Last Saturday Lloyd and I decided to attend Husker Divers Day near Kearney, NE. Husker Divers is a dive shop located in Lincoln, NE. They've held a customer appreciation day for the past four years. While this isn't our local dive shop, they said we were welcome to attend. This year they held it at Bassways, a Nebraska state recreation area right off of I-80 at the Minden exit. We couldn't have asked for a better day weather wise. We got to meet Joe and Donna, the owners of Husker Divers. They are very nice people. The staff grilled hot dogs and hamburgers for everyone. A couple of people from our local dive club were there. They both live in Lincoln.
Quite a few people showed up for this event. Visibility was around 10-12 ft. and the water was warm above the thermocline. No reason to venture below that as the vis dropped to almost nothing. For dive activities, the dive staff placed number bluerocks (they were actually orange) throughout the lake and each numbered bluerock represented a prize. Lloyd and I scored a couple of small Princeton Tec sport lights, a travel dive log book, and an Ikelite PCA light. We didn't do so well on the poker run, an underwater navigation course. Lloyd's digital compass was off by 20 degrees. We found markers one and four, Lloyd did a great job at a reciprocal heading back to number one, but being off that much made it next to impossible to find the rest. Oh well.
While searching the lake for bluerock Lloyd and I did a bit of cleanup along the way. I picked up a glass mason jar that had been in the lake for a while, a couple of glass soda bottles, an aluminum beer can, and some smaller items. On our way back to the entry point we came upon a huge catfish hiding in some tall weeds. It was as long as my arm. The catfish didn't seem phased at all while we were looking at it. I even got down eye to eye with it and he didn't spook. We also spotted some smaller catfish and quite a few striped bass. We didn't take our camera/video equipment as the visibility hasn't been great with all the rain we've been having so I don't have any pictures to share.
All in all, it was a fun day!
Quite a few people showed up for this event. Visibility was around 10-12 ft. and the water was warm above the thermocline. No reason to venture below that as the vis dropped to almost nothing. For dive activities, the dive staff placed number bluerocks (they were actually orange) throughout the lake and each numbered bluerock represented a prize. Lloyd and I scored a couple of small Princeton Tec sport lights, a travel dive log book, and an Ikelite PCA light. We didn't do so well on the poker run, an underwater navigation course. Lloyd's digital compass was off by 20 degrees. We found markers one and four, Lloyd did a great job at a reciprocal heading back to number one, but being off that much made it next to impossible to find the rest. Oh well.
While searching the lake for bluerock Lloyd and I did a bit of cleanup along the way. I picked up a glass mason jar that had been in the lake for a while, a couple of glass soda bottles, an aluminum beer can, and some smaller items. On our way back to the entry point we came upon a huge catfish hiding in some tall weeds. It was as long as my arm. The catfish didn't seem phased at all while we were looking at it. I even got down eye to eye with it and he didn't spook. We also spotted some smaller catfish and quite a few striped bass. We didn't take our camera/video equipment as the visibility hasn't been great with all the rain we've been having so I don't have any pictures to share.
All in all, it was a fun day!
