Me and my Buddy Dan decided to dive the Res yesterday. As an overall experience Aurora Res DEFINATELY falls into the catagory of "a bad day diving is better than a good day at work".
I arrived at 10:30am. Dan was nowhere to be seen which was surprising as he lives much closer than I. When he did arrive around 11:00, he had apparently been sitting waiting for the plackard at the main gate. Apparently the attendent had him wait until there was a *break* in the enterence flow so she could help him, and the break never happened. He sat for about 20 minutes before she finally just stopped attending others entering, and helped him. Not sure anything is to be done about that, but if anyone from the park service reads this... ever heard of first come first serve?
We loaded up Dan's truck with my stuff, and headed over to the scuba shore. The facility is barebones, but fine. About 6 picnic tables, a changing area, and an outhouse maybe 75 yards away. The tables are maybe 30' from the water. There were five other divers there.
I started to gear up as Dan drove the truck back to the lot (15 minute drop off only). I had both BCD's on the tanks, when Dan arrived. He went to put his reg on his BCD, and do an initial check. I then heard the words, "Houston we have a problem". Actually those were not the exact words, but you get the idea. He had put a new battery in his transmitter, and the transmitter would not link to his computer (his ONLY SPG).
After a brief discussion, a computer reset, and a review of his manual, he decided to head over to Wall Mart to get another battery. 45 minutes later he was back, and the new battery was not fixing things completely. His computer was linking and showing 3000psi, but his transmitter battery was showing low with the new battery. We decided to dive, and stay close.
About 1:30 we finally hit the water (MUCH L8R than planned). We swam out to the marker which *SHOULD* have marked a downed Cessna. It was a fair distance from shore, maybe 300 yards. We decended to about 35' (bottom), and no plane. The visibility was crap here (2 feet likely less). I attempted to do circles around the chain trying to find the plane. Dan thought maybe I was loosing my Nav skills, but as he described my circles Later I realized I did exactly what I attempted. After about 10 minutes of finding NOTHING with poor vis, I decided to head back toward shore, so I headed East (I had taken a bearing at the surface). The Vis improved dramatically as we went from about 30' to 25'. There was also a Thermocline at about 25' (water temp at max depth was 53F, and about 58F at 20').
I'm unclear why the vis was so bad near the marker, but with five divers having been there before us, we guess they may have stirred it up a lot, hard to say. We spent the remained of the dive poking along the bottom. We saw basically NOTHING other than the bottom, some holes where *something* may live, but we could not tell what, some dead Crawfish, and a few cement blocks. It was still fun.
Then I did run accross something worthwhile, a weightbelt. We were about 30 minutes into the dive, and had been at 20' for the last 10, so I decided to forego the safety stop, and just haul it up. I did, but it had over 30lbs of weight on it, and once at the surface, I realized I could not carry this thing back to shore as it was. So I dropped it.
After a brief discussion, we decided to go back down, get the weights off the belt, and split them up to carry them back. We went back down, and Dan located the belt. Once he picked it up, he hit the bottom, and I could see nothing but a huge cloud which was Dan. I began to become worried that maybe he was in distress as he twised around trying to get the belt open with his 5mm gloves. I tapped him, and he turned and handed me the some of the weight. Apparently he had stirred things up so bad that even with me being inches away, he couldn't see me!
In any event, we got back to the surface with the weights split between us and headed back to shore.
As it was close to 3:00 by the time we were standing back at the tables, we had to call the second dive (Tanks had to be back by 5:00). So about everything went wrong, we saw no plane, but we did walk away with some treasure (I can use the weight as I rent).
Overall while we had fun, and I will dive the Aurora res again, I was a bit disappointed in the diving. The Blue Hole is paradise compared to this dive.
I can only hope that some of the Mountain lakes have better vis, and more life. Flaming gorge is also looking a LOT more appealing after this experience.
