Search and Recovery on the Susquehanna River
In the middle of July we were contacted by a client that had lost his morning chain and mourning when his mourning ball can detached. He wanted to know if we can assist him in searching for it and recovering it. The problem with this was in the month of July we had numerous days of heavy rain. This made the river pretty high and the water murkier than normal. We postponed the dive for several days till we had several days of no rain to give the river some time to calm down and clear up. Finally we had an opening and headed out. The client was able to put us right on the location and gave us very good directions of where it would be.
Upon entering the water we were in approx. 13 feet of water and had about 4 feet of visibility. We clipped into our anchor line and headed in a NW direction like instructed. After a few minutes we came upon the mourning and the chain. We started to pull the chain to find the end of it and it felt like it took forever to find the end (the chain was 25 feet long we found out later and about 2 ½ inches thick). Once we found the end we secured a lift bag to the chain and sent it the surface. We then reeled ourselves back to the anchor line and ascended on our line due to boat traffic.
The dive itself took less than 10 minutes though we put in about 8 hours of preparation time to make sure both the divers and the surface crew would be safe and that the mission would be a success.
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