Wednesday was the day, sink or swim (or should that be submerge and live or submerge and become fish food for the possible outcomes) to start my underwater adventures. Sure, I've accomplished the pool work and my open waters, but this would be my first dive on my own without an instructor around to provide some kind of guidance. Sorry for the lack of drama, but it should be obvious that I survived!
The local dive shop promotes "Wednesday Night Dives" throughout the summer. There are some themed nights, but most are dives at some of the lakes in the area. This week happened to be Martin Lake (Lake 16). Simple concept being that if you enjoy diving, show up and meet some other divers in the area, dive, then go out afterward for some food. My dive buddy and I showed up at the "posted" time. I admit, we put on our gear slow, but there were people already finished with their dives as we were walking to the water! Not being in the loop yet, I think the "posted" time is entering the water time, not the lets all meet in the parking lot time. I'm sure glad we did this though, a woman gave us a great pre-dive briefing, that alone made the dive that much easier.
Let me tell you, 7mm wetsuit, gloves, hood, 18 lbs of weight, and all your gear in 82 degree air temps...is not fun. Not to mention the 200 foot swim on the surface to get to the point where it is possible to dive, I felt like a hot dog in a rotisserie grill. I couldn't wait to find the 50 degree water.
Down we go. I thought the visibility was horrible in Gull Lake for my open waters, this was 6 times worse! Visibility was literally a foot. Becca and I got down to the dive platform which was about 15 ft, gave each other the okay signal, then the next trick was finding a underwater line to guide us through the course. I was so worried about losing Becca that I'd start moving along side of the platform and two seconds later I couldn't see her. Sometimes I would stop and she would appear out of the darkness in my face, other times I would swim back to her only to again almost bump into her. Our lap around the platform helped, I think it got us comfortable with how close we needed to be and what we needed to do to find each other. We did find a bight yellow line off the platform, so off we went...only to find it going to shore and get us up to about 8 ft under water, obviously wrong cord.
Next guess proved better, it took us down to around 20 ft but again stopped. Lights on, we looked like two lost burglars searching randomly. Somehow Becca managed to see a chain leading deeper, so down we went again. This time we were lead to a sunken speed boat, success! At this point we both did an underwater high five because we both had zero expectations of finding anything. We looked around the boat for a little while, then continued deeper down the line. I set my dive computer to warn me at 60 ft, I figured that was a good safe depth. Martin Lake is about 80 ft and without doing the advanced class, figured this was our stopping point. At this point we turned around and headed back.
All in all, I'm very happy how we did. We found a boat, saw some fish, and more importantly lived to tell about it. It was great hearing some of the other divers complain about the visibility and cold at the restaurant. At no point did I feel cold and although the visibility was poor, I thought Becca and I did an awesome job of sticking together. I know I could improve my body control, can't count the number of times I put my knees in the mud, but I'm blaming that on not seeing the bottom and wanted to stick to following the line. Can't wait to give it another try, with a better idea of what to expect.
Here's my dive profile:
Official Dive #1 in the books!
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