Hi Paul,
   And keep shoveling I shall but not this weekend as we seem to be in
the throes of the annual January thaw.  Ordinarily the "thaw" gets up
around 50 though and not just up over freezing.  At least we haven't had
a tremendous amount of really cold weather and the consistantly cool
temps. have kept the snow fairly light and mobile till now.
     At this moment I am only using my wet suit, my ex-wife seems to
think that my dry suit looks better in her garage even though I
suggested I would be happy to accept a cement block pendent to go with
it should she decide to find it in her heart to part with one of her
favorite decorations, hey what are lift bags for anyway?  This
defininately reduces the amount of time that I spend in the water but
where I am trying to get ready for instructor training later this year I
want to keep my skills up to snuff.  I combine the farmer john with a
chicken band around my middle and pre-fill the suit with warm water
before entering the water.  I used to be able to manage a couple of
single tank dives a day in winter but I guess I'm getting old as I chill
up too much once I leave the water for the second tank.
     The depth of the channel over by the navy yard took me by surprize
although I saw it on a Nav. chart first before deciding to check it out.
 The closer you are to the sea and the better you can coordinate with
the slack tide periods over there the better, although the high tide
vis. tends to be much better.  I dove on a job only once in that area
during the flow period and swore that I would never do that again if I
could help it.  Too much water, too fast and too many things coming
together at once for me although the particular spot we dove on was just
a bit upstream of the Navy yard.
    One thing that I found interesting about the river zone was a fish
that I have not seen elsewhere in the area.  It was red and barred with
a lighter shade of red.  The body had the same same size and general
configuration as a pirana (?) and it had a mouthfull of needle shaped
teeth, although the actual opening diameter of the mouth was not
extremely large.  It behaved with an aggeressive display of its "spot".
I haven't yet figured out what the species is yet although I have seen
several over the last ten years or so in the area between the I-95
bridge and the tug boat landing.
    There are certainly a bunch of artifacts out there in that entire
area.  The spot over by the bridge, if it's where I am thinking, used to
be a place where the sailors dumped damaged goods overboard.  The
pickings are getting much less abundent than just a few years ago as
many people have commercialized the process and have found some limited
market for the stuff they bring up.  I only know of a couple of "wrecks"
as most of this stuff from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is
generally considered to be lost cargo.  We did find some sections of
smaller boats from this period but much of those were destroyed when
they dragged the  commercial boat area about eight years ago.  I've been
told that there are more further up the tidal zone closer to Newcastle
but I haven't done much diving over there so I personally couldn't say.
    I suppose that I should put in a disclaimer before I step on the
toes of somebody standing on a soapbox.  From what I've seen and heard
about this area I do not think that the archeological information to be
gleened from the area is all that high.  It has been dragged over a
goodly number of times and the stuff on the bottom has been moved about
considerably.  To the best of my knowledge no particular item of an
unusual nature has been discovered.  At one point an enterprizing fellow
that I knew went so far as to "lose" a crateful of modern reproduction
clay tavern pipes in the aream, which he "found" a couple of years later
and then sold as original artifacts to some unsuspecting tourists.  He
was getting more abitious when I learned of this as he was trying to get
me to make some reproduction helmets of the morion style so that he
could "lose" them as well.
   Oh well, time to get kids off to school.  At some point we'll have to
get together and you can show me any photos of your trips.  If the
stories are good enough I might even forgive you.
     Be wet and well.
Dennis
--- PCBoard (R) v15.21/10
---------------