Posted by Wayne on August 09, 2002 at 09:16:34:
In Reply to: Follow up question on beach entries posted by Starfish on August 08, 2002 at 21:31:55:
I'll give an example: Diving with #2 daughter at Long Point (old Marineland). Entered over the cobble beach. Beach is very short with fast drop off. Good sets with decent spacing and max wave height of about 4', but long pauses to use for an entrance/exit. We walked out chest deep, put on our fins, and swam out and around to our descent point. All done during a lull. Piece of cake.
Dive was shallow and a bit over an hour. We navigated back to the rock outcropping and then followed the bottom to the "beach" for our exit. As we got close, the surge was getting worse. We did our pre-exit surface to prepare and were we ever surprised. There were now almost continuous waves with crests of at least 6 to 8 feet. On this short steep stone beach, that means the waves just lift up and smash down and grind anything into the cobble stones. Oh yea, and I had my camera with me!
Our intial plans were out the window. We floated for quite a while while studying the wave sets looking for lulls. When we made our move, it was in a very short lull, we swam like heck chasing the last wave. We did not stop swimming until we were crawling up the beach. We were on our bellies when the next pounder hit us! We were prepared by planing and we held/protected our masks and my camera and bit hard on the mouthpieces to hold the regs in place. As soon as it subsided we crawled some more and then we were clear of the washing machine and able to stand back up. No problems, but that is because we stopped and planned our exit.
Had this been a regular beach, we would have found a place wher the waves had a smaller break and exited there. But the point is that the sea gets a little unpredictable. Always have air for your exit. Always surface and plan your exit before you get into the surf. And most importantly, get through the surf zone as fast as possible and breathe from your reg.
Wayne