Diving the Yankee Clipper Jacks with Kenny Barnwell

Kenny Barnwell is a guitar technician from Georgia, who is touring with the large show at the BB&T Center Saturday night. This morning, he wanted to go diving. He came to the apartment. I got him outfitted. We drove to the South Beach parking lot to dive the Jacks.

We swam out to the buoy line and descended. He was underweighted and had trouble just getting down. I handed him a brick of broken off coral to carry and that fixed that problem. We headed across the Algae Patch, the sand, the 3-tiered reef and turned South to the Jacks.

I did not take my camera on this first dive since I didn't have any idea how he would be in the water, but he is fine in the water. We swam along about 1/3 of the Jacks, then headed back to the beach. He was low on air, but we made it just fine.

Bottom temperature was 76 degrees; dive time was 76 minutes; consumption rate was 30.98 psi/minute at an average depth of 16 feet; SAC rate was 20.87 psi/minute on an aluminum 80.

Took a while to dry off and warm up.  I also put my camera together. We geared up and swam out past the buoy line and almost to the sand, before we descended. Both of us were heavier on this dive. We got across the sand and over the 3-tiered reef, turned South and were at the Jacks. We swam East along the North side of the Jacks because of the current. I was busy shooting pictures and looking for the Porcupine fish Kenny had commented upon earlier.

 Got this shot of a Caribbean Spiny Lobster,

 this shot of a Cottonwick,

 this shot of an Initial Phase Queen Parrotfish,

 this shot of a Nurse Shark with three trailing shark suckers, and

this shot of two Smallmouth Grunts on the Jacks.


Kenny tripped 1500 psi as we were almost to the Eastern end of the Jacks, so we turned the dive and scurried back to the beach. Two dives was enough for Kenny. Me too, truth be told. We did a lot of swimming.

Bottom temperature was 76 degrees; dive time was 75 minutes; consumption was 32.25 psi/minute at an average depth of 18 feet; SAC rate was 20.87 psi/minute on an aluminum 80.