Tuesday October 26, 2004

Underwater Salvage

This past weekend I helped my father-in-law's neighbors recover a couple of items lost in the (very) murky depths of Lake Buchanan. Lake Buchanan is just a few miles outside of Burnet, Texas and about an hour north and west of Austin. Buchanan is quite the fisherman's paradise, as long as said fisherman retains his favorite rod and reel.

Two weeks again, a fellow was night fishing in a boat just off a private dock which features an underwater light. By accident he managed to send his $250 Shimano reel overboard into about 14 feet of water. By all accounts, he spent the next couple of days dragging with a large treble hook and nets trying to recover his pricey bit of kit. No joy. By chance he ended up talking to my father-in-law about it, who mentioned that I dive and might be able to recover it for him. Who am I to disappoint my father-in-law?

The Afternoon Entertainment Arrives

The neighborhoods around Lake Buchanan are composed mostly of retired folks who know each other pretty well. Whether they like each other is a whole other post. So when I showed up in my frogman gear to recover a fishing pole, word spread quickly. Soon the shore was populated by people sitting in lawn chairs giving me a good natured ribbing ( something about "Sea Hunt" ). Speculation abounded on what I would encounter in the way of obstacles on the bottom, and there was considerable doubt that I would be able to locate the pole at all. For the most part, I was reasonably certain that I could find it given enough time. Since the water depth in the area of operation was relatively shallow ( less than 20 feet ), I would have over an hour of bottom time to get the job done.

Since I was diving solo, my main concern was entanglement. As mentioned above, Buchanan is a fisherman's paradise and I was worried about monofiliment, rope attached to anchors and tree limbs washed into the lake. I carried two knives ( a thigh sheathed 5 inch blunt tip and a short BC mounted chisel tip ) and a pair of EMT shears. Between the knives and the shears I was confident that I could hack my way out of most entanglements. If I did become entangled, plan A was to clear the entanglement with a knife or shear. Plan B was to take off my BC and clear the entanglement. Plan C was to ditch my gear and make for the surface doing a controlled emergency swimming assent (CESA) in the event that my gear entangled and I ran out of air. In general, I think that diving should be done with a buddy and solo diving should be avoided. In this particular case, I think a solo dive was appropriate ( clear goal, no overheads, shallow water, EMT trained personel on shore, lots of air and good gear ).

The hapless fisherman made an appearance to give me an idea of where his boat was when the incident occurred; approximately 20 feet off and 45 degrees to the left of the dock in question. He runs a business on the lake and wasn't able to stay and watch the operation, but promised a reward if I could recover the reel. Easy money, I thought.

Pea Soup

My confidence was significantly erroded when I got in the water ( which was a refreshing 78 degrees Farenheit ). When I stuck my face underwater I could barely see my fingers at arms length! And that was just at the surface without disturbing the bottom. This could very well be challenge. I took a compass heading off the corner of the dock, and swam out about 20 feet trailing a nylon rope that we'd tied to the dock. The idea was to use the rope as a reference underwater to help me quarter the search area.

I submerged and did a face first dive to the bottom. Most dive instructors won't encourage that sort of descent since a head down attitude makes it more difficult to equalize pressure in your sinuses, but my primary concern was to not hit the bottom and stir it up any more than necessary. Swimming down in that murk was pretty disorienting, and I was relieved when I finally saw the bottom at about 13 feet. The bottom was a jumble of small brush on top of a soft layer of leaves and mud. I worked on my bouancy for a couple of minutes to make sure I was as neutral as I could get and then started quartering.

Houston, We Have Murk.

Afterwards, my dive computer showed that I spent maybe 10 minutes underwater. But subjectively, it seemed to be forever. I had to stop and check my compass frequently since it was easy to become disoriented. The rope helped in guiding an arc thru the search area, but it is cumbersome to swim and hold on to a rope and check guages and check the compass. The bottom was covered in thickets of brush that had washed into the lake and collected around the limestone rocks which make up the shore. The pole had been submerged for two weeks, so it had plenty of time to take on the aspect of a algae covered tree branch. I spent alot of time inspecting brush piles looking for something metallic. On my second reverse in my quartering, I found it in a tangle of brush. I had been sort of combing through a pile with my hands ( gloves are good! ) when I noticed that one of the twigs I had just disturbed had an eyelet at the end! I worked the rod free of the brush and brought the reel up to my mask for inspection. I was worried that I'd just found somebody's Zebco 202 rather than the pricey Shimano I was after. Sure enough, the big open reel said Shimano on it!

Return the Conquering Hero

While You're Down There..

After proving my prowess at underwater salvage, the owner of the dock approached me and asked me if I would mind pulling something up for him. It seems that a two-seat gliding rocker had blown into the lake off the end of dock a couple of months ago. "Sure!" I said. Down I went, trailing my trusty 5-strand yellow nylon rope. I located it quickly in about 11 feet of water three feet off the end of the dock, and I secured the rope with a couple of half-hitches (about the only knot I can tie reliably anymore besides an axe knot). The crew on the dock waited until I surfaced and then hauled the thing up. The rocker was covered in algae, but surprisinginly it didn't seem to have rusted much at all. The owner of the rocker wasn't quite as generous as the fisherman, but I wasn't looking to make a buck off these folks either. It was fun for me and I was glad to help people at the same time.

I guess if this computer thing doesn't work out, I can always fall back on my mad underwater salvage skillz.

-ejo

(2004-10-26 12:55:27.0) Permalink Comments [1]

Tuesday October 05, 2004

Night Diving

Often times when I tell people we've been night diving in Lake Travis they respond with "how can you tell the difference?". Admittedly, visibility in Lake Travis is never on par with blue water which I'm told can be as great as 170 or more feet. Ok, nowhere near that. I think the best visibility I've experienced in Lake Travis has been somewhere around 15 to 20 feet. Still, diving in the daytime murk is somewhat different than diving in the same murk at night.

Vertigo Happens

Roy and I have been diving Windy Point on Wednesdays, nominally with the group from Scuba Land. We've been getting in the water around 7:30pm, which has been right around dusk. Decked out with green and red tank lights and an array of hand-held lights, we attempted dives similar in profile to our daytime dives.

Surprisingly, I didn't feel a great deal of anxiety of being in the water in the dark. I felt pretty confident in my equipment and my buddy, and just tried to enjoy the experience. Of course that all changed once the dive started. I was suprised to learn just how much I depended on visual cues that were either absent or far less prominent in the dark. Our percepetion of our current depth was always skewed too low ( we must be deep, it's dark ). And we also learned that navigation in the dark is somewhat difficult ( learned that a compass is not an optional piece of gear ), and that lights attached to your mask can become a dazzling hazard to your buddy.

So, vertigo. Experienced it for the first time on my first night dive. We were lost at 40 feet in a green haze of dusk, without a compass. Now we can normally navigate pretty well by following the contour of the shore, but we lost sight of the bottom whilst swimming about and got disoriented in the surrounding green. I didn't want to swim out into the lake since we'd heard some props earlier and boats are scary to divers. So our choices were surface or drop to the bottom or swim around lost some more. We went with c) swim around lost some more. I was looking down, hoping to see the bottom and get our bearings again when I started to notice the particulate in the water illuminated by my mask light. But I wasn't sure it was twack in the water, and thought it might be the bottom. And since I wanted it to be the bottom, I swam towards it to see if it was. And then I reached out to try to touch the bottom, and suddenly I'm in the grip of vertigo when my hand passes thru what I expect to be the bottom. As soon as it happened, I realized what happened and I remembered how to fix it. Find your buddy, hang on to him if you have to, and just look at him. Your brain sorts out what your middle ear and your eyes are telling you, and the vertigo subsides. So I find Roy, that was easy, and signal a problem and point to my head and give him hover signal. Sounds good, but I hadn't considered that by looking at Roy I would also blind him with my mask light and that about a third of my signals would get lost in the glare. Roy afterwards said he thought I was signaling a problem with his tank, and he kept reaching around his shoulder. We eventally got on the same page, and by that time the vertigo was under control. It then occurred to me to check my guages, and we had drifted up to about 20 feet from 40. Visual cues absent and the task load of the vertigo episode had kept us from keeping up with our depth. We dumped our BCs to get back to 40 feet and decided to swim off at a 90 degree to our previous imagined heading and eventually hit the shore contour and finished our dive.

Water temperatures are starting to drop, so there's no telling how many more night dives we'll get until spring ( or we shell out for better thermal protection ).

-ejo

(2004-10-05 12:08:19.0) Permalink

Wednesday September 01, 2004

Windy Point Park

Setting The Scene

The parks grounds are clean and well kept, and overnight camping is available. The camp grounds are fairly unstructured, you seem to pretty much pitch your tent whereever strikes your fancy. There are firepits strewn about, but we found evidence of some brainiac building a fire between the boles of two live oaks. There are also a fair number of sturdy picnic tables on the grounds, as well as "facilities", a changing room and a non-potable water shower.

Off the western shore of the park, there is a very nice scuba park with alot of random sunk objects to find. This weekend we visited the Pinto in 82 feet of water and everything else on the map except the manatee and out-of-service platform.

New Gear

In a burst of unchecked consumerism, I invested in some new scuba gear: an Atomic Aquatics Z1 Regulator and SS1 Safe Second, a Aeris Atmos Elite hose-less air-integrated dive computer, a set of Force Fin Pro Force fins, and a new true color frameless mask ( I can't remember the manufacturer ).

Atomic Aquatics

The real reason I decided on an Atomic Aquatics Z1 first and second stage regulator was because I dove a borrowed M1 and fell in love with it. I bought the Z1 because it was in my budget and because I couldn't find anybody that would say anything bad about Atomic regulators (beyond that they were expensive). The best sources of opinions I found were on Scubaboard.com and ScubaToys.com. ScubaToys wasn't so much a source of opinions, but did have an excellent article which explained what a pneumatically balanced regulator is and why they are desireable.

I chose an Atomic SS1 Safe Second ( a power-inflator/regulator ) due to reviews and it seemed best to have matched regulators so I didn't have to take them to seperate shops to get serviced. The SS1 also allows me to reduce the number of hoses connected to my first stage regulator by one since it combines the my secondary reg with the power inflator for the BC. Maybe not the choice for technical diving or DIR folk, but a reasonable choice for a recreational diver like me.

Both the Z1 and the SS1 breathe like a dream. I've taken them to 87 feet so far, and they breathed the same at depth as they did at 10 feet. I was able to stop the Z1 once while swimming down hard, but I haven't been able to replicate that. Beyond that one glitch, the Z1 has delivered dry air in pretty much any orientation I could come up with ( summersaults, face up, head-down inverted, on my side). The SS1 breathes as well as the Z1 ( and would probably breath better than the Z1 if it wasn't detuned to prevent occasional free-flows on entry or current ). The buttons for the inflator and dump are large and easy to differentiate even when wearing gloves. Mine has yellow buttons and purge cover, and they come in red and blue as well.

The only thing that I'm vaguely dissappointed in is that neither the Z1 or the SS1 comes with the Atomic "Comfort" mouthpiece. You can purchase one for $12 seperately, but it just hadn't occurred to me that they would come without Atomic's signature mouthpiece. Speaking of accessories, I also added the Atomic comfort swivel and M1 exhaust tee to my Z1. The swivel reduces the tug from the hose and increases your mobility, while the exhaust tee directs your exhaled breath out and away from your mask and mostly out of your line of sight. I'm happy with these additions, although sometimes my exhaust would bubble past my ears.

Aeris Atmos Elite

My Atmos Elite came from the shop already linked up with it's transmitter, so I didn't have mess with that ( each transmitter has an individual code so that any number of Atmos Elites can operate in close proximity to each other without interfering ). All that remained was to read the manual and get it wet.

I'm pretty happy with the computer over all. The display is big and easy to read ( when your mask isn't fogged up ), and the buttons are big and accessible. I'm alittle disappointed with the backlight. It was dimmer than I hoped it would be. It would be readable in complete dark, but in the murky dark of 60 to 80 feet in Lake Travis it was not bright enough to read without external illumination. Other than that, it keeps track of a multitude of diving data and presents it well to the diver: depth, temperature, tank pressure, elapsed dive time, estimated air time remaining, automatic safety stop timer, ascent and descent speed, nitrogen loading graph, O2 loading graph, and date and time. The computer allows you to set several alarms: maximum depth, turn around tank pressure, and minimum tank pressure. When an alarm triggers, the computer gives an audio cue (it beeps) and flashes a red LED in time with the beep. The computer will also issue alarms for lots of other conditions which require the divers immediate attention, the most serious of which is entry into decompression mode where the diver will need to make a series of decompressions stops on their ascent in order to avoid decompression sickness (the "bends").

Post dive, it will display your current surface interval, your estimated nitrogen load, minimum elapsed time before you should fly, and access to logs for your previous dives. It will also give you a dive planner which can help you plan your next dive by inputing a depth. The computer gives you a bottom time that is calculated from your current surface interval and nitrogen load from previous dives. Some people claim that the algorithms used by this computer are "aggresive", which I take to mean differs from the US Navy dive tables for recreational divers. I suspect if you dive this computer to the hairy edge of it's estimates you could get yourself in trouble, but the same is true of the dive tables.

The computer stores 24 dives before it starts overwriting older logs, and you can buy a cable to connect your dive computer to a personal computer with USB ports. I'm still waiting on the cable, so I can't really comment on what data is available.

So far, I really like my Atmos Elite.

Pro Force Fins

There is nothing like the subject of fins to raise the hackles of veteran divers. And people seem to either love or hate Force Fin brand fins. Roy had a pair that he let me try, and I decided to give them a chance. My previous fins were Tusa straights which I liked well enough, but I liked the compactness of the Force Fins. I tried the Force Fins first in a local pool and found that without my gear on I didn't really like how they kicked on the surface. Below water though, they felt great! With my straight fins, you really could feel resistance of the water on your fins as you kicked. The Force Fins had far less drag so you feel almost like your kicking with a bare foot. Apparantly it's that feeling that drives some divers to distraction, but this weekend in the lake I adjusted to them within a couple of dives. After this weekend, I put my initials on them and put my straight fins in the closet.

New Mask

I'll write more about the mask when I can identify it by brand and model. I liked it after it stopped fogging up on me, and seemed much more comfortable than my previous Tusa mask.

UPDATE: My new mask is a SeaDive. FYI.

-ejo

(2004-09-01 14:07:13.0) Permalink

Tuesday August 24, 2004

Mansfield Dam Scuba Park

This previous Saturday I dove at the Mansfield Dam scuba park with Roy and his wife. I haven't found any linkage for the scuba park's map, I'll try to scan in the map we were given at the gate. The scuba park facilities are pretty nice ( from my vast experience ). There was a small parking lot and covered shelter that services the park, and a long paved side walk and stairs that leads directly into the water. There is also an elevator for handicapped access which requires a key or something ( I'm assuming you can get it from the park staff ). Last weekend the park was pretty crowded, what with a large group ( 30 odd people ) from Houston doing their PADI Open Water Diver class as well as car loads of random other people. For the most part dive folk were friendly, especially the Houston dive instructors. I had rented a regulator for the day, but the shop missed that the inflator on my Zeagle Concept BCD has a different fitting. Roy picked up the gear, so I didn't spot the problem till we were at the lake and hooking up our gear. I was faced with prospect of diving and controlling my bouancy with the oral inflator, or not diving at all. I approached the Houston folks, hoping they might have an adapter that I could borrow. They didn't have an adapter, but they did have a spare first and second stage that they were willing to let me borrow! I was impressed with their generosity, and if you are reading this Travis, Thanks!

We got our gear on at the car, up in the parking lot, and trekked down to the water ( less than 75 yards I would guess ). I recommend just putting on all your gear but your fins up at the car, it's much easier to carry the tank on your back. The stairs down into the water have a nice sturdy railing, and the stairs end in about five or six feet of water. The dive park itself is reasonablely large, maybe 150 yards deep by 300 yards across, but I'm pretty bad at guestimating distances over water. There were four sunk boats, several platforms, and a small Cessna airplane (sans wings ) sunk at about 60 feet ( lake level at the head was 679.6 MSL ). There were various lines strung along the bottom, so it was reasonably easy to find things once you found the lines. The dive area is well marked with a number of large orange bouys as well as dive flags. And as crowded as the park seemed up top, we only bumped into two groups during the course of our two dives ( one along a line at 40 feet and a class perched on a platform around 30 feet ). Surface water temperature was a nice 81 degrees up top and we enountered a prounced thermocline around 60 feet which dipped to 74 degrees.

All in all, I enjoyed my first visit to the Mansfield Dam scuba park and I'm looking forward to diving there in the future.

-ejo

(2004-08-24 11:34:48.0) Permalink

Tuesday August 17, 2004

Hey, You Got My Gear Wet!

This weekend I spent some quality time underwater SCUBA diving in Lake Travis, which is a man-made lake just west of Austin, Texas. I enjoyed four dives over two days, with a maximum depth of 58 ft and alittle over two hours of downtime. The dives were supervised by Thomas from Deep Blue Scuba. Both days, we loaded up at Emerald Point Marina on a pontoon-type dive boot and motored over to West Point on the north side of the lake. I had a lot of fun remembering how to dive again. My first dive I managed to lose a dive light tucked into my BC, but managed to find it again on my second dive. The first two dives were just getting comfortable with my gear again and hanging out in the murky waters of Lake Travis. The third dive, my first dive on Sunday, was more interesting.

Another diver (Vincent?) on the trip out told Roy and I about a wall that is near by the dive site. According to this guy, the wall bottoms out at 120 feet and they had dove it the night before. So Roy and I plan our dive; a swim out of the dive area which is just north of West Point, go around the point and descend to about 50 feet, swim out along the wall for about 10 minutes and return the way we came. Our main concern is to get around the point staying as deep as we can since boats are constantly cutting around the point. As you can imagine, surfacing in the path of an uncoming boat would be bad and to be avoided at all costs.

After some Abbot and Costello navigation, we made it to the point and I promptly got seperated from Roy. I was having a series of problems that contributed: my bouancy was positive and I wanted to be negative or neutral, I had a squeeze in my mask, and I had just gotten tangled in a quarter-inch line running from shore down into the lake (probably a trot line). So I cleared the squeeze, dumped my BC, and backed off of the line to get free. Roy hadn't seen me get caught and we got seperated. So I surfaced, got positive (bouancy) and lounged on surface watching Roy's bubble stream meander around me. He surfaced after a bit and we continued our dive together.

Coming out of the cove into the main lake was scary cool. We were swimming in about 25 feet of water, hugging the bottom since we could hear various props above us cutting around the point, when I look up from the bottom of the lake and see inky black ahead of me. The wall dropped off into the dark, and I could see maybe 10 feet down from the edge. I pushed off and dumped my BC and floated down the wall. I was thinking of the movie "The Abyss" at the time, and I was feeling muy macho! It was very cool. We dropped to about 50 feet and followed our plan for the rest of the dive. ( Ok, I made us turn back 7 minutes out due to having consumed too much air during the swim out, but it was close to the plan ).

On the map above, we dove just west of Starnes Island. I did my inital checkout dives at Bob Wentz Park, and next weekend Roy and I are thinking of trying to locate a Cessna airplane sunk somewhere in the vicinity of Mansfield Dam (the southern most flag).

-ejo

(2004-08-17 15:32:34.0) Permalink