Alpena Michigan Shipwrecks and Some Surprises for a new charter

Hello, and welcome to Diversync, the Netcast and podcast for Scuba divers. My name is Rich Synowiec and you're listening to episode 527. And this is the only one that's done in August that is caught up to August, and it's hopefully getting back on track to being able to do these in August. So it is August 7, 2024. If you've been binged listening, you've listened to me talk now for an hour, because I did the May episode, the June episode, the July episode, and now the August episode. And the August episode is one that is pretty cool. So, to recap, we've come off a summer where we've done Alpina, or we've done, I'm sorry, July, or we've done truck lagoon, we've done Milwaukee, we've done Isle Royale, we've done Munising. And last weekend we did Alpina.

Alpina was with a new charter captain, and he's really new to the scuba industry. He's a commercial charter boat captain. He worked with commercial divers forever and decided a foray into the scuba recreational and found out that some people can be whiny cry babies. And so it was neat to educate him a little bit on the. On the side of things, because when it was all done, he said, I gotta tell you, the guy I bought the boat from said, you were the guy that I should listen to, and I'm gonna tell your charter was the best I've ever had. And what it turns out. And I asked him about it, I said, what's going on?

And he goes, it turns out that people are kind of whiny that if you get up there and you have a charter booked and we can't get out to the wrecks because there's eight to ten foot waves that they get whiny. And I said, yeah, you got to kind of educate your people about it. And he says, I said, did you take them someplace else? Cool? And he says, no. And that's why I'm calling you. And this is before the trip. He says, you're looking at Saturday being a blowout day on the lakes. You're not gonna be able out to Moravia, not gonna be out to deeps dive. And I said, where's it coming out of? And he says, the northwest. And I said, well, we can get sheltered. There's scanlan barges over there. We're on a handset.

And he goes, but you guys are coming up here with advanced divers. They said, we're also coming up here as divers. And some of those dives are the best dives in the whole preserve. Just nobody gets to go see them. And they are knocked down in a big area. So he goes, oh, man, that makes me feel better. And I said, don't worry about it. Well, he shows up, he has a truck breakdown. So he shows up late for the charter, but he's all in communication. He's not like surprising us with this. He calls me right away. He goes, my truck broke down. I'm jogging back to my car, get my wife's car. But we're going to come, we're going to be a little bit late. I said, no big deal. Weather's looking like shit. So it was able to get out.

We get out to in rough water. Boats can handle rough water. Divers on swim ladders can't. That's the thing. And people who aren't experienced don't know that. Me, I've got tons of experience in the area. We've gone on stuff that we probably shouldn't have done real close to shore, but we end up going out to a wreck that's called the mana hanset. And I'm going to say that you can snorkel the mana handset. Glass bottom boats visit the mana handset. The maximum depth on this one is like 25ft. And that's if you're digging. But it's one of the prettiest, most picturesque things. And some of the social media stuff you guys are going to see.

If you're following me on Facebook, if you're following me on Twitter, if you're following me on X or follow me on LinkedIn or here on YouTube, shorts and YouTube, you're going to see some cool stuff. And I'm going to say that there's a lot of stuff you got to look at. Now, if you're not following me on divers incorporated website, divers Incorporated, my dive shop, has a lot of the same stuff, but some of the stuff in Diversync gets put up on Diversync. Some of the stuff on the divers incorporate. I'm trying to line them all up. When we get a webpage, kind of diversync's going to morph into one little kind of a blog of the divers incorporated site. Just because of the way that the corporation way that social media has changed the way that the industries.

I'm trying to stay on a cutting edge. I'm trying to stay out of the diving industry mindset, which is 20 or 30 years old, and get into the more modern mindset like the Mister beasts and the Gary Vee's and the people that are doing really cool stuff now that's. I'm trying to get way ahead of it. And if you've been following me on social media, if you follow me on Facebook, you know that the posts are ridiculous. I'm diving. I'm posting way more because I found that AI and automation and things like that allow me to do stuff way more efficiently and I'm spending money on it. But it's cool and. But it's going to give you entertaining.

And I was shooting on the mountain SAP some of the coolest over because it turns out that all the fish that we don't see on the deep wrecks are on the shallow Rex. And the shallow Rex had bass, it had rock bass, it had fry and have babies. It was as prolific as the quarry in spring. And that was a huge surprise. Water temperatures were also a huge surprise. It was 75 degrees to the bottom in Lake Huron. So I was, I mean, I want to do this as a recreational trip. Next year, we're going to do it as a recreational trip. Let people come up and do something that's really cool and do the stuff that's there. So it was cool.

And now the mana handset, because you don't hear me talk about this, is basically a giant prop and a bunch of boards and a big boiler that doesn't even belong to the mana handset that kind of floated down where the Monahan surrey site, before it sank. But the whole thing sits one big, giant fossil. So getting an hour of bottom time on a single tank, for people who are diving single tanks is easy. For someone on a rebreather, it's even easier. Well, that one turned out to be a really fun, photographic and enjoyable wreck. The next one, I don't remember the new name of it because they finally figured out what it really was. But when I was growing up and back in the nineties, it was called the Scanlan barge. And the scanlan barge was cool.

It had anchor on it, had some machinery on it, and it was just a barge. Well, it turns out that when they put the survey on it, that there's more to it. And the problem with shallow wrecks is that the side scans don't work all that well. You have to do them pretty much with a diver and find each piece of machinery with a diver. But as the water got clearer, they can do it with drones and they can do other things. So they ended up finding this barge, had a crane on it and the crane had machinery, so there's three huge, distinct pieces. And went and dove the crane again. It was huge amount of fish. Just huge. And that was really cool, very picturesque. But then we decided to go.

We had been told by the boat captain that there's a part of it that nobody buoys, so the bow is or the crane is buoyed and the main body is buoyed, but there's also a big chunk of windlass, which is buoyed. So I go out there thinking it was going to be one of these windlasses. The windlass turns out to be the power lift for the crane. So that was really cool. It was huge and we ended up having to navigate it. I navigated it out, couldn't find it, navigated again, couldn't find it. And I had done a compass bearing because we had actually driven over it with the boat. So we pointed it out. So I'd done a compass bearing.

I thought I was going to be okay, but turns out when you take a compass bearing from a wreck that's 150ft long, the crane wreck sites like 150ft long as you're on the wrong end of it, you're going to miss it by 150ft. So I wasn't on the wrong end of it the second time and I hit it. Right. Right. Good. So it was worth the three really long swims. I mean, the comment that came out was, I won't need my cardio because we're in 20ft of water kicking all this rebreather through the water. And it was really warm, but it was clear, it was warm, it was lots of fish and it was a great first day. The food in Alpena, the nightlife in Alpena, really fun.

Alpina, it does have some really good things that are touristy that they did a really good job on. And so if you're going on there and you're taking the wife and kids with you, there's a lot of stuff to do and there's a blowout thing that's there. So next. So the next day, the weather cooperated for some of the deeper stuff. It was still not cooperating for a lot of it, but were able to get out to one of the deeper wrecks called the EB Allen, and everybody enjoyed that. It's about 90 to 100ft of water, 110, I think, is what I got, 106. But that was a really cool dive. Everybody had a great time on it and it was. And everybody saw and we got really good pictures and a lot of good stuff. And that was that. It's a sailing schooner.

Got a lot of the rigging, a lot of machinery still on it, a lot of the capstan and the windlass is still there. The bowsprit's gone, the anchors are gone, salvaged years ago, but everything is really well intact and the decking is removed. So it makes penetration super duper easy. And then the second one we did was the Montana, and the Montana burned to the water line and sank, but all the machinery was not salvaged. So it's like the. It's very similar in way I look at it's very similar to the Chisholm engine that's up in Isle Royale, in that it's like just an engine sticking up there with a prop on it, but it's only in 70ft of water, a 60ft of water.

Now, the only problem with that is thermocline was just about a foot above the deck, which made the wreck really warm. But it also didn't have the super Cooper clear water that below thermocline has. So when you're below thermocline, the really clear water makes it a whole lot nicer to be able to do. But I was all in all, very tickled with the charter boat captain. The infrastructure that's up there makes it difficult to get air fills right now, but hopefully they get that fixed. And I've got workarounds for that, if I know about it. But what we're going to do next year is we're going to be setting up a little bit different type of charters. And with his help, the cool thing about his new boat, the way that it is there's. It's trailerable.

So for next year, we've got this really cool trip set up and I was able to do all the stuff when I got back and I've already put it up, so there's people that are already signed up for it. But we're going to start out doing a technical trip in the area and we're going to do a couple wrecks that are not very common in that area. We're going to do the pewabic and we're going to try to do some of the stuff that's a little bit further out. Then we're going to go up to presqueel for the second day and do some deeper stuff, and then turn around and come back and do alpina. And then I'm gonna do a recreational weekend.

So I'm gonna go up there for a week and save my travel time and go up there and spend some time diving. So I'll do three days of technical charters and then two days of recreational charter back to back. I got one guy that's gonna sign up for both. That's kind of fun. But the whole kit and caboodle of ithood means that I'm bow back in the Alpena area. And the good news is that this success of this weekend actually breaks something that happened to me last year in that I actually did not get a dive in Lake Huron last year. It's the first year I've missed in almost 20 years in Lake Huron, but did most of my diving last year in Lake Superior and Lake Michigan. So I'm glad to be back in Lake Huron for this trip.

But I was really, everything's really well done. I'm really well surprised. I got to see, I got to visit some friends that were up there. That's always a good time because when you're doing this list, long old other people with charter boats and that sort of thing are just fun people who have retired. The guy that sold the boat was a real good friend of mine. It was in my first IDC and so it was nice to see him and his wife and chat. So what I got coming up next, this weekend, we are going to be diving Sanilac. I've got another day of discover scubas, hopefully to share with you. We're going to go to Sanilac. I'm actually, the only reason I'm doing sandilac is because my patty rep, my new patty rep has not done Great Lakes diving.

And so I'm going to take her on a dive with all of my group. Threw her on the last spot that was up there. And then Saturday we're going to be teaching. And then all next week I am teaching. I'm in the store and then I'm teaching side mount. So this is a interesting side thing because you guys know that if you've been listening to me a long time, you know, I'm kind of thinking side mount was a fad and side mount was not going to be the way to do this. And I've been getting a lot of people. I became a side mount instructor about three years ago. I was really only using my old backplate and harness for side mount, trying to look for a different way of doing it.

And I had a guy call me up and he said, hey, I go through air too fast. So when I was in on my trip in the Bahamas last week, they clipped another 80 to me and said, breathe it like a stage bottle. I didn't feel real comfortable with it. It was nice to have that much gas. And I said, okay, what do you want to do? He says, I want to learn how to do side Mount proper. And so he came in, and we actually carry side Mount bcds in the store. We carry the Kontana two from Hollis. And a lot of my friends use it. A lot of my friends are talking about cave diving. Most of them are cave diving using it. But the thing with it was that it's a really good substitute for doubles.

And that's how my friends were talking about it. One of my. The big thing was one of my CCR guys, one of the California guys that came in and did CCRD, he said that he does almost everything in side Mount, almost all of his trimix. Everything like that is inside Mount. And I said, oh, okay. And so I went and I got coached. Okay. Went, read my book, followed all the stuff, followed, find some stuff online, talked to friends, talked to people who were diving it. When I was up in Isle Royale, two of the people that were up there were hardcore side mount people in caves. And so I was able to cinch some stuff down and get things dialed in, get my stuff all dialed in and put together with somebody else helping me.

And then I was able to make it really cool. And so two weeks ago, I jumped in the water on a Wednesday just to try it all out. And I can see now why people really like it once you get the tanks down to the water. Walking around with all that shit on is a lot different than walking around with nothing but a, b, c, d on. And so I'm gonna say that I can see the difference once I dial it in.

I'll have a couple more episodes where I talk about it, but I'm gonna be dialing this guy in, and I'm excited to be able to do and give him value, because now I was able to tweak stuff and move stuff and all the things that I know from I became a side Mount diver because I wanted to have better gear with my rebreather. Never thinking that I would do it as a side mount gig. But now that I've done it in a side mount, proper BCD, and a side mount, I'm kind of hooked on side mount. Kind of goes with a friend of mine where says, I'm not, you're not.

We were talking about how one winter, I was taking pictures of him and all his scuba pro gear, and he says, well, I might not be a scuba pro dealer, but now I'm a scuba pro photographer. I might not be a side mount diver, but now I think I might be at least a side mount enthusiast. So this is me eating crow for all you guys that have gone back and forth with me on it because I always thought it was a fad, thought it was a tool to be able to use to get in smaller places. But I can see what you're seeing now. So it only took me 40 years to come to the party, but the, that's something that I figured I'd add to this because it's good stuff. So hope that's what I'm going to be doing teaching.

It's only a, it's only a two dive specialty because it's a rating more than a specialty. You're not certified deeper. You're not going deeper. You're certified. If you're advanced open water, you're certified as a side mount advanced open water diver. If you're a Trimix diver, we can do that, too. But, but it's all about the rating, not about the certification. So it's all good. So anyway, that brings us the end of my episode. Gets me all caught up to August. Apologize to everybody who's been waiting so long for maybe listening to it. I might be kidding myself. And all five of you are all good with it. I know the Patreon people are good with it because I do. I have been, because they're actually paying for the service.

I actually have been going in there and showing up more stuff and throwing things in there more and sending them letters and private stuff and all that kind of stuff for the people that are doing that level, but that's all now I've got regular guys. I didn't want to forget about you. So go out, be safe. Get the best of the August. Summer's coming up. The end, at least if you're in the Midwest, for you guys that are south, summer might be coming up. You guys have warm water, and all year round, I'd be diving every day if I live someplace warm and tropical, but I'd probably be broke, too. So until next time, hopefully it's not as long. It'll probably be a couple weeks if I hopefully I get a break. But until next time, we'll see you.