notabob
Contributor
As a few already said - pumpkins are pretty bouyant. Bring weights. With ours, we cleaned them out in advance. The visibility is usually bad enough without making it worse with the pumpkin guts floating around. Prior to going into the water, put some rocks in the pumpkin. If you got time, you can experiment before the dive in shallow water and put enough rocks in the hollowed out pumpkin to make it neutral. Keep in mind that it will get a little negative as you carve. Little serrated pumpkin-carving tools appeared to work best, but they might be hard to manage if you're wearing thick gloves in cold water. For non-complicated designs a dive knife should be sufficient. We didn't have any problems. Glow sticks make the pumpkins look very cool, especially at night. Definately something you will want to bring along. As for designs, you may want to get a pumpkin stencil book (one of the guys on our dive had a little paper-back, you rip out the stencils and trace them onto the pumpkin using a marker or something with a sharp point. Hope you have fun at your pumpkin dive, we had a blast at ours!
-Roman.
P.S. see this thread for a report on the NELD pumpkin dive that we did last weekend
-Roman.
P.S. see this thread for a report on the NELD pumpkin dive that we did last weekend