Saturday morning we made our way to Outer Banks Diving to check in.  We filled out our release forms and headed to the boat.  Unfortunately, Isabel did some damage to the parking lot and we got stuck in the sand in our Volvo.  Fortunately, the folks from Outer Banks Diving were there to help push us out.  We ended up parking on the other side of the marina and the boat picked us up at the fuel dock.

We had about a two hour run out to the Proteus - a 390 ft. passenger freighter built by Newport News Ship Building in 1900.  In August 1918 she collided with the SS Cushing (a Standard Oil tanker) and sunk.  All but one survived the collision (a crew member panicked, abandoned ship and drowned).  We were on the first commercial dive trip to the Proteus since Hurricane Isabel and the folks who dive there a lot said there were many changes.  In fact, the captain found a porthole and a light.  We found a shark tooth and had some great animal sightings.  The sharks on this particular wreck were really incredible.  There were several standard sand tiger shark and some spotted  sand tigers.  We also saw a purple moray eel (the first one we have seen) and a purple sea slug.  It was a great dive.

Our second dive was at the Dixie Arrow.  Built in 1921, she is a 468 ft. tanker that was torpedoed in 1942 by the German submarine U-71.  Another great dive, we saw several large turtle, a ton of spade fish and some sharks.  On this dive, we found two treasures - a nut from the Dixie Arrow and a stainless dive knife.  While they weren't portholes, it's a start in our artifact collection.

On Sunday, we reported to the dive shop to pick up our tanks for another great day of diving, only to find that Mother Nature would not have it.  NOAA was calling for strong winds and severe storms so the trip was cancelled.  Needless to say, we were pretty bummed.  We are looking forward to another trip to Hatteras with Outer Banks Diving hopefully very, very soon!

Both of the dives were relatively deep (max depth at Proteus was about 130 ft. and Dixie was about 95ft) so not all of our pictures came out.  We've picked a few to share that we really enjoyed.