Nellie Lyon Dive Pictures

So John, after some prodding, has just sent me the pictures he took from the Nellie Lyon dive trip. The pictures were taken with a Canon A540 in a canon waterproof case.

As you can see, the viz was rough. John has the camera at most 3 feet away from the subject that he's taking the picture of at the time, so you can see how the underwater visibility was quite poor that day.

Here I am on the surface:


Jerry taking it easy on the Surface:


The anchor from the boat holding fast to the wreck:


A portion of the ship near the anchor point. The lightbeam is from my 10 watt HID Cannister light. After this dive I'm starting to lust after the 21 watt lights the more advanced divers in our group use, or even better, the Salvo 35 watt light.


Here's Jerry on the Wreck:


Here I am at about 40 feet on the wreck:


All in all it was a fun and challenging dive. Hopefully we'll get the chance to go back on a day with better visibility, a little less current and a bit better luck. Thanks to John for taking the pictures, now its time I got a waterproof case for my new Canon SD1000 Elph.

Dive Report: The Nellie Lyon

Last Sunday, courtesy of Jerry's friends we were given a deluxe boat ride on Lake St. Clair to the mouth of the St. Clair River where the wreck of the Nellie Lyon lies.

The Nellie Lyon, a sandsucker barge, sank in 1911 and was discovered in 2005 by the US Geological Survey and the Fish and Wildlife Service during a survey. It is certainly off the beaten path for divers, and we soon found out why.

Problem one was locating the wreck, and after a few dives searching we found it. Why was it hard to find?

Problem two was the absolutely lousy visibility, of approximately 1-3 feet. There was a lot of particulate running through the water that day and it was hard to keep the others in the dive team in sight.

Problem three was the current of at least 6 knots. You can swim all you like against it, but you don't get anywhere.

Once we found the wreck, we could only see little pieces of it with our lights - deck planking, steam pipes and other features a foot at a time. Finally we were separated and two of us were pushed off the wreck by the current and were picked up by the boat. One of the divers was able to take a few pictures with his Canon camera in an underwater case, and he'll hopefully send them to me soon and I'll post them up here so you can get an idea of what the experience was like.

The Nellie Lyon is a very cool wreck, but hopefully the next time we dive it the visibility will be better. It is certainly not a beginner's wreck dive.

For a really good write up of the wreck including some pictures see Ray's Scuba Page, which is an excellent Great Lakes Diving resource.