xiSkiGuy
Contributor
Six brave souls (all employees at Bermuda Triangle in Greenville, SC) did a night dive last night (Halloween) on the old Mount Carmel Church Graveyard at Lake Jocassee. When Lake Jocassee was created in the early 70s, the church was moved and most of the graves exhumed. However, several head stones and plots remain. You can catch a glimpse of the Graveyard (pre-inundation) while the graves are actually being exhumed in one of the last scenes of the movie Deliverance.
We met at the main boat ramp in Devil's Fork State Park at 7:00pm. We loaded tanks, BP/Ws, deco bottles and miscellaneous other gear and motored off to the dive site. Using GPS we quickly located the submerged buoy that marks the location of the Graveyard.
Normally a ~140ft dive, the lake is quite low right now bringing the depth down to about 120ft and making Nitrox 30 a doable option. The air temperature was in the mid 50s and the surface temperature was in the high 60s. Passing 85 feet the water temp drops to a cool 51F. 5 of the divers were diving wet, using hoods and gloves. I was diving dry with no hood or gloves. I was quite warm on the bottom and actually hot during the deco.
Visibility was 40ft or so horizontally on the bottom, which is typical on the Graveyard, but quite nice compared to most of the dive sites at Jocassee.
We saw a few catfish and even a pale white crayfish. One diver on a scooter covered quite a bit of ground and intersected with one of the old roads surrounding the Graveyard. My buddy team followed the north line (typewriter line) past the larger head stones to the end of the line at the exhumed plots/brush pile. Backtracking to the upline we then followed the south line into the trees for a ways until our planned bottom time began to run low and thirds were getting close. We returned to the upline and began our ascent, which during the day is always a cool sight, because your eyes have adjusted to the darkness and you can get a nice view of much of the graveyard. At night it was just as cool to see the ghostly pale blue glow of HID lights as the other divers made their way back to the upline.
Making our first stop at 70ft for two minutes and switching to Nitrox 50, you could see the relief on a few divers faces to be above the thermocline! The rest of the deco was uneventful, but a just touch crowded as teams with different schedules leapfrogged each other on the upline. A little over an hour after splashing, deco schedules were complete and we were back on the boat and headed to shore. What better way to spend Halloween than diving in a real Graveyard?
We met at the main boat ramp in Devil's Fork State Park at 7:00pm. We loaded tanks, BP/Ws, deco bottles and miscellaneous other gear and motored off to the dive site. Using GPS we quickly located the submerged buoy that marks the location of the Graveyard.
Normally a ~140ft dive, the lake is quite low right now bringing the depth down to about 120ft and making Nitrox 30 a doable option. The air temperature was in the mid 50s and the surface temperature was in the high 60s. Passing 85 feet the water temp drops to a cool 51F. 5 of the divers were diving wet, using hoods and gloves. I was diving dry with no hood or gloves. I was quite warm on the bottom and actually hot during the deco.
Visibility was 40ft or so horizontally on the bottom, which is typical on the Graveyard, but quite nice compared to most of the dive sites at Jocassee. We saw a few catfish and even a pale white crayfish. One diver on a scooter covered quite a bit of ground and intersected with one of the old roads surrounding the Graveyard. My buddy team followed the north line (typewriter line) past the larger head stones to the end of the line at the exhumed plots/brush pile. Backtracking to the upline we then followed the south line into the trees for a ways until our planned bottom time began to run low and thirds were getting close. We returned to the upline and began our ascent, which during the day is always a cool sight, because your eyes have adjusted to the darkness and you can get a nice view of much of the graveyard. At night it was just as cool to see the ghostly pale blue glow of HID lights as the other divers made their way back to the upline.
Making our first stop at 70ft for two minutes and switching to Nitrox 50, you could see the relief on a few divers faces to be above the thermocline! The rest of the deco was uneventful, but a just touch crowded as teams with different schedules leapfrogged each other on the upline. A little over an hour after splashing, deco schedules were complete and we were back on the boat and headed to shore. What better way to spend Halloween than diving in a real Graveyard?
