Anyone dove Smith Mountain Lake, VA

[mindseye20]

Hello-

Has anyone dove or heard about diving Smith Mountain Lake, VA??? I'm currently creating a diving calendar for my university dive club and am looking at diving Smith Mountain Lake, VA. The lake is open for diving and has a submerged town with portions at 60 feet. The problem is, it's a well kept secret :toilet (oops for posting this on here) and information is sparse. I'm wondering about temperatures, visibility, etc. etc. etc. Any and all help is appreciated!

 

[charlyme]

I have been looking for the same. I was at a boat show and asked SM local dealer about the town, funny thing the only have herd of it. They did say if I were to come to there marina they a picture from the air of the lake before it was a lake. My friend has ther business card which I will for ward when I get it from him.

Just in case you still want to know a lake has a big turn over in the spring which means it gets stirred up. Late summer may be clearer on into winter. This true of most lakes man made or not but is no fact.

Good Luck

Charlie

 

[captain]

The Smith Mountain dam project was one of the first commercial diving projects that used saturation diving

CACHALOT
This was the first commercial saturation diving system and was designed by Westinghouse Electric Corporation, Underseas Division (Tom O'Neill and Alan Krassburg) for use in clearing the trash rack of the Smith Mountain Dam in Virginia. The system consisted of a large chamber Deck Decompression Chamber or DDC and a Personnel Transfer Capsule (PTC) which could be mated to the DDC at pressure. The divers lived in the DDC and went back and forth to work in the PTC. The operation was between depths of 159 and 240 feet and lasted for four months beginning in August 1965. To do the job using contemporary conventional techniques would have entailed draining the whole reservoir, a two year job. To do the job using two divers at a time from saturation replaced 32 divers using normal surface diving techniques. This system was the forerunner of the great explosion of commercial diving systems which soon spread across the world. In fact, the first at sea commercial saturation dive was done in 1966 in the Gulf of Mexico using this same system.

 

[DougK]

I lived in Virginia near Smith Mtn Lake up until 2001, but this was before I learned to dive. My job put me in contact with some of the police/fire dive teams in the area. They might be the people to talk to for info on where dive to see certian items.

Contact the Bedford Co. Sherriff's office to get the name of someone on the dive team. I seem to remember that these guys were mostly Vol. Firemen, or Va. State Police. I was present at a drowning and a plane crash in the lake where the dive team came out. If not the sherriff's office have one of the marinas help with the local fire department number. I don't remember many others diving in the lake.

The divers talked about big catfish in the lake, but it still had a lot of trees that might cause problems. The lake is deep.