WJL
Contributor
Last summer one of my dive buddies and I had this brainwave. He spends the summer at his lake cottage just a few minutes away, he's got a nice runabout at the dock, so why the heck don't we do a dive in his lake? Sure it's a little murky, but it's also a body of water right there at the end of the dock. How much worse can it be than some quarry that's hours away? And there's no charter fee like going out on the Great Lakes. This should be just dandy. Our hubris was soon to be amply punished by the dive gods.
So one day after work I meet my buddy at his cottage and we hump the gear down to the dock (three flights of stairs) into the boat and out we go. It's a beautiful afternoon, and after a pleasant tour around the lake we pick a likely spot and throw the anchor over the side. We knew visibilty was gonna be less than tip top, so I had brought my reel, thinking we'll tie off to something or other on the bottom and follow the line back to the boat. We are totally prepared for every eventuality. It is interesting to note that as I clipped my reel onto my d-ring and got ready to jump in I smiled. It was the last time I smiled that afternoon.
As soon as we're in the water I can see that visibility is none too good. Maybe it will get better as we go down? Wrong! We descend down the anchor line, and as we go down, the visibility gets worse and worse. By the time we are down about 25 feet or so we are basically eyeball to eyeball on either side of the line and visibility is about 2 feet. I can just make out my buddy's 18 watt HID light, and I'm realizing he probably can't even see my 10 watt unless I shove it in his mask.
So we're descending down this line and we realize there's no actual bottom to this lake. The soup we are in is just sort of getting thicker as we go down. There is no chance in the world that we are going to find the bottom, let alone anything on the bottom to tie off to. We stop on the anchor line and I grab it and reach down to see if I can feel the anchor, maybe we can tie off on that, and it's like sticking my arm into a vat of viscous goo. I give up on finding the anchor, ascend a bit, and tie my reel line off on the anchor line in what amounts to a somewhat less dense strata of silt. We pick a random direction to head off and away we go. I have this vague idea that perhaps we've dropped by chance into some ungodly hole and if we go a little ways things will improve. This, alas, was comically incorrect. This lake just was not composed of standard water. Swimming along side by side, if I got more than 3 feet away from my buddy all I could see was the faint halo of his dive light. To read my pressure gauge, I had to unclip it, pull it up to my face, and shine my light on it. After about five minutes of this my buddy turns the dive. Even though the visibility is poor, I can can still see the actual thought balloon above his head, which reads "***k this." We swim back, I'm reeling up the line, and we ascend up the anchor line. Total dive time - maybe 15 minutes. When we get to the surface we instantly declare that this was probably not all that great a dive site.
Things aren't over yet. There's no swim step or ladder on this boat, so we take off our gear in the water and clamber aboard. We drag our floating gear over the transom onto the boat, and as I'm getting everything squared away I realize I've lost my unreasonably expensive, hardly used, totally cool Halcyon Explorer reel. As tears run down my cheeks I realize that even if I drain this stinking lake I'll never find my reel in the goo down there. Last but not least, when we get back to the dock, we have to hump that gear, double 104s naturally, back up those three flights of stairs.
But other than that, it was the best dive ever.
So one day after work I meet my buddy at his cottage and we hump the gear down to the dock (three flights of stairs) into the boat and out we go. It's a beautiful afternoon, and after a pleasant tour around the lake we pick a likely spot and throw the anchor over the side. We knew visibilty was gonna be less than tip top, so I had brought my reel, thinking we'll tie off to something or other on the bottom and follow the line back to the boat. We are totally prepared for every eventuality. It is interesting to note that as I clipped my reel onto my d-ring and got ready to jump in I smiled. It was the last time I smiled that afternoon.
As soon as we're in the water I can see that visibility is none too good. Maybe it will get better as we go down? Wrong! We descend down the anchor line, and as we go down, the visibility gets worse and worse. By the time we are down about 25 feet or so we are basically eyeball to eyeball on either side of the line and visibility is about 2 feet. I can just make out my buddy's 18 watt HID light, and I'm realizing he probably can't even see my 10 watt unless I shove it in his mask.
So we're descending down this line and we realize there's no actual bottom to this lake. The soup we are in is just sort of getting thicker as we go down. There is no chance in the world that we are going to find the bottom, let alone anything on the bottom to tie off to. We stop on the anchor line and I grab it and reach down to see if I can feel the anchor, maybe we can tie off on that, and it's like sticking my arm into a vat of viscous goo. I give up on finding the anchor, ascend a bit, and tie my reel line off on the anchor line in what amounts to a somewhat less dense strata of silt. We pick a random direction to head off and away we go. I have this vague idea that perhaps we've dropped by chance into some ungodly hole and if we go a little ways things will improve. This, alas, was comically incorrect. This lake just was not composed of standard water. Swimming along side by side, if I got more than 3 feet away from my buddy all I could see was the faint halo of his dive light. To read my pressure gauge, I had to unclip it, pull it up to my face, and shine my light on it. After about five minutes of this my buddy turns the dive. Even though the visibility is poor, I can can still see the actual thought balloon above his head, which reads "***k this." We swim back, I'm reeling up the line, and we ascend up the anchor line. Total dive time - maybe 15 minutes. When we get to the surface we instantly declare that this was probably not all that great a dive site.
Things aren't over yet. There's no swim step or ladder on this boat, so we take off our gear in the water and clamber aboard. We drag our floating gear over the transom onto the boat, and as I'm getting everything squared away I realize I've lost my unreasonably expensive, hardly used, totally cool Halcyon Explorer reel. As tears run down my cheeks I realize that even if I drain this stinking lake I'll never find my reel in the goo down there. Last but not least, when we get back to the dock, we have to hump that gear, double 104s naturally, back up those three flights of stairs.
But other than that, it was the best dive ever.
