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!