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.