- Messages
- 53,680
- Reaction score
- 7,860
- # of dives
- 500 - 999
New Zealand: One student dead, one missing at Lake Pupuke
- Thread starter DandyDon
- Start date
Please register or login
Welcome to ScubaBoard, the world's largest scuba diving community. Registration is not required to read the forums, but we encourage you to join. Joining has its benefits and enables you to participate in the discussions.
Benefits of registering include
- Ability to post and comment on topics and discussions.
- A Free photo gallery to share your dive photos with the world.
- You can make this box go away
koozemani
Contributor
3 instructors-5 students. Always sad to hear, but I'd like to hear this story.
Last edited:
OP
- Messages
- 53,680
- Reaction score
- 7,860
- # of dives
- 500 - 999
There are actually good reasons for why condolences are not allowed on this forum, restricted to Passings forum, but yeah - pretty amazing that 3 Insts can lose 2 students out of 5, if it was an OW class. As usual, we get little info from the news and hope for facts to be supplied by locals.
koozemani
Contributor
Fixed
YC
Guest
Lake Pupuke is a pretty awfull place for a diver, specially for an OW course, don't know who approves that. Visibility it's usually bad, the botton is mudy and full of garbage ( form bottles to big dangerous rusty pieces of metal)
Im really sorry for what happened... I do wanna hear the story.
Im really sorry for what happened... I do wanna hear the story.
Hang on a mo guys.
Howsabout not passing comment untill the facts are know. Lake Pupuke is a fairly popular spot for scuba training and a whole bunch of other water sports.
The weather here in NZ is utterly horrible-High winds and rain squalls so a sea dive was definitely out of the question.
I dove that exact spot on sunday.despite the above post it is normally a fantastic place for training. You enter the water either giant stride off the wharf or you walk down the slipway and its a 100m/300 foot swim out to a marker Buey which is anchored at 9.0m water depth.you do surface swim the first 50m or so because there is weed.(the underwater grass type)
If you go down the boey anchour line the area right below it is a big (30m plus) square flat area of volcanic rock. There is usually very little sediment there --max depth 1 inch. Normally vis is around 10m (you can still see your buddy that far away but not clearly id them )
The suggestion that the lake is a dumping ground of litter isn't true.There are some bricks. Big pipes even waterlogged lenths of lumber but they aren't prolific or in any way a hazard.
But on sunday in better weather and better light than today Vis was terrible . IMO it was around 6 feet. The water was pretty darned cold. I was in a 7mm with hood/3mm thermal vest and winter gloves. I took off a glove and the water felt almost ice cold.
What worries me is that my buddy and I followed the weedline 150m north to a place called the rockgarden. There you go down a small cliff face with some overhangs and very shallow caves. There was a pretty nasty Thermoclyn as we went from 9 down to 12 m
But also the storms have stirred up other rubbish and what I thought was a light cloud of silt turned out to be a nasty tangle of monofiliament fishing line. It was the light stuff so It was fairly easy to cut my way out of it.
Without question conditions were worse today on the surface--It would be irresponsible to comment on what they were like in the water today but they wouldn't have been warmer or clearer.
One worry is that if you forget to use your compass you can head east. East is out towards lake centre. Out there you can go pretty deep (40m) and visibility just gets progressively worse as you go deeper to the point a torch pointed directly at your own face is like looking at a candlestick when you get to 30m deep and thats when vis is good. I hope the still lost diver isn't out there for the sake of the police dive team who are going in to search for them.
Howsabout not passing comment untill the facts are know. Lake Pupuke is a fairly popular spot for scuba training and a whole bunch of other water sports.
The weather here in NZ is utterly horrible-High winds and rain squalls so a sea dive was definitely out of the question.
I dove that exact spot on sunday.despite the above post it is normally a fantastic place for training. You enter the water either giant stride off the wharf or you walk down the slipway and its a 100m/300 foot swim out to a marker Buey which is anchored at 9.0m water depth.you do surface swim the first 50m or so because there is weed.(the underwater grass type)
If you go down the boey anchour line the area right below it is a big (30m plus) square flat area of volcanic rock. There is usually very little sediment there --max depth 1 inch. Normally vis is around 10m (you can still see your buddy that far away but not clearly id them )
The suggestion that the lake is a dumping ground of litter isn't true.There are some bricks. Big pipes even waterlogged lenths of lumber but they aren't prolific or in any way a hazard.
But on sunday in better weather and better light than today Vis was terrible . IMO it was around 6 feet. The water was pretty darned cold. I was in a 7mm with hood/3mm thermal vest and winter gloves. I took off a glove and the water felt almost ice cold.
What worries me is that my buddy and I followed the weedline 150m north to a place called the rockgarden. There you go down a small cliff face with some overhangs and very shallow caves. There was a pretty nasty Thermoclyn as we went from 9 down to 12 m
But also the storms have stirred up other rubbish and what I thought was a light cloud of silt turned out to be a nasty tangle of monofiliament fishing line. It was the light stuff so It was fairly easy to cut my way out of it.
Without question conditions were worse today on the surface--It would be irresponsible to comment on what they were like in the water today but they wouldn't have been warmer or clearer.
One worry is that if you forget to use your compass you can head east. East is out towards lake centre. Out there you can go pretty deep (40m) and visibility just gets progressively worse as you go deeper to the point a torch pointed directly at your own face is like looking at a candlestick when you get to 30m deep and thats when vis is good. I hope the still lost diver isn't out there for the sake of the police dive team who are going in to search for them.
Last edited:
ScubaSteve
Wow.....what a DB
The people concerned were close to completing SSI quals --either master or AAW courses If the missing divers were attempting the deep dive for AAW it would have been a night dive from 40 feet and zero vis at 70 that is for certain. given I had very limited vis at 30 feet on sunday
Last edited:
Similar threads
