Posted by Eric S on August 02, 2004 at 20:41:14:
Last weekend I took the family on a mini vacation up to Tahoe. I took 2 tanks, 2 wetsuits, my drysuit, 2 pony rigs - one of which was filled with 50%, and my kayak. For 5 days I did nothing but dive, kayak, and lay in the sun.
I never used the drysuit because of the likelyhood that I would overheat kayaking to the dive spots, so I mostly just used my old 7 mil one piece with a hooded vest. The 3 mil I used also with the hooded vest for snorkeling.
On my first day of diving I went all the way down to the Brockway point, about a 1.5 mile kayak from Kings Beach. This is a wall that ultimately bottoms out at about 4oo feet. At the surface the water was about 67 degrees, at 30 feet it was about 60 degrees, at 60 feet there was a hard thermocline and shortly below 60 feet the temp went to 45 degrees. I went to 82 feet and froze my a___. I worked my way up the granite wall and at about 50 feet started to find some sizeable bugs. I nabed about 30 crawdads and looked around somemore then did my stop at came up. The vis was about 90 feet and it was nice to get to see some of those grand vistas. On this wall there are some huge school bus size rocks layingon top of each other forming many caves and swim throughs. There were no fish except some schools of small minnows.
I still had 1500 pounds in the tank so I went back one point closer to Kings Beach and did another shallow dive in and around some big boulders there and I found some cool caves and tunnels.
A couple days later I kayaked back to the wall and explored an area further towards the Nevada border. This time I went to 93 feet and stayed long enough to use my 50/50 up at 60 then 30 then 10. More for practice than anything else, and I'm sure I added a good safety margin for an altitude dive. I found lots and lots of abandoned crawdad traps and lots of lures. I brought my Nikonos and shot up a roll of 400 print film with natural light and a 20mm lens. The pics are alright.
On the way back from that dive I put on snorkel gear and snorkeled for about a half mile pushing my kayak along from the back. I found 2 antique bottles, 12 golf balls, a good beach towel, an old antique cell phone, and a pair of Oakley sunglasses.
Oh ya, and I finally saw exactly 1 trout about 12 inches long.
One thing nice about Tahoe is you don't have to rinse your gear.