Now I am thinking about the gear. I am slipping into the drysuit. My only concern is to be short of breath when I pull in the neck. It does not happen. I am very comfortable. I meticulously think every movement, everything I am doing. I am already in the water in my mind. I put the hood on. There again, no claustrophobic feeling. This is strange because I remember this being an issue last year at Laguna Verde at 4,300 m during our training. This feels so much more comfortable. Now the gloves but before, Greg comes with the CPOD and the cable. His fingers are cold because of the temperature. He has some difficulty adjusting the pad to my finger and has to try a second time. But that's it. I am wired. This is no training anymore.
Now the tricky part is to put the diving gloves on top of that. They are tight already in normal conditions and this is not helping. Greg is pulling on them very hard. Finally we get there. I just close my eyes for a moment. It is just total peace. Nothing else exists around me anymore, just the sound of water. It seems that time is suspended. I open my eyes again and just have this vision of the crater wall on the other side of the shore and the emerald water.
It's time. I am now ready to go and adjust my mask on my face. I am starting to walk backward into the lake, guided by Rob who is standing behind me. I feel great and so calm. I am not even anxious. Maybe this is what it is to be totally crazy. I am in the water up to my knees. The drysuit is fantastic. I do not feel one ounce of cold. At this point, I give the thumbs up to Greg and the go sign to Rob who moves away from me. I have no hesitation whatsoever. I just throw myself backward in the water. The water feels great, not even cold and the lake grabs me as if with gentle arms. I turn on my belly. The lakebed is all of a golden color. This is so surprising because the color of the water from the surface looks emerald. Gold and vibrant.
For a moment, I loose track of time and where I really am. The vision of the cable on a rock brings me back to the reality of what is still to accomplish. I try to dive a first time to get the cable untangled but obviously I do not have enough weights on my belt. I pop up back at the surface like a balloon. I free the cable and go back to the shore and stand up. I need the other belt, the one with 20 pounds of lead on it. The clothes I kept underneath the suit are adding buoyancy. Rob gives me the second belt and I go back. I try to find a good rock to anchor myself during the free dive to accumulate some time underwater so that Greg can get significant data. I finally find one and I go down! That's it. All these months of work are now paying off. I am peaceful at the bottom, holding this rock like I would a friend's hand.
Once again I loose track of time. It does not matter. I keep my eyes close for quite some time and reopen then shortly before resurfacing. Back at the surface, I am not even out of breath. I go down again several times. I would like to explore more. I then ask Greg to climb in the boat and follow me with the cable. I also ask him to give me the underwater video camera.
After 5 more minutes, he is on the boat and we are passing the camera to each other. He is taking some footage of me underwater and I am taking also some footage of the bottom of the lake. I reach the middle of the lake. There are algae of various colors, going from emerald green to red. I am just enjoying myself but at the surface Greg is having a hard time because the wind is blowing our inflatable boat all over the place and he cannot keep it from going back to shore. The end result is once again that the cable of the CPOD is entangled on rocks, this time a bit deeper which will give me the occasion to do some work between two and three meters depth up there.
I gladly go and get the cable free again. When I resurface, the boat is against the shore and Greg decides that since he has no control over it, he is better of on the shore. We have already some dives and unprecedented data under our belt. Greg also tells me something that stuns me: my O2 saturation was at 91% during the dives! That's something at this altitude! One amazing thing happens as soon as I step out of the water. My entire drysuit gets covered with ice crystals!! That's pretty. That tells also a lot about the temperature out here. Rob is in the water sampling for Aaron. Then, I decide to use the time while Rob and Andy are diving to take the boat and try to do some sonar reconnaissance of the depth of this lake. I have heard all sorts of numbers, from 4 m to 10 m. I push the boat in the water and try to paddle on my own with some measure of success. However, the wind is really strong and as soon as I stop, the boat is pushed back on the shore. Frustrating! Marcello comes to the rescue. He does what he can with the paddling but faces the same problem. While he is struggling, I am taking some sonar measurements here and there. It is impossible to keep a straight profile. As I am doing this, the maximum depth I record next to the middle of the lake is 5.2 m but we may not have passed over the deepest point. Marcello and I give up. This is impossible. Too much wind. We are going back to shore. Aaron is filtering hundreds of liters of water through his plankton nets. This crater is really buzzing with activity.
This is Andy's turn in the water. He is also wired by Greg and do some monitored free diving with the CPOD. What's happening now in this crater is phenomenal. Andy gets out of the water. The three of us have accumulated at least one hour of free diving in this lake this morning, collected physiological data and samples, underwater video and photos. The wind is a bit stronger and it maybe time to get out of here for today. We have spent close to 5 hours in the crater altogether. We collect some of the equipment but leave mostly everything in the crater since we will be back tomorrow.
Macario leads us back out of the crater. Our troop is heading back to the summit camp. We reach it nearly 45 minutes later. Later, Greg is wired and has a big smile. He has a CPOD connected to his finger. He tells me that he successfully sent his vitals live to Ames and Stanford. What a day. We have accomplished a lot, and I really mean a lot. All that has been achieved today is unprecedented. I am now thinking about the weather and what to do. If it holds, we should be able to achieve everything we set for.
We will see how the night goes.
I could not find any details on the 1984 expedition and dives - whether they were indeed scuba or free diving.,,?
