This past weekend I completed my Padi open water certification in Lake Pleasant, Arizona along Desert Tortois road as I mentioned I would back on Dec. 28th, 2005. I had flown in from Chicago for work and was able to stay at a good friends house, so this was pretty convenient. I'll be in the BVI's later this month and I needed my c-card. The other referral diver (Mike) was in from Colorado and he's in a similiar situation with Cozumel. Good guy.
The water was a chilly 54 F. I used a 7mm farmer john wet suit, a hoodie (I think 3 or 5mm, not sure what I bought, but it's Pinnacle and worked really well). I also have pinnacle gloves (3mm) which are great. The visibility was about 10 feet unless you touched the bottom and kicked up any of the desert dust.
It was a cool site (not much to see, but a lot of rocks and a few decent sized bass - they scurried before I could get the camera out). What made the site cool was that we parked next to a road... the road continued, but at this time of year it was underwater. When we suited up, we would walk down the road into the water with our stuff. As it got deeper, we would put on our fins, and get into the bcd. Then we would turn right... as if we were walking (or diving) off the side of a banked cliff. There was a ledge at about 22-25 feet where we didn't most of our exercises. The ledge continued to drop down another 80 feet, but we didn't bother much with that. The water was cold... did I mention that before?
A 7mm suit does wonders to keep the body warm.
We went through All Wet Scuba (
www.allwetscuba.com) and I was really happy with the gear they set us up with. All their rental gear is less than 1 year old I found out which made a huge difference in my appreciation for good equipment (in comparison to my class / pool training I did in Chicago). Brett, one of the shop owners was really helpful. Our master dive instructor was Frank Calliss and he was fantastic. I really can't say enough... extremely professional, clear, and very informative and helpful.
I posted some pictures in my area if you want to see what the site looks like (I didn't develop the underwater photos yet as we didn't take that many... the vis wasn't so great to make it worthwhile).
Greg
