Deep Weekend

Two weeks ago, I was sick. Last week, we were in the middle of a monsoon. This weekend, it felt great to just to be able to do something! The above video clip is our dive in Martin Lake on Saturday.

Martin Lake was our first diving adventure. It's a deep lake and our first visit, we didn't feel comfortable doing deeper then 60 feet, especially on our first dive. This time, we are both more confident divers and were eager to do more exploring and see what was down there. The visibility wasn't great, but it was much better then our first visit.

The first task was finding the underwater platform, which we did fairly quickly. It almost looked like we knew what we were doing! We descended down to the platform, made sure we were both okay, then started the express elevator down to the first boat. I didn't get too far down when I felt a tug on my fin. Not sure what to expect, Becca showed me this:



By pure chance, I missed seeing our underwater friend on my decent. I have to admit, I'm glad I missed him because it I probably would have screamed like a little girl...and lets be honest, it's more fun to tease Becca for freaking out instead of me! Later on the surface, Becca's comment on seeing our friend "I almost swallowed my regulator". What I really want to know, on our first visit to this lake we went with a number of local divers, I made a comment that it would be funny to put a skeleton in one of the boats. Not a single one of them made mention that that skeleton was even down there! So, ha ha you guys! Way to not let on to the new divers that somebody already thought of that idea!

I was surprised at the number of boats that are down there, it's a boat graveyard. We found three and we still didn't cover all the water we wanted to. We'll have to go back again for sure, just to make sure we see everything. We burned through air much faster then I wanted to. At least Becca's excuse could be the huge gulp she took when she saw our friend, but in my case I can't explain it. I just like breathing, mmmm good air. I'll blame the cold though, it was 41 degrees from everything deeper then 60 feet. We made it down to 75 feet, about the same as our deep water dive in our advanced class, but it was 5 degrees colder here in Martin Lake.

Our second dive the week end took us to Long Lake. There was an underwater geocache that we've wanted to do for quite awhile. It's always a challenge to swim on the surface with your dive gear on, but then add holding a GPS over you head and not only do you look silly, but it's harder then it looks. After getting over the correct coordinates, we dropped down to look for our treasure. Visibility was only a few feet, which wasn't bad, until Becca dropped down in the muck and stirred everything up! Leave it to Becca, always wanting to increase the difficultly level! I can't say I followed an orthodox search pattern, but it was good enough because we found it.

After our goal was completed, off we went to search for something else cool. Well, we didn't find it! Long Lake seems very strange, typically the deeper you go the better the visibility gets, instead here it was the opposite. Deeper then 30 feet and it was the lights were off, there was more sediment, and the bottom was invisible. We ditched that plan and stayed above 30 feet for most of the dive. The second highlight for the dive for me was during our safety stop, which we did swimming back to shore, I got a little freaked out because sand got kicked up right in front of me. My first thought that a boat went over our heads and I knew we weren't very deep, then it dawned on me that I would have heard that. Looking around, there was a huge carp swimming around. Apparently, we got to close to it and spooked it and it cause the sand to kick up.

That was the extent of our deep weekend. All in all, it was fun and I didn't get scared when I saw the skeleton ;)