about a 70% chance of getting blown out.

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Safe Diving,
Martin

Dave Sutton

I never use the word "Lunatic", and I'm *quite* happy to stick my foot in my mouth while using my own words, thank you just the same. Let me speak for myself and don't add words or inflection to what I wrote.


Here's the worst that can happen: He ends up like the last guy from "someplace else" (Florida) who thought he knew it all and then got wrapped up inside the wreck: He'll be cut out the next day by another team of divers and be carried home on the swim platform in his sleeping bag face-first.

Respect this environment, and leave your cave diving stuff at home. I brief my divers offshore that if they miss the anchor line, they are the next best thing to dead. This area plays for keeps. Play it's game, or it's gonna win.

The NJ Mudhole Trifecta (IP Gouandris, Choapa, and Oil Wreck) are just about the only three that I would use for training. Conditions here can be easy, or worse than aweful. The problem with guys (tourists from other areas withut lots of local experience) who happened to "hit it right": once or twice is that they then give advice based on their "exerience", which may be a statistial anomoly. Prepare for the worst, hope for the best. I don't discriminate between these three and the Doria other than to say that you are a LOT more exposed on the Doria as far as time to transit and fog. If you think for one moment hat a SMB and a reel is a way to deco here, I've got two words for you: Shark Bait.

If you need to ask advice about how to dive this wreck, *you do not belong inside it*. You belong on a nice swimming tour of the periphery (and more to see there anyhow). And yes, I do carry a reel... but I've never needed it except to keep a lift bag with a porthole swinging under it from drifting off the wreck in the current.. ;-). Capt. Ted & Mark Nix have this right. You get ONE chance to screw up here, so don't make mistakes.

"Toll the bell, call up the ghosts, summon out the lifesavers and the pirates.The shoals are there still, the winds howl loud, the rain beats down, the waves burst strong. Some night, in the chill darkness, someone will make a mistake: The sea will show him no mercy".


Welcome to the North Atlantic, guys.... We call it home.

Dave (diving the NJ Mudhole and Beyond since '74)

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"Changes in Lattitudes, Changes in Attitudes, Nothing remains quite the same".... www.nobubblediving.com

Frankie Pellegrino

Hey Dave
If you want to get ready for the cold..... Mark and I are planning to hit Dutch next Saturday Feb 17/07. Give me a call or send a e-mail if your up for it. Any other local guys your welcome. I just have to call and make sure we can get in.
The Mud Hole has my vote!! It's the place to train. Danny Bartone goes there often in the spring. In my opinion the Doria is a warm up dive to the Choapa.
Cheers Frankie

JS1scuba

John, there has actually been very little rebreather diving done on the Andrea Doria (that is compared to OC) nevertheless a wreck is a wreck and how you manage your technology and your dive is the key.

The Andrea Doria is a pincacle dive. Traditionally a diver going to the Doria will have had many years of active wreck diving on the cold and nasty wrecks. The conditions on the site will vary from day to day and hour to hour. One time of day it can be still flat calm on the surface but a ripping current at 150 fsw and dead calm on the bottom. Other times it's a washing machine on the way down but the wreck itself is calm, other times well... you get the picture. I have been on it in just about every condition.

Drifting decompression is NOT and I repeat NOT practiced. You go down the anchor line and you come up the anchor line. You rarely if ever let go of the anchor line. As such you will need to be capable of managing you deco on a short leash to hold your stops level.

Expect that the down line will be either straight as a flag pole on viagra or a big ole zig zag. I have made the drop in as fast at 3 min and as long as 12min If you have too much shit dangling from you clean it up. If you have no upper body strength.... forget it.

If you are a diver who relies on his buddy for everything forget it. You need to be capable of doing this dive on your own. A partner is fun to have and will be helpful but if you are not capable of diving it on your own this is not the site for you.

Expect your RMV to be significantly higher on this site than on others mostly because of the take off's and landings being strenuous. So, plan on real bail out gas not minimals.

Good work up dives: depth is not critical but size, mass, limited vis and cold are. On the west coast: San Diego is a good place to train. Yukon, Missle Tower, B-36, Oil Rigs and Sub Tower off Catalina.

East Coast: Anything of Long Island and New Jersey. USS San Diego, SS Oregon, Coimbra, Virginia, Texas Tower, Goulandris, Stolt etc.

South East: during the winter the wrecks off Pompano, and of course the Wilkes Barre off Key West .........

All of those would take a year or more to do. But these are ALL the training grounds for those of us who have spent a good part of our diving careers diving the Doria.

I've done 14 trips, and have 53 dives. I've done 10 tie ins on the site. Everytime i say i am not going back I end up right back there.

Diving CCR on the site requires you to have your system down pat. This is not the place to be learning some new electronics head, HUD or display.

Oh one more thing. If you only plan on going to the Doria once forget it. You need to consider it like heroin. Once you take the spike expect you will be going back for more!

Cheers

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Tech Diving Limited a Division of Scuba Training and Technology Inc.

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AD_ward9

My two posts on this have been short, and their slightly cryptic nature seems to cause misunderstanding. So here is the full version to clear away that haze.

Your 70% is exaggerated based on the numbers from boat operators. More like 50%. The fog, tide and % days weathered out on the Doria is better than a great many dives here (Scotland). Even the vis: no lentil soup (thick and deep plankton bloom), or siltup storms on the Doria because it 260ft at 70miles out instead of 260ft just off the shore. So bottom line might be, come to Scotland: we have plenty of deep,ripping tide, ziltch visibility dives in cold water. And that is when the skipper has read the right page of the tide table Its the other 50% that make for it

The Doria was a pinacle of diving when diving was done on air. On mix using a rebreather, it is simply a deco dive on a wreck, in generally good vis, with tides that do not go much over 2 knots. A Jon line fixes that. I will modify what I said: if you plan doing it, it should be a piece of cake. That is, if you think those conditions are not a piece of cake, don't do the dive.

I will also expand what I meant when I referred to the boat operators as contributing to some of the accidents. There is a big difference in the way we handle offshore technical dives in Northern Europe compared to the NE USA: we do not anchor into wrecks. This means we do not waste 6 hours trying to anchor the Doria and then send down two guys to heave the anchor closer to the wreck or fix a traveller line between the anchor chain and the wreck or a second buoy line from the wreck to the surface, tied to the anchor.

We sail over the wreck once, decide where the best bit is on sonar, and plop overboard a big weight tied to a rope and to a smaller weight at the other end, with the rope going through a shackle on buoy: that way the rope stays vertical. Bing, tie in in 3 minutes. We clip a trapeze to the line. We put a safety diver on the trapeze. Put diver labels on the trapeze clip, so the last person up knows he is last and unclips it. Boat then follows the trapeze, with a radar tape on it just in case heavy seas obscure it, or fog. Our web site, such as the Jutland page of The Extreme Dive Team (click here) has plenty of pictures of how we rig this, if anyone wants to copy. It is used widely in Europe, in parts of Asia, and some on the US Pacific coast. I do not understand why it is not used on the Doria, other than it takes planning. With a trapeze, you can dive any tide in comfort and safety. If the main boat loses its engine following you, there is a chase boat.

This procedure also means that if there are problems in the wreck, there is a safety diver to fix it/assist.

The trapeze follows the current so anyone doing solo deco because they got really lost, can be found because the main boat and the search boat is in the right area. Even in a total fog out, the safety diver realises there is a diver missing and the chase boat can go and find him then follow him: fog has gaps in it usually.

What are the other advantages: we do not have bits of line hanging off wrecks because someone has reeled themselves to the surface. Some of those lines are big, and in a number of cases on the Doria these were mistaken for the buoy line.

I suggested taking your own mix analyser because the blending from at least one boat operator is miles out: so far out, my buddy decided doing a deep penetration in the Doria on air was better than on unknown helio-something. If even the O2 % is 30% out, what is the helium % in a bottle?

Generally, the boat operators diving the Doria seem to have the safety setup for a 100ft AOW no deco dive. If the operators borrowed the methods used in worse conditions for trimix dives in Europe, I am sure there would be fewer accidents. The method used by at least one operator is the anchor chain or buoy clipped to the wreck. No chase boat. No safety diver. No mix analyser and poor mixing skills. Solo dives allowed on the Doria as a 1st or 2nd dive there. Most do not dive there after dusk (at least one good thing). For any commercial diver reading this, no locators, no comms and inadequate bail out: but that is common everywhere.

There are some good operators, but what I am saying, is it is too easy to be a poor operator. The level of service from the poor operators is not tolerated here. One has to protect yourself from the things others do wrong. Read over Gary Gentile's books: he is quite explicit also.

Alex

Capt.Dan

I agree with frankie.While I do run to the Choapa three to four times a year. I usually only take crew do to the hazards of the wreck.For the people in the N.E. the Oil wreck and the Goulandris is a great training dive for the Doria.The Oil is only 14 miles out of Manasquan Inlet.The wreck lies in 180 ft. The bridge comes up to approx. 120 ft.Most of the deck is 140 to 160.There is some great penetration in both the bow and the stern.We try to hit the Oil 15 to 20 times in a season.

Safe Diving
Capt.Dan

fireman

Two things: First, I have no direct experience. That said I have wondered why the back ups on some wreck dives were so lax. Reading some of the stories about diving deaths, I wondered where the safety divers were, and perhaps even on deck decompression. Extra gas on the down line, having a diver ready to go on deck perhaps to try in water deco.
Anyway these were just some thoughts after reading about some of the Doria deaths and the father and son who died. Please don't anyone take this personally, I know I know next to nothing, and I certainly wasn't there, its just a thinking mans reaction.

dive2dive2000

Thanks for clearing up the haze.

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Safe Diving,
Martin

O.C.Diver

The reason boats don't do drifting Deco on the Doria has to do with the international shipping lanes that the Doria is right next to. The strong currents there can carry a drifting Deco station or dive boat across the lanes of the shipping channel in under 2 hours or worse down one of these lanes. This is a major shipping lane. It is not uncommon to have 4 or 5 ships per hour going in each direction. The logistical nightmare of potentially running interference between a floating Deco station and 600' freighters in pea soup fog is void of any common sense. When I was 2nd captain on Doria trips we explained to customers that we had to cross the shipping lanes to get to the Doria from Montauk. A Northerly current would carry a drifting diver back across these same lanes. Do drift Deco at your own peril!

Ted

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Consider this my opinion.......sometimes I'm even right, but remember.........YMMV.

Ted Green
Charter Boat "OC Diver"
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AD_ward9

It was used for the dives on the Brittanic. That is in a very much busier shipping lane than the Doria.

Also, a boat anchored into the Doria in the fog is a hazard in itself: remember how the Doria sank!

Alex