Welcome to diving and welcome to SB. Lake Pleasant has a lot of good dive spots. I can't join you on Monday but maybe some weekend sometime. There's a great and growing group of divers that do a lot of local diving. Somebody is almost always going to the lake. A couple of things to think about no matter where at the lake you choose to dive..
Always take and set a dive bouy. If you and your dive buddy both have buoys, set both of them. As the lake continues to get more and more busy we've found that setting a group of dive buoys seems to get the boater's attention with a show of force, so to speak. And the jet skiers enjoy the slolum, which brings me to the next point.
Treat diving at Lake Pleasant like diving in an overhead environment. That is, keep surface swims to a minimum or better yet descend as soon as you can and follow the bottom contour. The same at the end of the dive. Follow the bottom until you are in water shallow enough to stand in.
Always take a dive light. Depending on the vis it can get dark pretty quickly and it makes keeping track of your dive buddy easier if you both have a light. Besides, there are a lot of nooks and crannies that must be investigated.
Trust your compass - most of the time. The lake bed has mineral deposits in some areas that can effect the compass needle. You'll be finning long and all the sudden your compass needle will spin or deflect. If you have a visual reference to something in front of you, keep swimming straight to it. Most likely in a few seconds the compass will right itself as you put some distance between you and the mineral deposit. Really, it doesn't happen very often but it does happen. And I want to stress that even with the situation above your compass still has a better sense of direction than you do.
Other than that, enjoy the balmy gin-clear waters of Lake Pleasant.
Steve.
