The Divers
Ted (Captain)
David

The Plan
We decided to ignore the fancy-dancy Scripps Swell Model and set out for a day/night charter on the Escapade. Jim Capwell always provides top-notch service...and did not fail us even on the night before Easter.  So, the plan was to get out as far as we could for a deep day recreational dive and then a sheltered night recreational dive. We made it out to Ballbuster, and conditions were rough. Ted and I had a shortened dive brief and decided to keep out bottom time to MDL-5 minutes due to the difficulty of the site and conditions. The big plan was to drop on the line, dive for 25-30 minutes, and come back up the line. Ted would lead. The rest was totally dependent upon the underwater conditions.

The Dive
Wow! Talk about one of my toughest dives ever! We descended on the line hoping to get below the nearly zero vis muck. We never got below it and started our dive-by-braile. At most, we had 5' of visibility and several feet more of surge. Ted picked a compass heading and led us off in a direction for a while. We returned on the opposite heading and found the anchor again. We set out a second time and again found the anchor. Finding it every 7-10 minutes was a nice security blanket. We set off in a new direction and found Doc Wong's line...and then found the nice wall of Ballbuster with all the Metridium anemones. We spent the rest of our time there and then made our final return to the anchor. If you couldn't guess...we didn't see much on this dark low-vis dive.

The Deco
We made our way up the anchor line and stopped at 50'. We kept with one minute stops until we hit 20' and we stayed there for two minutes rather than risk a 10' stop with 10' swells. We surfaced and got back on a rockin' boat. Ugh, that was a tough dive...but hey, whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger, right?