Dive, Dive, Dive

June 13th and June 14th

This Dive weekend was a special treat because it brought me home to the area I grew up and it also added a new dive buddy. Turns out that an old high school buddy also got hooked by the dive bug and is just as addicted to the sport as I am. We were able to plan a weekend to meet, visit, and get some diving in. It almost felt like we were Jacque Cousteau because our first dive had real purpose. There was rumor that a small plane crashed in Sunrise Lake and even though it had been found, it hadn't been found by us! There were a number of times I got excited thinking we found it, but it only turned out to be a large log. In the end, we didn't find it, but it was still a fun dive. The bottom of the lake had what I can only describe has huge rolling dunes for the bottom, which made for an interesting dive. By the way, it turns out the plane went down in the 60's and there's probably nothing left but the engine block and the local dive shop owner hadn't heard of anyone finding it in twenty years. That just means next time we get together to dive this lake, it will make it that much better when we find it!

The second lake we dove was Wells Lake. We spent an hour and half underwater and still had air to spare! Of course that means we stayed shallow, but we had a blast chasing the local fish population around. The highlight of the day was when Brent found a school of baby fish that had just hatched. They were so small and so hard to see, I don't know how he even noticed them! It took me a few seconds to realize what I was looking at and Becca thought both of us had lost our minds as we had stopped and laid on the bottom to watch.

Hopefully, the three of us can get together again because it was a blast. It was good to find somebody as hooked to the point of almost wanting to dive a mud puddle (that makes me feel better that Becca and I aren't crazy).

June 17th

The day started with the goal of diving the South Haven Pier, it ended diving our normal dive spot of Gull Lake. We got up and drove over to South Haven only to find that the waves were smashing in far more then we wanted, but also a brand new "No Swimming within 50ft of Pier" sign. Discouraged by the weather and the sign but not willing to give up diving for the day, we joked about diving the first lake with public access on the drive back. We ended up deciding to play around with Gull Lake. The point of the dive was to get Becca some practice towing the dive flag around and she got a workout because it was almost as windy as it was in South Haven and she was getting bounced around pretty good. We had great fun with the marine life, I got attacked by a blue gill, which I'm sure was protecting her young. But the best adventure was Becca spotted a crayfish. We startled it a couple times and it scooted backwards to avoid confrontation with us. Twice was enough though, at that point it decided we weren't going to leave it alone, so it stood as tall as it could, opened it's pincers and basically said "Bring it on, I'll take both of monsters on!".

Here's video of the encounter:


July 20th

We typically dive a quarry in Ohio. It's a good quarry, but frankly I dislike everything that's in Ohio. For that reason, I jumped at the chance to give another quarry in a different state, Illinois, a try. A small group of local divers were going to visit and check it out to see if it was worthwhile to send future dive classes there. It's called Haigh Quarry and it turned into a very nice place to dive. It didn't have as many cool objects on the bottom as "the other" quarry, but location, parking, and layout were all advantages. Becca and I ended the day with three very nice dives. Our first major discovery was the mysterious paddlefish that we had never witnessed before. Becca also fished a PADI divers mask off the bottom for him (a NAUI diver knows to never rest the mask on their head!). We also swam away with some decent pictures which is where the blog picture came from. Becca saw a plastic hammerhead shark and decided to give me the signal for shark!

Silver

The one year anniversary of my dive certification must be silver. My gift, this silver lighter found in Eagle Lake in Decatur. I'm very happy with the colors of the treasures I'm finding this year, the value not so much. I suppose I shouldn't complain, after all I'm coming up muck free.

Somebody really needs to mow Eagle Lake! The weed bed is incredible. It's not like I have tons of diving experience yet, but it's growth was so thick, it did remind me of my time spent in Nam. Even at fifteen feet below the surface, the weeds went all the way to the surface. It made for a challenging swim out to deeper water and once there, we both looked like swamp monsters and spent some time deweeding ourselves.

For the amount of weeds, I would have guessed many fish, but we really didn't see any. Next time, I'm going to bring my machete! We did have some fun trying to pull a boat anchor off the bottom, but only accomplished pulling ourselves in the muck. We also decided that we are not sure what the local divers are doing, we were the first divers in the water and were also the last ones out of the water! Either we are awesome with our air consumption or we still have too much fun underwater even when there's nothing exciting around. I'm guessing the latter.

Tattle Tail

This is the face of a trouble maker and I'm going to tattle on her! I've been doing so much diving lately, this blog is turning into my dive logbook, so time to relate some of the every day experiences around the house to change it up (plus I already know there will be more diving adventures this weekend)!

It's safe to say Sweetie Pie has adjusted to her new home. The shyness is almost gone. She is well aware of who feeds her and adjusts how well she likes you based on that. Though it's obvious that we don't compare to her original mom, she's now very comfortable. I would argue to the point that her name might not apply anymore. It could be that she is breaking out of her shell, or the other two cats are that much of a bad influence (I'm guessing this is the correct reason), but I caught her being naughty the other night. As a special treat, all the cats got to go out and play in the back yard for a short time. After some typical exploring around, Sweetie Pie decided the grass really is greener on the other side of the fence and she jumped the fence! She is hardly the most nimble cat, but she made quick work of of it once she made her mind up. I jumped the fence (not as gracefully) to follow her and she knew immediately that I had caught her because she jumped right back over.

The little stinker still has a sense of right and wrong and she knew that she got caught, so she headed right back to the house. I'm sure it won't be too much longer before the other two cats teach her there is no shame in getting caught and just ignore the humans like they do. Oh well, it was nice having a good cat for two years. So, Grandma, if you are watching or reading...your cat is naughty (which means she fits right in)!

Even with Failure, Positives Happen

Phone a friend? A call for help? It's amazing this call didn't go through from the phone booth at the bottom of Gull Lake.

One of the hopes of getting certified last summer was to go after a geocache two miles out in Lake Michigan. The time finally came to trying to make this dream a reality. I called a couple charters, had some options and finally decided to make an attempt for this cache with the cache owner. The boat turned out to be too small, under powered, and the weather didn't cooperate with us. For fear of being one of "those guys" who attempt something stupid and need the Coast Guard to come rescue us, our adventure ended with deciding to dive the pier at Holland. Although disappointed for not being able to attempt our goal, the diving experience turned out to be very positive. Initially the visibility was very good, we were treated to the huge population of gobi fish. Apparently they are kind of a nuisance fish, but I can relate to their personalities and thought they were fun. They lay around on their bellies and only move if threaten. Since we at the pier, it's a popular spot to fish, so the real game became finding snagged lures. By the time it was all said and done, I think we could have started a small bait shop with the amount of gear we found. The water was a cool 52 degrees and with the hour long boat ride in the wind and smashing waves over the bow, I think we were in the water a total of thirty-seven minutes. It was a fun dive all things considered, I'm looking forward to exploring the pier at South Haven now.

Our Wednesday night dive ended horribly this week. It was a game of navigation and about the only thing we did right was surface at the beach we left from. Saturday, we decided to return to our failure and give it another attempt. We navigated much better this time around. Our only problem area this time was me remembering 40 degrees for one of the headings, Becca remembering 47 degrees for that heading, and I'll just say that the object should have been at 40 degrees (I'm sure it was moved)! The picture of this blog was from after we found the phone booth and Becca was playing around and trying to make a call. I've worked on enough phone problems to know the reason she had trouble with the call, water on the line! It was a busy day at Gull Lake, there were two dive groups there doing their open water certification. It was fun to visit briefly with one of the instructors who happened to be our guide in Cozumel. He thought it would be more fun for the three of us to go dive, leaving his class, but we recommended he should do his job. Our navigation problems seem to have been corrected and the other positive, we look much better then the new divers with the year of experience under our belts!

Sunday rolled around and what the heck, might as well make it three straight days of diving! This time we headed back to Lake Sixteen. It was our third visit to this lake and we were hoping for the visibility to be better. Lake Sixteen requires what seems like a long swim to get deep enough to drop down, heading out it was like swimming in pea soup. My initial thought was here we go again. We dropped down to forty feet and it was amazing! Not only could we see, but it was what we could see. Two boats, a couple of signs, our good friend the scuba skeleton, all within view at the same time! Before it took hunting to even find the line to point us in the right direction to a boat. The signs, never saw them before and then the real kicker is finding the boat we stopped at last time was only maybe a hundred feet from where we dropped down at. Last time we swam the course out to it, then turned around and followed the course back. Here that same boat was almost within visibility of our start point. I'm kicking myself for not taking my video camera down. Hopefully, we'll get back here again while the visibility is still this good. We found the car this time, two more boats, and it turned into diving what almost felt like a completely different lake now that we could see. The only thing that wasn't different was the cold! Lake Sixteen is a deep lake and we spent twenty plus minutes at 43 degrees and we both were cold so the total dive time was only around thirty minutes.

Part of me still wants that geocache (which by the way was official found on Sunday, so we can't be the first ones anymore), but overall we got some good, fun dives in this weekend.