This was a special evening club dive for members of the Island Divers diving club. The plan was to go to 130 ft. (the limit for recreational diving) and dive the wall at Split Rock. We took the boat out to site, geared up and everyone paid extra close attention to the dive plan instructions from Matt, our divemaster for the dive. I purposefully left my camera on board the boat as I didn't want the distraction of taking pictures while going to this depth.
We all got into the water doing a negative entry (no air in our BCDs) so we could all begin the descent immediately as a group. We descended to 130 ft. but once we got to that depth we, unfortunately, realized that the captain had missed the drop. We swam around in the blue water a bit but Split Rock was nowhere in sight. While we were looking for the site I wound up dipping down to 135 ft. Definitely the deepest I've ever been.
Air (in this case Nitrox) doesn't last very long at those depths so we started a very slow, multi-level ascent. We would ascend 30 ft. and spend 3-4 minutes at that depth. We did this the entire way up until reaching the surface. We got back on board without incident, got our gear off, cracked a few beers and headed back to the dock.
