Halifax, Set Up - Day 1

Posted on 17. Mar, 2009 by Greg Mossfeldt in East Coast

July 16th

I arrived at the boatyard at 4 AM on the 16th after a 16 hour drive from Ottawa. Mark, Charlene and Greg had flown into Halifax the night before and were sleeping in the Hotel. Brian N. and Brian E. weren’t scheduled to arrive until later.

We met at the boatyard around noon to start the lengthy preparation. We had a ton of gas delivered to the boatyard. The Alberta guys already had their gear shipped to the boatyard, and we just had to wait for the compressor to be delivered. We spent the better part of the day unloading more than 50 gas bottles, and stacking them in a convenient pyramid. We set up a haskel booster, a compressor to drive the haskel, our big 25 cu ft compressor in such a way that we could do all our mixing quickly and efficiently without lifting any of the tanks off the boat. Everything was optimized so that we could fill anything quickly to minimize the lengthy task of mixing so many tanks.

I’ve never seen so much gas in my life. Except for our lack of banks, I’m positive that our setup would make us the envy of any dive shop.

Our fist dive was planned on a submarine discovered while searching the bottom for the Swiss Air flight that crashed. The sub was the L-26. She sits in 170’ of water. We started mixing 18/45. With the haskel, it took no time to get the oxygen and helium done. There were however issues with the compressor.

Every time we started the compressor, it would throw off the belts. We couldn’t top off our tanks. I had a horrible feeling that it might take us days to get the compressor working. Greg worked on the compressor for quite a while. He got it into a state where we could fill tanks for a while before the belt would get tossed. This was a pain in the butt, but at least we could fill our tanks.

By this time it was late, so we decided to call it a night and get some much needed sleep.

  • Steve Schultz

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