Golf ball divers

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sdexcalibur

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NewBedford MA
Read the new Rondales yet? They have an article about retriving golf balls.
Was wondering if anyone on the board did this or have done it. How do you go about getting into this . Is their certain people to talk to. Thanks. Also any scary stories more than welcome
 
a golf ball diver but nearby lake is surruond by a golf course so I do frequently find them while diving there. I have talked to a guy that has done this and what he told me was that most of time the viz is truly zero. Pretty much like a total silt out and you find the golf balls by feel.

Talk to the golf pro at the various golf courses in your area. You may find that someone is already retrieving golfballs in your area. Contact them--if nothing else they might be a new divie buddy for you.
 
All the courses out by me all are contracted out, and theres no way to get into it unless you want to work for that contractor that has the contract.

do a search, i know we talked about this in detail in the last year. might be some good info in there for you, check it out.

Andy
 
Just think of all those nasty chemicals they put on the greens to kill the weeds and make the grass look so good. Its like taking a dive in Hazmat. .... deco would not mean decompression it would mean decontamination!:bones: :poison:
 
I did some golf ball diving in VA. the pay scale was $.05 a ball and you could gather between 2500 and 4000 in a day.

It was dirty work, the kind were it takes three or four days for the tannic acid stains to wear off your skin and nails and it never comes off your equipment.

Leeches, eels, turtles, snakes, other things moving but you can't identify...


Story:

In one pond three of us were diving, we would occasionally run into the other diver underwater and squeeze to identify or if undetected attempt to scare them...

I was near a stand of vegitation and had something slowly but with a bit of pressure clamp onto my bent arm. The area latched onto was from my mid-bicep to mid-fore arm.

I came slowly to the surface as I was sure it was one of the other divers, when I got there the other bubbles were both on the other side of the pond (100 m).



I've had better jobs...

Jeff Lane
 
My dad used to do it w/ scuba and I would do it w/ snorkeling. There was a creek that ran through the course..tons of balls would get hit into it, and where there were deep pools the stream there were deep pockets of golf balls. You could get tons of them.

Also, where the stream fed into a lake near our house, there were balls several feet thick....in several feet of mud. It was NOT fun diving, but it was cool coming up with tons of balls.

It was very bad diving conditions though...yechh.
 
I'm not professional at it - but I have a lake cabin about 60 miles up the Colorado that is only about a mile from the local course. #6 is a 160yd Par 3 with a carry of about 130 yards over a lovely inlet in the Lake.

My son & I go out once a year max - and we both have enough balls to last for the year!

As noted before - zero vis work, but at least it's in a river/lake so most of the other nasties associated with a golf course are minimized.
 
Last year, a man in England who'd been running a business of retrieving golf balls was caught, tried and convicted (for tresspassing I believe). He'd been using scuba gear in the dead of night to dive, clandestinely retrieve the balls and was reselling them.
There was outrage among some circles and the golfball diver was eventually cleared on appeal (I heard that subsequently, he went into business - legal this time - retrieving balls for golf courses).

Be careful whose balls you grab.
 
When I was a kid in Louisiana, me and some buddies used to free dive for golf balls in the local golf course ponds (4-10ffw). Viz was zero, so we didn't even wear masks and snorkels (or fins, for that matter). We'd take the balls and sell them to the golfers on the course for $0.25. We never got into any trouble, finally the pro shop caught on, they would buy our balls at $0.25 and sell em in the shop for $0.50.

We had plenty of scares, these ponds contained gators! We'd run whenever we saw one, but it's a miracle no one ever tangled with a gator. Of course, we stayed the heck away from there during mating season. The coolest thing was actually bringing up a gator skull from the bottom once...
 
around the golf courses near my home. A bunch of kids were into this and would display their "wares" near the crossovers on the course (where they crossed the road)

I don't think the course operators cared - certainly they knew about the kids, as they were out there virtually every day hawking those balls....
 
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