Into the darkness...

This post is from a trip last year, the first weekend in October to be exact, on the Cooper River. I was lucky enough to be able to join a charter of three guys from the Chicago area because none of my usual dive buddies could get away. The best part was these guys were diving three days straight, three dives a day. That made it a little easier to convince the wife that I would have to stay for three days and proof that I am not the only person who just can't get enough of this kind of thing. I pondered during my seven hour drive why the real south was so far north of my home in south Florida and why "Southern Hospitality" didn't just keep getting more "hospitable" the further south you went but had to draw the conclusion that it just don't. I was real happy to be in Goose Creek again. I touched base with Johnnie of Cooper River Dive CHarters and started the daunting task of trying to get some sleep. Sometimes I feel like I am getting older after a trip like this but the excitment leading up to it make me think I am still a little kid.

Anyway, met the guys I would be diving with for three days and everyone seemed really cool and we were off. We all found stuff on every dive. Some stuff in fair condition and some stuff looked like it had been rolling around the bottom of a river for a million years and, of course, it had.
One of the guys found an outstanding old bottle but I didnt get any pics. One of the days a member from this site, whos name escapes me right now who I met the year previous diving with Johnnie, joined us so that was cool. A young blackwater rookie joined us one day and found a 5 plus inch tooth just to remind us practice is futile without luck.
My favorite find was the point pictured below. You generally try to avoid slack tide when diving the rivers but I ended up doing just that at one spot. We were right near a pretty sharp bend in the river and in one area the water just quit moving, thats right where I was. Anyway I was crawling along the bottom on my knees trying to keep my head close enough to the bottom so I could see what my light was shining on. I had to keep moving forward because when I stopped a cloud of sediment from the bottom would overtake me and then it was pretty much "lights out". So I am cruising along grabbing anything that looked pointy or otherwise interesting and stuffing it in my bag before the cloud got me for later inspection when I noticed something so pointy I just had to stop after I grabbed it. It was kinda hard to tell with the gloves on but it sure didn't feel like a shark tooth but seemed to be serrated and was pointy for sure. I had stopped moving so seeing anything was out of the question so I put it in my bag and continued along. A arrow head is something I had only found a broken piece of in the Peace River before and I started thinking I may have finally found another. It got the best of me and with no current I figured I could stick my head up and see how far the boat was and maybe see what I had found. I came up right next to the boat so I swam over and handed Johnnie my bag and asked him if there was a point in it. He said "absolutely not" but the smile on his face led me to think otherwise. As much as I wanted to climb into the boat to check it out I still had half a tank left and theres always the thought of "maybe theres a bunch of them down there" so I went back down and didnt find much else. One of the guys on the boat that day sent a pic of it to someone "in the know" who identified it as a "Kirk Cornernotch" point and said it could date to 10,000 years ago. On the boat we marveled at the detail and the time it must have taken to make something like this.

The last dive of the last day was pretty typical of a last dive fossil hunting. We were on a spot where I found a steep bank with a lot of sand and sparse gravel. There were alot of teeth mixed in and these teeth were in much better shape than what we had been finding. I assume these teeth were coming out of the bank more recently compared to the usual Cooper teeth that I had been finding in the gravel beds. I found the pipe stem and the Angustiden here. And of course the Angustiden was stuck in the sand tip first so I burned one of my fossil god wishes hoping and praying it was intact but no. It is my best Angustiden so far and I am happy with it anyway. I say this was a typical last dive because it got me thinking that somewhere under that sand is some really nice stuff and now I can't wait to go back. My hair wasn't even dry and I was already planning my next trip.
Well its starting to warm up finally so hopefully we can all get out more often now and post some reports. I can't wait to get up to the south for some more of that blackwater diving. If you are comfortable in the water and in the dark, you don't freak out over alligators, and don't mind mask stripping current, you might enjoy this also. Just sayin'.

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