Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

I was curious if there were any scuba divers here? I'm sure others will enjoy this too, but thought it was a good chance to reach out to other divers and get some other dive videos posted up here.

This is a video I just pieced together from the video I shot last night doing a night dive at one of our local lakes.

Cool video Rob, how deep and what temp was the lake?

I couldn't see the video

I scuba dive too, though it's been a few years - never any freshwater diving so I'd like to see the video.

Coldest I saw was 66F at 26ft, night dives we stay pretty shallow just checking weed beds to see what kind of fish we find.


Dstjohn here is the link to YouTube
https://youtu.be/0XZVhsYOk4o

This is a video of where we are diving next week.. this video was 2 years ago, we are hoping for a repeat of this dive and finding the smelt, but it's been 90F or more the past few days, not taking the water temp the direction we needed it to go for the smelt to be active... https://youtu.be/ej24EQw5Qkk

this is a bit of a long video, but it is the new lake just down the road from my house.... we finally dove it yesterday. not my best video, but I was able to edit it enough to make it OK... the colors were all messed up from using my gopro filter in too shallow of water so it washed the colors out and could barely see anything so it took me a while to figure out how to edit it in ways I've never done before to salvage it...

only hit 32ft deep and when we did the visibility went from 10-15ft down to zero. 66-68F water temp right now.

Thanks for sharing. I have been diving a lot but never in fresh water. Interesting to see all the weed beds.

a lot of divers around here don't dive locally... either because they think it is too cold or they think there is nothing to see... they really miss out on some good dives! Especially in our Great Lakes... some of the best shipwreck diving in the world is in our Great Lakes!

I have probably only done about 20 dives in saltwater, the rest (probably 150+) have all been locally in Michigan in freshwater. My dive season is coming to an end now that our Wednesday night dive club is done for the year, I have to head home to take care of my son until my wife gets home from work which is usually after 6pm, and it won't be too much longer that it will be dark by 6pm as we approach winter... so I might do some night dives, otherwise my opportunity is limited to the weekends... which I may still do a few weekend dives. I have not logged any of my dives over the summer, but now that I'm about done diving I'll unload my gear out of my truck and bring my computer in to start logging everything I've done over the summer to get a better idea of how many dives I have total now.

here is a dive video from this morning... same lake as we dove last weekend...

Here are the rest of my videos from this summer...

I haven't shared any videos this year... we've been diving as much as possible this year so I have a lot of new videos, but thought I would share my most recent one...

Saturday 7/28 I went on trip to a shipwreck called the "Thomas Hume". It is located about the middle of Lake Michigan... 1 mile past the middle to be exact -- it was 22 miles from the dock in New Buffalo, Michigan to the wreck at which point we were only 20 miles from Chicago, Illinois.

The Thomas Hume was built in 1870 and lost in a storm in 1891. They were traveling from Chicago, IL back to Muskegon, MI after delivering a load of lumber... it's sister ship decided to turn back when the storm came upon them but the Hume continued... two days later the sister ship headed to Muskegon and found that the Hume wasn't there... so apparently they thought the captain of the Hume had stole it and sailed to another port and repainted it and claimed it for himself. It wasn't until about 10 years ago that they finally found the wreck and identified it as the Hume. It has been on the bottom of Lake Michigan for 127 years and it still in quite good shape! Our cold freshwater lake preserves shipwrecks making them last for a long time if they are deep enough to not be effected by storms and winter ice.

The Hume's deck is about 130 feet below the surface... the bottom is about 150 feet deep. I did two dives on it the first dive hitting about 136 feet, the second dive hitting 144 feet deep. It was an awesome wreck to explore and I can't wait to get back to it again!




Other scuba related news -- I finished my Rescue diver certification in May as well as CPR / AED certification. Then I passed the NAUI F.I.T. program (intro to leadership) in June/July. In about 2 weeks I begin NAUI Assistant Instructor classes, and if that all goes well then in October I'll be attending a NAUI Instructor Training Conference to become a NAUI Scuba Instructor.

THats great Rob, diving and instructing is rewarding. Nothing like getting paid to do your hobby, helps with the equipment costs

I'm a PADI instructor myself, have been instructing on and off for 20 odd years.

Congratulations Rob!

Thanks guys, I enjoy sharing diving with others so think instructing will be a fun way to expand my hobby and get other people into it to keep the hobby thriving! I've been organizing our local club dives for two years now and it's a lot of fun.

I do scuba diving, next week I am flying to Langkawi, Malaysia for my birthday. I am hoping to see the beauty of some water species. Nice video that you have there.

Good news for this week is I've managed to hit my 450 time three days this week and the hardest for me -- I managed to do the 25 yards (actually 25 meters in the pool I'm in) underwater on one breath twice this week now. My issue with only being able to do half the pool was stemming from my heart rate being too high. If I do the underwater swim as my first thing I do when I get in the pool I can manage 25 meters (so I'll be plenty good for 25 yards since it is 75 inches shorter)... if I try swimming laps first then try doing the 25 meters underwater on one breath I can only do half the distance... I tried a couple more times after doing 25 meters and I can't do it, so assuming it's because my heart rate is too high that I need oxygen / expel CO2 sooner, or just the nature of heart rate being higher and out of breath I can't seem to take as large of a breath once I'm already heart pounding and out of breath. Yesterday I even sat up on the pool ledge for a few minutes to calm down but couldn't do it a second time... so I'll just insist on doing the underwater swim first thing when we get to the pool before doing any laps.

Tonight is supposed to be my last night of assistant instructor class... I already passed the written test so I'm good there just have to pass the pool skills test which I'm now confident I can do... but we might have one more class because the other guy in my class couldn't make it last Thursday so they cancelled the class, and tonight we're not actually having our class we're just shadowing and helping with pool skills for another class that is on their last night of basic scuba class. Yay for bottom ditch and recoveries and NAUI bailouts... not! Instructor asked if I wanted to show them how to do the bottom ditch and recovery and NAUI bailout tonight... not that I'm not willing to show them, but I don't know if my skills are "demonstration quality" yet... showing basic scuba students a poor example of how they are done is just going to make it harder for them to do them... and the instructor already told me he has some kids in this class that were going to struggle with it... so I think I'll wait until after then have him just watch me and tell me if I meet his expectation for demonstration quality yet =)