July 12, 2016: Grubbing is the “art” of locating items on the river bottom that might have value. Today’s effort was geared to recovering bottles and items that just looked interesting. The real work is cleaning your finds and figuring which ones to toss (or give) away. Keepers are generally the stone ware jugs and pots, highly embossed bottles, and those with interesting shapes.
Looking for a lost Navy Neptune PV-2 bomber off the coast of St. Joseph, MI
First dive of the year in Paw Paw Lake is on Forest Beach Park on Pier Street in Watervliet, MI. Big John and I had the lake all to ourselves.
It was nice to have had such a mild winter and not a lot of snow or associated run off. Last year when this was completed we had snow.
Today was a recovery day for a ice fisherman that dropped his cell phone. Jim was my tender for the dive. The water was clear until I was on the bottom and began searching then the visibility was zero. It was a fun dive and successful recovery 🙂
Pictures are as follows: Ice entry setup – Jim in dry suit as my tender – just a little over 4″ of ice – looking at the hole as i am going down – vegetation above the bottom before the search begins – actual visibility as search continues – Jim pulling me home 🙂
Ice conditions change at a drop of the hat so when you have good ice you take advantage of it. Today we had good weather, we anticipated good visibility and some willing souls to brave the driving conditions. This is a pictorial of the days activities.
By submerged platform looking up toward the staging platform and hole. Hence the adage” go toward the light”
This was our first real ice dive of the year at Lake 16 in Martin, MI.
My line tender is out of the picture holding the yellow rope, the shore tender is helping me with my gear, the backup diver is behind me sitting on a board so his butt does not freeze to the ice.
