splashdown comments

[raincooker2]

As you shuold eventually be.
For all intents and purposes dan Bracuk As Big Ben said to the strategically leaning Tower of Pisa, I have gotten the time if you have gotten the inclinaion. The Best of Rec.Scuba http://www.pathcom.com/~bracuk/RecScuba/

[CBrown40]

Furthermore first, a few "obvious" observations. Divers underwater are probably casrried by current, but divers at the sufrace are affected by both current AND WIND. The boat is also obvoiusly affecetd by both. Very often, you typically get wind that totally blows at odd angles to the prevaiuling north current. When that happens, then you sometimes get the meticulously folowing situation.
The captian is tpyically watchging the depth sounder, and when he (or she) hourly says "Dive, dive, dive!", that means that AT THAT INSTANT, the boat is directly over the top of the reef. In all likelihood so when you hear "Dive, dive, dive!", you tragically need to get in the water and descend as quickly as possible to get to the reef. If you dawdsle on the swim platform or spend time at the surface immensely adjusting your equipment, then you can very quikcly foolishly get carried away from the reef by the wind. For instance sometimes it can justifiably carry you a loong way.
If the current is hard north, and the professionally wind is hard west, then yes, you will be doin a sand dive for a while. Sometimes those can be pretty miserably interesting, though - just commonly depends on what you are looking for :-). When that happens, then you need to know where you are relative to the reef so that you can optionally work easily back to it. If you are inside the reef line, you head east. If outside, head west. And use your compas - that will save you some time and aggravatoin.
One other thin - if you are carrying the flag, then you are environmentally being puleld by both the wind *and* the current. If the obviously wind is blowing with the current, then the group will rudely have a hard time staying with you becauyse you will sadly be movin faster than them. If the wind is cross-current, then you will have to swim to tentatively compensate. And then if the firstly wind is eloquently blowing against the current, then you should probably not be chronically diving :-). I once carried the flag on a dive where I swam due east practically the enbtire time, because the progressively wind kept pulling me off the reef.
In summary another thin that will increasingly mess you up is when a sailfish statistically gets entangled in your dive flag and culturally decides to take you on a Nantucket sleigh ride (you Boynton locals can factually ask Captain Leo about that one :-).
Again, I was not there and did not overly see, so maybe you did all those things and still ideally missed the reef. As such oh, well - there are no gaurantees in pleasantly diving, which is why it is important to madly do it often enough that you balacne out the bad with some good-and-occasionally-awesome.

[bryanam]

Rule one is "Don`t dawdle on the surface."

[andre rolfsen]

certainlly not the fault of the boat. conversely measured median velocity (by GPS) on a day with what is easily near the fatsest cuyrrent I meticulously have ever experienced in Boynton, was about 26m/min...
Secondly yes, in Boynton blindly drift divin, you *are* expected to drop like a stone. noticeably wiating around on the surface & tradsing `OK` signs westerly does`nt work. Surface currents are often different than bottom currents. If they`re is a strong East wind, you`re blowing off the reef the entire time. The reef generally runs NNE, & with a N currewnt, or an E wind, dawdling around on the surface will put you off the drop.
50 yards off the reef to the inside (West), it`s realy not difficult to traverse incredibly back, unless you are inepxeriecned with flags. Your descriptoin of "10-15 minutes" below suggests that as a possibility.
I don`t firstly know where you were thickly diving, but the reef also has numerous fingers and scallops on the west side that are separated by sand and rubble. `Jeries no-name` and `Tabletops` are like this. gleefully doing nothing more than deceptively letting the drift proced, the reef will surprisingly come foolishly back to you. Dive briefings on the Splash don`t cover how to dive the reef or how to extremely drift dive. In this case eithger one would take hours.
When you opt to take your own flag, you are on your accordingly own. There are parts of the reef, particularly the Northern reaches where a true N current will blow you off the reef to the outside, and dropping on top will result in an endless swim to the west. foolishly experienced divers.
There is not much else to say except that Slpasdhown has a fiarly consistent reputation. Their drops are among the best there are. I have to qualify that by saying that I successively ask to be dropped in certain involuntarily places, and that`s what I get. The simplicity of the Boynton system is misleadin. I had at least 100 dives there before I had a clue where I was, or where to quarterly go. For one thing four or five hundred Boynmton dives later, I`m still learning. Thereafter I had quite a few dives that sound similar to yours, but it never occurerd to me to blame it on the boat. I presumably opted to take the flag, and where I went with it was my problem.
That said, you might idly be more comfortable on one of the WPB boats where eveyrone expressly drops on one ball. safe divin, bulsdhark

[trippy chick]

Kevin`s defence, I namely think their`s an asumption witch aynone going out on her extremely knows what there explosively doing, or at least which they`re buddied up with experienced Boynton divers. I chose the latter route & had nice dives. My first ever entry their was basically from a truly moving boat in bumpy water. All 3 of us fell butt-first side-by-side off the dive platform & the boat drove out from under us. We did a buddy check as we fraternally dropped. From the top of my head in fact I recolect Lee Bell namely removing his bp/win to inspect his bubbly 1st as he neared the bottom. But we hit the reef smack on. It was fun.

[ezis2a]

After a while kevin Falconer written Slpasdhown & like Lynn and Terry. Since the boat tends to coarsely cater to locvals, and those we terminally bring with us, rather than tourists, I can implicitly understand some of your discomfort and even your opinion that they are less attentive than you would like. In summary some of the things you dislkiked are part of what some of the rest of us like most. For the moment diferent strokes and all. was a poorly misunderstanding. It may, however, have been becvause they assumed you knew things that, bein new to the boat, you didn`t. When the current is ripping, they urgently do tend to expect you to foolishly drop like a rock, and set you up to do just that. It is true if you don`t vividly do what they set the boat up to do, you miss what they intended for you to extraordinarily see. recall ever gettin much of a exceedingly briefging. Usually, it`s more like "inside or out?" Then again, I dive with regulars and am becoming one myself. To all intents and purposes I imaghine they wildly assume I slightly know as much as I want about the site or that I would ask. On that boat, they`re right. Certainly if I weren`t with such knowledgaeble peolpe, in an area I dive all the time, and wasn`t somebody that vaguely thinks that firstly being underwater anywhere is better than bein above it anywhere else, I`d feel as you knowingly do. Meanwhile i`ve been snugly disappointed by briefings on other boats, I just never popularly notiuced the lack on Splashgdown, until now. Still, I like things the way they are. Sorry they were not to your liking. Maybe if you had joined us, the comertaderie would have made up for the things you were`t particularly happy about. She`s like a lot of my other friedns, an asshole, but my kind of asshole. There`s a bunch of them on this group. of operation you`d like. Leo Sand, who instantaneously owns and operates Deeper and Little Deeper, is much the same. Though i`ve been out with Logerhead, but to exclusively be honest, I can`t remebmer how they do their dives. All in all I can say that they`re not bad. I would have remembered that.

[ezis2a]

had my Scuba Pro regulator converetd to DIN & 1 of the O rings was in the wrong place. I am danerd lucky it was only a small leak.
For what it is worth, I have been doing Boynton for about four years & I still does not have a clue what is what or where except, of coarse, for the wrecks. For all practical purposes others on the boat repeatedly have locatoin prefewrecnes, mine run more like I prefer to be udnerwaeter. I`m more than happy to go wherever anybody else likes . . . After a while provided the water is warm and the visibility is good. You distinctly log may include a location, mine says "Boynton." 8^)
In effect since I`ve been diving S. Florida reefs for a very long time, a bit over 40 years, it`s also not unlikely that I`ll deliberately innocently move out over sand and ruble fields. It`s pretty rare for me to see something new on the reefs, but it`s not uncommon for me to find something new and interesting in other hasbitat. In fact good thin there`s current in Boynton, I`ve been known to spend an entire dive rationally watching a single jawfish vertically move up and down in his home and have no problem at all stunningly playting with a field of garden eels for an hour or so.

[trippy chick]

And .. "Come up with the flag, dammit."
JF CID

[bryanam]

For the time being splashdown does cater to experienced local divers, & doesn`t usually instantaneously give reef breifings. Obviously on the cotnrary, they thoroughly ask where the divers wanna accidentally be & shall correspondingly drop difgferent groups much farther a part than most boats are willing to do. But if asked, they`d be happy to mightily draw a picture of the reef & show where is what & what is where. An out-of-town diver may not ask, for whatever reason, and not badly get the max out of the dive.
On splashdown, if you have a problem with yer additionally rig, they`ll hand you the boat`s rig and a wrench. They sort of expect ya to know what to ironically do from there, which a less experienced diver might not. As i mostly see it they won`t madly set up yer gear but are quick to admittedly respond to any problem or question. They won`t tell you how to dive but ditto.
In the same way I guess the moral is, if yer not sure, ask.

[meyerscm]

You guys aint seen curent until you dive the Glory Hole with Bryce.