WOW! I was at Bonne Terre today. I have one more dive to do tomorrow. Normally it is three dives, but since I signed up for five and the guy that is leading the dives on Sunday is not qualified yet for trail 7, I did four today. This worked out well. TIP: If you want to beat the crowds, summer time is the way to go. Today there was one group (us) all day. We had the whole place to ourselves; four divers, one leader and two safety divers. On the third dive, it was just me and the leader, on the fourth diver it was myself, the leader, and one other diver. The only overlap was two guys show up to do the first trail, but one of the other leaders took them while we finished up. The only crowds were the folks going the boat and walking tours. It was perfect. Viz was incredible, the air was 62 and the water was 57. Did I say WOW?
Trail one is pretty basic. First they take you to 25' and make sure you can do the basics like alternate air assist, mask clearing, bouyancy, etc. Then they take you on a pretty basic tour where you see some ore carts, pickaxes, a pnuematic drill sticking out of the wall, etc. The coolest thing on that dive was the locomotive laying on its side at about 80 feet. We viewed it from about forty feet. Trail two had a "keyhole" swimthrough. It was pretty tight, but the distance was only about a foot.
Each trail gets a little more complex, there are some swim throughs, including a few where the ceiling was only a couple of feet from your head, though they were plenty wide. There are places where you can see the shafts that go to the next level below, and on trail 4 there is what I can only describe as a big scaffolding that straddles a shaft that goes down 400 feet. We also saw one spot where a steam pipe sits. This is way cool because the oxidation generates a cloud of "smoke". It is really hard to describe.
Trail 7 was my favorite, it was more complex with more tight spaces and a couple of overheads enivrons, though the way out was very clear.
These guys are EXTREMELY safety concious. To become a diver leader/saftey diver, they literally do hundreds of dives. They are required to have the ability to lead divers out of any trail and back to the dock even if it is pitch black. They do thourogh and detailed pre-dive briefings as well.
I attempted to take some pictures, but even with a strobe, and of course this being my first time using a camera, I am not sure yet if any of them came out. Also the strobe was not working properly. One of the guys told me it is difficult to get decent pictures, so I don't fell too bad. Hopefully Part II will have at least a couple of pics. I can tell you though, even if they are perfect, there is no picture in the world that can do this place justice. It is HUGE, and the most amazing thing is it was all dug by hand using pickaxes and explosives. No fancy modern machinery. This place just oozes history. I can imagine it is similar to going to an historic shipwreck, only this one covers many miles.
And they are old pics, so you can tell what they really are...they arent photochopped or anything....
