Here's the dive report from the first Lake Pleasant dive outing. The day finally came, and including us, we had 10 divers at Scorpion Bay, not a bad turn out for midweek in Arizona! It was great to finally put faces to names. We had a great time and it looked like everyone else did, too. We drove up from Tucson followed by Jason/jaydub, another Tucson diver and arrived at the lake shortly after 1pm. Don/dblume was arriving at the same time. We geared up and got in the water as Alex/titandiver and his friend Peter arrived. We waited a few minutes while they geared up, did a dive site briefing, and went diving!
Viz was down to about 10 feet this week. Water temp was a nice 76 degrees from the surface to 25 feet down, then we hit a 15 degree thermocline. It was dark and cold at 60 feet! Because of the lower viz and so many divers, the group ended up splitting into pairs and finishing the dive that way. My team spent about 40 minutes in the water on this dive. Most of that was above the thermocline!
Second dive included Craig/AZ zoner and JD/phatso-29, who arrived during our surface interval. No change in conditions. However, on this dive my team found a small cavern in the wall at about 45 feet. The cavern does back about 8 feet and turns to the left for another 8 feet or so. Penetration takes you about 3 feet or so into the 2nd portion of the cavern before it narrows too much. We also found a pretty good size cat fish hanging out under a ledge right next to the buoy anchor. It was a little skittish, but if you want to get close to the fish just head over to the fish habitat that sits about 10 feet down at the top of the wall. It's just a few boulders, but houses dozens of fish, and they don't seem to be afraid of our bubbles at all.
For the third dive, a night dive, Jason, Alex, and Peter had to head out, but Andres/andresrumis and Garrett/shark.byte.usa showed up. So we had 7 divers in the water. Max depth stayed above 25 feet (remember the thermocline). We did see lots of life down there, though. The crayfish/crawdads/crawfish were everywhere. We saw some as big as 5 inches long! We also saw a 15 inch or so carp sitting in the grass. We surrounded it and it just kept sitting there! No fear. We also saw lots of blue gill and bass. This was our first night dive in Lake Pleasant, and I can't believe we waited this long. The difference between night and day is equivalent to the difference we get in the ocean. It's well worth hanging around to check out!
We had a great time. It was nice to meet everyone who made it face to face and talk about dive experiences on our surface intervals. And we had a great time diving! I know this was the first time for some to dive the lake and that particular site. It sounded like everyone had a good time. I'm hoping these get togethers can happen on a regular basis. Remember, we'll be heading to Lake Mohave and Lake Mead on July 16 and we'll be back at Lake Pleasant on July 30. Hope to see some of you there.