Saturday Night's All Right For Diving - Dive 249

After three long dry months, I finally got back in the water last night.

It almost looked like we were going to get nailed by a thunderstorm with some impressive lightning, but it stopped just as we arrived at the lake.

Chad, Keith, Jeff and I geared up and entered the water just as the sun was going down.

Diving is a rather perishable skill. While you can still throw on the gear and get in the water, if you don't practice, you lose a lot of the fine tuning. While still not bad and passable enough, I certainly wasn't what I'd call good last night either.

Everything felt a bit off and combined with lousy visibility in the lake and that we did a long fin-kick along the north-line it felt like a lot of work. Along the way we were hitting depths of 53 feet and water temps of 46 degrees at the bottom which combined with the absolutely lousy visibility made for an interesting hour dive.

The lake became dark very quickly as the sunset.

The vis began like this:

And in minutes it looked like this:

The current camera isn't very good at night. Actually, it sucketh royally, but we'll see about fixing that.

This dive was fun but my buoyancy and trim were way off, and I kicked up the bottom once pretty badly. On the upside the back kick was still there and I didn't lose my dive team even once in the flashlight-swallowing darkness and particulate filled water.

Hopefully, it won't take three more months before dive 250 rolls around.