Dive 248 - Union Lake

So having not dove in over 4 months, I met up with Chad, Fred and Reichy for a scooter dive in Union Lake this morning.

On gearing up, I took time to put silicone lube on the scooter internal O rings, on the light's battery pack O ring and on the glove seals. Having not used the gear in for months, some fresh silicone grease was called for.

Adding it really helped - the battery went into the scooter body past the first O ring easier than it ever had, and the scooter body and tail went together easier than before as well. Should have done this back before my last dive in January.

So we geared up and hit the water.

The group is doing a mapping project of the lake, documenting where all the lines are, their lengths and bearings and noting important bottom features and depths for future reference. This will make it a lot easier to get around the lake considering may of the sunken boats have been moved and fishermen have ripped up a lot of the existing lines.

So we headed out on our scooters, zipping along out past the trolling motor boat and the A-Aron boat, and getting to the end of the first line and then Chad and Fred began measuring the distance back, recording compass azimuths and depth etc.

Here's Fred either taking some notes on the distance or writing me a prescription to get more diving in!

I was just out and happy to be in the water getting back into the flow of things. This being my 4th dive with a scooter, more than half the fun is anticipating where everyone else is going, anticipating where you're going, keeping track of your depth changes and adjusting buoyancy on the fly to match the depth and trying not to silt up the place.

On the upside, I had some good buoyancy awareness and had a nice controlled ascent but I found I need to adjust my wing setup as I'm having a hard time reaching the rear release valve on the wing, which is a problem. Other than that a pretty good time overall.

Boat traffic was crazy this weekend, with tons of unskilled boat owners mucking about, and more and more boats were going over us during our dive. Dome boats were hammering it so hard you could feel the effect of their props from 40 feet underwater. The visibility wasn't fantastic but it got more serviceable as you got farther away from the dock.

We made it down to 53 feet, and the water is still pretty chilly. Even in the 38 foot range it was 48 degrees and dropped down to 45 degrees at 50 feet.

We finished with that line and headed back to our entry point. This was good as we were all getting kinda chilled after being in the water so long. At 20 feet we stowed our scooters, did our deco and then slowly ascended.

We ascended to even more boats around the boat dock area, so it was good that we didn't come up the dock but instead came up on shore near it. We arose just in time to see a DNR officer chewing out a boater for being an idiot at the dock and even more bopats were stacking up, so it was a good time to get out of the water.

Overall not a bad spring day dive, my suit had no leaks, everything was under control, and not a bad way to wash away the rust from 4 months of non-diving.

The Details:

Dive Time: 69 minutes

PSI used: 2000

Max Depth: 53 feet

Average depth 37

Water Temp: 45