WOW! Great pic seaslug! Tx! How big do those cod get? (O/T, I know, just got a "fishing jones"!!)
Seaslug, if you were going to dump something in the water and hope it was never seen again, where would you do it? And could I ask how you would do it? Respectfully asked by a friendly poster - asking you because of your knowledge of the area and of fishing...!:innocent: TIA!
Wow, never though about this one before. Very good question and very easy to answer by anyone who knows the waters and truly wants to make something disappear.
Assuming you are speaking about a dead body correct?
Well, any seasoned fisherman in the Northeast will tell you how we have a very large shark population in the waters south of the island from the end of May until around October (with the peak being around July 1st). In addition to the sharks, we have an extremely large population of a species of fish known by its popular name,
bluefish. Between the large schools of bluefish and the large schools of sharks (mostly blue sharks but also many mako & thresher sharks) there are many opportunities to create a feeding frenzy using a chum slick and then feed body parts (how gross right?) to the hungry fish. On the surface, this would appear to be a good plan. My problem with that plan is... what happens to the body parts that don't get eaten? Do they wash up on a beach somewhere or do they end up in the net of a commercial dragger?
So that plan is out. It's also too difficult to gurantee if and where a feeding frenzy will take place. But it does make one remember that there are many commercial fishing vessels in our waters dragging nets. With that in mind, the old "cement shoes" mafia method of disposing of a body is very risky if the body is dumped in the open water where it could be scooped up by a scallop dredge. However, anyone with knowledge of the seas & fishing would be aware that there are certain areas where commercial draggers will avoid like the plague. These would be areas where "hangs" exist. A
hang is something sharp on the otherwise smooth sandy bottom that could cause the net to get hung up.
Commercial fisherman do not want to lose $10k+ worth of gear by getting it hung up on the bottom. A hang could be a rockpile or a ship wreck. The New York bight (area of water from NJ to Montauk and everything in between) has been nicknamed
Wreck Valley because we have so many shipwrecks. These would be places were draggers would avoid. But on shipwrecks, the person dumping a body would have to worry about recreational divers discovering their secret (and we have many divers. Check the news, one just died this weekend while diving on the shipwreck of the USS Oregon that lies in about 130 feet of water just South of Long Island along with the hundreds of other shipwrecks).
The idea of dumping a body near a known hang is a good idea. Finding one that divers would never visit is where it gets a bit tricky. So now the gears in my mind are spinning. I start to think about what divers hate. One is poor visibility. Another one is strong currents. Yet another is very deep water. The only thing worse than diving in deep water with poor visibilty and strong currents would be to add in some very large, sharp boulders and possibly some sharp rusty metal and even some broken glass to the mix (OUCH). That would be a death trap for a diver.
That's it; the perfect dump site would be an area with deep water, strong currents, poor visibility, and lost of jagged sharp objects scattered along the bottom. In such a location there would be no threat of divers nor would there be any threat of a commercial dragger accidentally netting the body.
Now ask me... do such locations exist in my area?
The answer is YES.
At most of the former
DUMP SITES.
You see, before our society and government cared about the environment, New York, New Jersey & Conneticut would load our trash on to barges and dump it into the ocean and the Long Island Sound. The state governments would approve dump sites as long as the waters were at least 100 feet deep and had sufficient currents to help circulate the water. On many NOAA nautical charts, these dump sites are still identified. They have to be because they are obviously
hangs that commercial fisherman need to avoid with their nets. NOAA calls them either
dumping grounds or
Disposal Sites.
Much of the garbage that was dumped was in the form of soot (they put the garbage through an incinerator) but much of it was also jagged pieces of metal, concrete, glass (even crushed automobiles). The soot settled to the bottom but any diver will tell you that one swift kick of a swimming fin is all that it would take to send a cloud of soot floating through the water column created ZERO visibility for a diver.
I'm running out of time to continue this post. I can tell you that if you look online you can surely find a list of all of the inactive dump sites around Long Island. One of the most famous is South of NYC and East of Sandy Hook NJ. It's called
Mud Hole. There is also another inactive one in the middle of the Long Island sound halfway between Huntington and Maramoneck (yes, it's true, look it up).
Very quickly, to finish my reply... to make sure that a body is never found after it is dumped at one of these inactive dumping grounds I guess a smart person would encase the body completely in concrete. A not-so-smart person would use the Dexter Morgan method of puting the body pieces in a large plastic garbage bag that is weighted down with chains or rocks. Another dumb move would be to put the body in a suitcase that appears heavy enough to sink to the bottom. Both of these are dumb moves because as a body decomposes, the gases that build up inside the cavity of the body are enough to make the body buoyant enough to offset the weight attached to it. Saltwater is also highly corrosive. Even plastic contractor bags will rot away (or get chewed through by crabs & fish with sharp teeth).
Anyway, hope you've found my answer useful. I never thought about this before and I fear keeping this post up because what if a potential SK reads it and learns from it? (or is that really unlikely?)
