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