Dive: 34
Season Dive: 2
Date: 7/4/09
Site: Gruntenheave, Joan
Avg/Max Depth: 14/22
Temp: 63
TBT/CBT: 1:09/26:47
Buddies: Curtis, Kristen & Ted
What better way to spend the 4th of July than diving? And what better way to remember all about it than to blog about it 6 weeks later? Too bad my dive computer doesn’t record experiences. For your reading pleasure, please enjoy Curtis’s rendition:
Our diving plans were thwarted by my being sick on Friday morning. Saturday we gave it another go and it was a success. Jill requested we dive someplace with lots of fish so I suggested Joan for the two nice beaver piles. When we arrived at the site we were surprised it was completely empty. No divers, no campers, sweet. There was a loon swimming right by our entrance, maybe we’d see it on our dive? The four of us suited up and made the hike down the steep bank to the water. We stuck Jill with the little 63 so the rest of us air hogs would have a chance to accumulate some bottom time.
We swam to the right towards the beaver piles. Right away we noticed the horrible vis. Below 15 feet we couldn’t see more than 5 feet because of a brown haze. It was decent on top. Kristen and I both had to surface to fix a leaky mask. While fixing my mask I noticed one of my gloves needed some correcting as well. Once underway Ted and I noticed a nice northern leading the way. It kept our attention in the otherwise barren terrain. Kristen and Jill were lagging behind too far to see it. I happened to look away and missed the highlight which Ted later described. The northern pounced on a sunfish at the bottom. When I looked it was arranging the sunny in it’s mouth and choked it down. Nice.
At the first beaver pile there were quite a few sunnies, large mouth bass, and rock bass. Not nearly as many fish as expected but still enjoyable. We slowed our pace quite a bit to take it all in before continuing on to the second one. It was way farther away than I expected. I started to get nervous that Jill was getting close to half psi so I asked, 1100. Another 20 feet or so and we were at the second pile. Again plenty of fish but not like expected. We spent a short time watching the fish then swam back in high gear.
When we passed the first beaver pile I swam on the shallow side and notice some huge sunfish spawning in a ‘hole’. There was also a cluster of big ones around some old tree trunks.
The rest of the dive was just a quick swim back. At the exit Ted and I did some rings. We were both hitting them like a couple of pros. I had quite a few doubles go up and after I snapped a pic of one set I noticed Ted hitting all kinds of good ones.
Actually, I’m about 87% positive that I had a write-up of this dive, but I can’t seem to find it on my laptop anywhere.