Establish the Patton Beach/Watermans Landing Project Baseline Site
The Patton Beach Fish (we should probably give it a name?) presently sits in 37 feet of water, is covered in algae, is deteriorating (from our first encounter in 2004) but still sits majestically creating a great dive site.
Today’s dive was conducted to establish the depth benchmark, temperature gauge and visibility markers at the Patton Beach Fish. Upon 102 minutes in the water at a maximum depth of 37 feet, the site was successfully established.
The Fish sits about 1200′ off shore at a bearing of approximately 150 degrees.
A couple of notes:
1) This is right in the boating lane coming out of the marina and gas dock. Take a flag with you – you can clip it to the depth benchmark. We had several boats pass overhead and were glad we had our surface station and flag present.
2) We are going to need some help from the dive community in maintaining this site.
a. First we tried to run the line over and under logs and rocks to keep it low to the ground so as to avoid being hooked by a recreational boat anchors. So keep an eye and add debris along the line to keep it down. Remember though not to push the line into the sand so that a storm will cover it. Where you put something on the line to anchor it, put something under the line around your debris anchor to keep it about 1 – 2 inches above the sand.
b. Second, periodically clean the line; it will get covered in algae.
c. Finally, please let us know if the line goes missing… we have more and will go up and reestablish the line. (nmde@att.net)
Project Baseline Stats
Depth: 37 feet
Temp: 58 f
Visibility: 30 – 40 feet
Photo:
Previous Post