Hi Gang,
I was Mpscubatoytech's dive buddy that day. It *was* 39, so at this point drysuit required. :cold: In fact, he had on neoprene gloves and nearly froze, so he picked up some dry gloves the next week. :cool2:
Hey Ron, what's an "RMO Dive"...? Just curious.
A few additional notes about Aurora Reservoir:
1) I *think* this is new, but they now *require* a surface-marker buoy, so be sure to take one along.
2) They also offer night-diving with a week's advance notice and special permit (which I'm *certain* they charge for).
3) If you are doing a "Stress and Rescue" course, they require advanced notification (I *think* it was a week or so).
4) There is also a requirement that if boat diving, they want you to fly the ALPHA flag on the boat (that's a new one).
As far as the dive itself goes, frankly it was short because of the aforementioned lack of dry-gloves (remedy in place now), but I personally *really* enjoyed it. As he said, not a *single* fish showed up for the party (although there were a LOT of fishermen, and those with float tubes were hovering at the edge of the SCUBA area and casting into it - man that frosts my drysuit underwear). The Crawdads were out in droves though - and because of the cold water, they were particularly slow (no backward tail-shooting for them) so they were very easy to catch and take pictures of...I know, it's cheezy, but hey, that's what we had to work with. The vis on the way there was between 12-20 feet at times, and at the plane it was about 8 feet. The temp at the surface was around 42 degrees and at the plane was 39 degrees...there was no thermocline, just a steady drop of 3 degrees on the way down. I love it when you come up and your face and mouth are numb, so you sound like Bill Cosby's rendition of "The Dentist".
We recovered our "hidden hydrocache" and are refurbishing it now to replace here in the next week or so...for more information send either me or Mpscubatoytech a message.
Regards,
-S