"Diving" the Nordmeer

June 15, 2021
Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary

The Nordmeer has a modern mooring buoy (https://youtu.be/utuqKPKPl7Y) with a solar light and anchor line.  Chuck had told me to look for floating bleach containers or other homemade markers (which we found on some of the other sites). As I said in the last post, he's done this a few times, and he spotted the buoy well before I did.

 Since I'd never been on a  dive boat before, and since we needed a steady hand at the tiller to get us secured (not it!), Chuck explained the process to me several times before we got there.  In addition to the anchor line, there is a bright yellow, easy-to-spot tag line for dive-boats; it has a loop at the end, and dive boats secure themselves to the buoy by passing a line from the bow of the dive boat through the loop and back to the bow of the boat.  Once you're tied off, you can cut the engines and just float above the wreck. 

I managed to grab the tag line in only a couple of tries (all that Mylar balloon rescue practice pays off!).


Below is a better picture of what the SONAR showed when we were above the Nordmeer.


 
In the video below (from our drone), you can watch as Chuck navigates the FiFish (I'm now realizing that we have to give the FiFish a name) to the anchor line and follows it down to the wreck.  Unfortunately, the drone doesn't capture sound and even if it did, you would only hear water.



The link below has some more info if you're interested.

 https://thunderbay.noaa.gov/shipwrecks/nordmeer.html

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