Chanb77's Weblog

Saturday, August 2nd, 2008~

Steve, Leigh, and I headed to Kingston, to meet our friend, Jay. We then headed over to the ferry, that would take us over to Amherst Island.

We had a bit of a wait, so we goofed around a bit…

Jay…

Steve…

Leigh…

…and I even caught a pic of a little otter with a fish in his mouth…

Here comes the ferry!

Jay was a bit famished…

Upon looking overboard, there was a lip where people had thrown coins…

After about a 15 minute ride over, we exited onto the island. Leigh has a friend that lives here, and has allowed us access to his property. You can see the jug to the William Jamieson wreck from his kitchen. Today, we were going to scooter over to it, and see if this was feasible to line, in the near future.

We drove up to what is believed to be the life raft from the Jamieson, when it sank in 1923. Some believe that the raft was switched out later on, but no one really knows for sure. We aren’t quite sure what’s up with the wagon wheel…

We lined our gear up on the shore, and got ready…

We did our predive checks, took a bearing, and headed out to the wreck. The visibility was a bit stinky, and we wanted to check to see if we were still on the correct bearing, so we blew a bag and surfaced after about 12 minutes on the trigger. The water was a bit choppy, as there was a bit of a storm brewing, not that far away from us. We looked for the jug, and saw that we were about 100 feet away from it! w00 h00! We took another bearing, and back down we went. We managed to get right to the mooring line, to the wreck! W00 H00!! There was an obvious thermocline at 63′, and the bottom of the wreck is at about 75′. You could actually see the haze of the thermocline. Seeing as we had wet gloves on, we tried to stay above it for the better part of the dive! None of us had done this wreck before, and it is a pretty fun one to do. Although the vis wasn’t the best, it was still pretty cool. The Jamieson is a two masted schooner, about 100′ long, and carried coal. The stern is still intact, but the bow is pretty broken up. We had the camera with us, and both Steve and Leigh took turns filming. I made sure I did the Heleen dance too. ;o)

On the way back, we stayed at exactly 62′, in order to keep toasty! The ride back seemed alot quicker! We did see what might have been a mast of some sort, sticking out of the silt, quite a ways off of the wreck… a very interesting thing to see.

Bottom Time ~ 76 mins.
Max. Depth ~ 71′
Temp. ~ 55/65
Vis. ~ Hazy

We surfaced, doffed our gear, and went back in to laze about in the water for a while.

The pics are a bit dark, but… oh well…

Steve…

Leigh…

Jay…

Me…

Myself, Jay, and Leigh…

We packed up, and headed over to the ferry dock ~ It seems we missed it by about 5 minutes. We’d have to wait another hour, so we loitered for a bit by the cars…

We finally boarded and made our way back to the mainland!

We headed back over to Northern Tech Diver, where Commander Tom was going to be having a BBQ!

Here are the boyz, trying to get it started… it was quite the ordeal… rofl…

There was quite a crowd of us gathered round for burgers and sausage. Thanks to NTD, and to Matt for doing the cooking!