Triple Dip

There are a few thing that mean spring is here in a usable way. It starts by me shoveling the snow from my deck and wheeling the grill away from the house and burning up some burgers because I can't see in the dark to know if they are done.

Next is playing on the bad ice but I've already covered that in previous post.

Last is a trip to Crosby Ironton for a long day of deep clear water diving with my buddies. Two weeks ago this tradition happened. Joe, Terry and myself made the long drive a-la-truckpool to Crosby mines. We've been diving them for something like 8 years and it's always a good time but the visibility isn't that great this early. Spring run off and all so we have about 20 feet but we didn't really care.

It's a good time because it's such a great area but we just really want to go deep to break the monotony of 3 months of shallow ice dives and all the stress of diving under ice.

Last year we placed Terry's old dry suit in the mines. It's common for divers to place items in the mines so others have something surprising to find. We inflated "Ichabod Diver"  and brought him to 60 feet with the idea to have him standing on the bottom for others to enjoy.

 Above: me working while Terry holds a foot.

 Left: Terry and Ichabod. I made a skeleton from 2x4s and a fun noddle. Weighted by rocks.

Below: Me at 60 some feet trying not to tie myself to a corps in a massive silt storm. Yes, I'm under that thing.
 This spring the first task was to find Ichabod on the south side of Alsted. Terry and I had a hard time of the placement and nether of us knew where we left him.

Dive site 1. You can see it's a cold ugly day.

We find our target and move it to 30 feet so other may find it easier and move to dive site two.

There we find a 3 wheeler from the 80's. I 'ride' it for the camera but the silt is monstrous from three divers laughing and fining up the bottom. The rest of the dive is lousy so we bail but the 3 wheeler was a good find and a great laugh. Terry finds a frog while I clear my mask and otherwise look at rocks and sticks.

Terry with me in back

Yes, trees. This was an open pit mine for decades.

Site 3 was about as bad of a dive site as 2 but without the three wheeler but it did have a rope swing! Who can pass up a rope swing when it's 33 degrees and the water is 39 degrees,,, I know, I can't. We must have played on that thing for an hour.

The third and final hurtle to spring was in the books and we managed to make the best of three rather poor dives on a gloomy cold day so Joe and I jumped for joy.