Captain’s Blog

To truly appreciate how great it is when you have one of those picture perfect days, you need to see the bad days… One of the reasons that I moved my dive op to Panama, was to avoid the fury of Mother Nature. So far, I’ve done 12 hurricanes with boats… This is Hurricane Frances…

Fortunately, I hid in a protected river and avoided the aftermath of a Hurricanes fury… such as this…

The four hurricanes that walked through Florida in one month, made the diving non-existant… Fortunately, I was able to score alot of salvage work…. some of the worst diving on the planet… This is a pic of a sailboat hitting the Buchman bridge during hurricane Jeanne… Nothing I could do, they had locked down all the movable bridges, and I was too tall to get under them… All I could do was watch, along with others.

I used to do some towing and such for the local “save a boat” operations on a contract basis… The problem was that they would only call me when it was “hitting the fan” out in the middle of nowhere or the boat was too big for them. Or, when the boat was 40 or more miles out in the Atlantic… usually coincided with it “hitting the fan” also. Kinda miss that big old research/salvage vessel… Okay… here’s a pic of her… (named her after my Great Grandmother)… “Lady Margaret”…

Ohhhh… I’m getting all misty now…

Topped off the tanks (97 gals). So at about three and a half hours that means that the boat at 2350 rpm was using about 27 gallons of diesel per hour. At half the rpm she burns 8 gallons per hour. Not bad. Cleaned up the dive boat and took it into town for lunch.

Seth brought in Sea Love III and it looked like they had a good fishing trip. The pelicans were around for the typical handout.

Of course, at the fish cleaning table, we had an audience. These guys were just chatting away. Did you ever hear a pelican beg. It almost sounds like one of those plastic snake straw whistles. Here’s a short video with sound of them. It’s pretty funny.

Though you have to keep an eye on them. They aren’t above pilfering your cleaned fish. Don’t leave them alone with your fish…