I took my significant buddy's sister on a quarry dive excursion to get her some experience in less-than-ideal conditions. She'd done springs and the Gulf, and she went with her family to Cozumel, but all of those dives were good-to-superb visibility, with generally warm (to balmy) temperatures, and no more than 90 feet or so of depth (and that was just once, in Coz).
At the quarry, I brought her down just shy of 110 feet, where it was dim and quite cold. Next, we went to a section with a siltwater layer with less than 1 foot vis (around 85 feet down). After that, it was back to moderately decent viz for a compass course between "wrecks", with much of it done with very little to reference. From there, a semi-free ascent (including stops) along a line (but no touching) took us back to about 30', at which level we continued the dive as a bottomless wall dive (maintaining constant depth). Finally, we crossed the quarry at safety stop depth (with no visual references available), navigating by compass. (I was following behind and towing a float as a depth reference as she experienced the awesome power of task loading -- holding safety stop depth while swimming with no visual reference and simultaneously following a compass bearing is hardly easy.) Naturally, she had great difficulty maintaining constant depth, and by the time we surfaced, we were so far off course, we had *quite* the surface swim to get back to the dock (the dock is on a concave part of the somewhat bean-shaped quarry, so missing it by a little put us midway through the other lobe).
Obviously, I'd consider that an official dive, considering I'd be hard-pressed to come up with a "harder" dive otherwhere. About the only thing that it didn't have was a strong current, but I guess that'll be a good reason to log non-quarry dives, too.
- unless i'm diving off the deep end!
