it's not a cave dive, but it is sidemount with prep for cave....
The leaky mask continued to leak despite my best efforts to reseat it. Finally I just had to give up, bite the bullet, and remove it to start from scratch. The cold water hit my face like a hammer; a hammer made of a block of ice. The ice-cream headache was oddly delayed a few seconds as if my brain was hit by the freeze so fast it couldn't think of the proper reaction. Taking your mask off underwater is not much fun, but in this cold quarry water it really has to be justifiable, not something one does on a whimsey, but I'd been trying to reseat it for 10 minutes and it was not working. The only other choice was to end the dive. Since I wear my mask on the inside of my hood, removing the mask was doubly unpleasant. The cold water on my now exposed bald head was one shock, which was quickly followed by the second one from removing the mask. You can bet I was real quick replacing the mask and hood, and then clearing the mask. Ahhhh, that was better. The leak was no more. I instantly became a happy diver!
Jeff's Quarry is no warmer now than it was in the dead of winter. At 43-degrees F, at 20-feet deep, it was just barely tolerable in the 7mm wetsuit I'd chosen to wear. Next time, I'll include 7mm booties - those 3mm things turned my feet blue! Viz really sucked. It was 5-10 feet mostly with the 10-foot viz rare and out away from the walls. The new sidemounted steel tanks I was carrying bobbed a bit as I frog-kicked in slow rhythmic cycling - this was their maiden quarry dive and I was mainly out to see how best to reconfigure the gear, weights, and all for the best trim for cave diving. It was too cold to do much more than notice this and that difficulty and jot down a note to think about later. The fish are returning; a small group schooled around me for the first time since early fall, but many were still lethargicly laying on the bottom, hovering in the grass, or hiding motionless under or in the debris.
As I kicked along waiting for the groove to glide me along effortlessly, it seemed as if every breath was too deep too long. My legs were too heavy and my knee was not fully healed from the damage inflicted by the incident with an errant crowbar several weeks ago. It all seemed a bit too much of a struggle, so I turned my thoughts to the sites.
The rope from the platform was overgrown with grass and as I tried to pull it free great clumps of grass and gunk bloomed out reducing the poor viz to no viz. I continued on unfazed and decided to refrain from clean-up attempts and just enjoy the dive. I smiled as I passed my 100-foot marker, measured and placed three years ago so divers can count kick cycles, and/or number of breaths, psi, etc., in 100-foot increments. It's nice to know that 60 kick cycles is 100 feet of travel distance. I kicked on.
The reading room appeared out of the gloom, partially overgrown with grasses, some wooden chairs bent at odd angles, warped by the years of immersion into shapes that made it appear like a reading room for broke-back zombie children. there are no books in this reading room; only chairs for kids arranged in a semi-circle around the one adult chair. A boombox sets silently on the one small side table. A park bench is at the back behind the children's chairs for the few parents who hang out waiting for story-time to be over so they can take their handicapped zombie-kids out for a treat of brains.
I was in the groove. It happened so subtley I was unaware of just when, but there it was, unmistakable. My legs and fins were no longer connected to the conscious part of my brain, but were now autonomous; acting on their own as if driven by a clocked motor. Kick cycles. Kick, glide..., kick, glide..., kick, glide..., and so on. I don't know how one sets it on automatic, I only know that it comes with practice, lots of practice. And even then, there are some dives where it just never kicks in.
I like this part of the dive because I can begin to fool around with things and keep on truckin'. I can unclip and reclip my tanks (a sidemount-only skill), switch regulators, remove stuff from pockets and put them back, all those things that instructors tell you should be able to do without difficulty, but no one can really do without constant practice and all the while my legs and fins do their thing as if I wasn't even there.
The appliance grave-yard suddenly opened up in front me. Viz was 10 feet and it was like a veil had been parted - like those in a Sheik's tent that aren't opaque, but give you a hint of a view of the harem inside. Not that the appliance graveyard is anything like a harem! The rusted hulks of old washers, dryers, ranges, the busted-up pinball machine, and the proliferating toilets (who keeps throwing old toilets in there anyway?), share very few common features with young nubile sex slaves, although one might make a case for common features with wives (just kidding Kimpi)!
As I round the end-zone of the quarry and start down the opposite side it occurs to me that I am cold and maybe a complete perimeter sweep of the quarry would take too long. To shiver or not to shiver, that is the question when one is 35 feet deep in a 43-degree quarry. I cut across the quarry, deciding to cut the remaining dive time in half, and to take a look at the middle by crossing from one end to the other. I used to bring a compass, but I've been here so many times there is no longer any doubt about where I am or which way to go to get anywhere else. There's the upright cement block; I should jog right. There's the triangular rock sitting upright all by itself in the middle of nothingness; I cross right over it. There's the edge of the grass and from the way it bugles out in the middle, jutting into slightly deeper water, I must be back near the car and no sooner do I think it than the car appears - right on cue. Then there on the bottom is a huge blue-gill. He doesn't see me and is lounging there with his belly in the mud and leaned over nearly 45-degrees. Keeping warm. I give a shiver and as I glide over him, he suddenly comes to life and darts away startled. "Sorry, dude, didn't mean to disturb your nap," I think as my legs just keep on ticking.
I am warm enough I guess, so no hurry to get back. I turn to follow the grass line to canoehenge where I do the slalom dance then turn to go back to the grass and search for the cabin cruiser floated on lift bags then sunk. It was around here somewhere, but after a couple of sweeps back and forth I couldn't find it. Dang. In poor viz some things are just hard to find! I must have come within 10-feet of it, but could only see about 5. Time to go.
As I turned to head back to the platform, my preferred pre and post staging of the dive, I couldn't help but think how this 7mm wetsuit was as warm as my drysuit (except for my feet). Wet or dry I was warm enough.
The underwater world had once again showed me the magic it can bring to a soul; the healing power that quietly rests in the depths. As I finned for home, I saw the healing power as destructive power too; how the water can rise up and destroy as it recently demonstrated in Japan. I thought of how you can't have one without the other. How for all things there is good and bad, that nothing is good or bad, but is both, intertwined in some inextricable weave in which one is the other and the other is the one. How sometimes we see the bad and sometimes we see the good. How often we think that that which we see is the way it is, as if anything, anyone, could be one or the other. We pin labels, we shout names, we rise up against the bad, and we support the good, and too often we forget that there is no good or bad, but only that all things, all people are both good and bad and everything in-between.
The old boats strewn about on the bottom reminded me that it was time to do a safety stop, then surface, and drive home. The sun felt good. It was bright and made me squint and it hurt my face almost as much as the cold as it superheated my exposed flesh - one of those painful but pleasant moments, in which the goodness and badness blend in some Machavillian perversion, but only for a moment. Quickly the warmth of the sun becomes nothing but goodness and I am once again in the Light.
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