SeaYoda
Contributor
High tides at the jetties are very early this week so I checked the river level for Morrison and, even with the recent rains, the level was under 6'. I needed to experiment some more with the camera for the cavern project so I decided to give the old water hole a try. I convinced Mrs. Yoda to go along as a bubble watcher and bribed her with a fancy dinner at Sally's . There were no clouds in the sky at the house this afternoon and I checked the radar, storms seemed to have passed through near Morrison and were headed northeast. We loaded the car and headed out on our way. The closer we got to Ponce DeLeon the darker the sky got. Just before the exit on I-10 it began to rain. In typical Florida fashion, we turned south on 81 and it stopped raining. When we got to the spring, there were a few swimmers / tree climbing, rope swingers and just a couple divers. The water was bluish with a green hue. I could tell from the surface that conditions were not pristine. I geared up and entered the water with overcast skies and when I checked the viz it was OK but not spectacular. I really needed a sunny day with clear water to do the camera tests that I wanted to do so I figured I would just play with some settings today. I stayed in OW for the whole dive (I needed to surface a couple times for the camera play that I was doing). I saw two divers going in and out of the lower cavern while I was swimming around. There is a lot more "grass" in the shallows than I have ever seen at Morrison - along with lots of baby fish. During the dive I noticed a haze layer coming from the edges of the basin and slowly filtering across the shallows. The run-off from today's rains was filtering into the spring already. I got to see several small bass, sunfish, and two baby snapping turtles on the dive today. The experimental pictures today were done to see what I could do with an aperture of 10, slow shutter of 1/25 Seconds, and manual focus to try and estimate where focus is with the dome port. With the dark conditions, I also tried ISO 400 to see how noisy that gets. The results are grainy due to the ISO, a little blurry due to motion blur, and slightly out of focus due to the manual focus trial. Still not too terrible considering everything ...