Welcome to Thunderdome

That particular pic is about 32 feet. It is a quarry... so it will be a good chunk algae, but a also a little bit the minerals in the water absorbing light.

Real life vis was about 30 feet.... not too bad. The pics make it look more green than it was.

JUST heard recommendations on my Spearo podcast to shoot photos in RAW underwater and clean up in post processing. Looks like you are all over that.

Cool. It was just the other day on a scuba site I saw peeps talking about a red filter, and that got me to thinking about post processing. Proper gopros have a filter mount, I don't think my clone does. Even so, at depth reds are either there, or being absorbed... It seems like a physical red lens would just take MORE light out of your pics.

Yeah, RAW is the bomb, if you have the tools/patience for working with it. My wife's a photographer, so I have it by proxy.

Opening RAW file in Photoshop isn't as complicated as you might think. There are maybe 10-15 initial sliders for color balance/brightness/etc. You can just play with them and get results surprisingly fast. I think there is even an auto-adjust function. When I did product photography out of college as part of one my my first jobs I remember taking pictures and was pleasantly surprised how fast I picked it up .

Picasa or Google Photos can do it too, but not 1/100th as deep.

I'm using Rasc Paintshop Pro that I legally purchased in 1998. It is.somewhere in complexity between Paint and Photoshop. Happy.enough with it.

I'm about to go to trial in TX for 3 weeks, and i'll miss a family vacation and wedding in the process. Which sucks.

On the upside it gives me an excuse to do a solo dive trip to San Diego for 4-5 days in mid September. Planning on doing shore dives every day. Maybe find someone to take me out to the Kelp Beds in a boat or a kayak. Will try to take some pictures (maybe even rent a go-pro w/ mask mount if i'm feeling crazy)

Great day of diving a couple shipwrecks in Lake Superior. Water temps about 68F. Two more shipwrecks tomorrow. Pics and stuff when I get home.

Nice, hope it was a fun and safe dive. Grab dinner

I'm sitting in this war-room practicing breath holds while working. Can't seem to push it to 3 minutes - maybe with all this free time I'll get there by the time I head to SD.

In water, the dive reflex kicks in. Should get better.

Second day of diving was great as well, we did 4 dives in 2 days, a record for us. We also hit a depth of 59 feet, the deepest the kid has gone. Again, pics and stuff later. Still not home yet.

Also, I would bet a dollar there were more tourists from India in Michigan's UP this weekend than there were actual Michiganders.

Did you know you could enter Michigan on I-75 and drive 70 miles an hour to the other side of the state for 10 hours and still be in Michigan? Jesus fuck.

GORDON wrote:Did you know you could enter Michigan on I-75 and drive 70 miles an hour to the other side of the state for 10 hours and still be in Michigan? Jesus fuck.

Sounds like Michigan.

Google Maps had no better suggestions?

Did you know Michigan is an old Indian word for "northern shithole?"

TheCatt wrote:

GORDON wrote:Did you know you could enter Michigan on I-75 and drive 70 miles an hour to the other side of the state for 10 hours and still be in Michigan? Jesus fuck.

Sounds like Michigan.

Google Maps had no better suggestions?

Mackinac Bridge is a pretty natural funnel point.

Four dives of videos and pics to process, but here's a sneak preview.

Me taking a sit on some ship captain's lost throne.

We did so much diving I am going to make a post about each dive, otherwise a single post would be too huge.

Way up in Michigan's upper peninsula there is a small town on the shores of Lake Superior... the lake that they call Gitchegumee, and they say she never gives up her dead. This town is called Munising, and boats tend to sink around there from time to time.

We would never really have known about all the available diving if it hadn't been windy one day when we were visiting. We had tickets to do an evening cruise to see the "Pictured Rocks," a really gorgeous stretch of the shoreline that was basically a 150ish foot cliff that ran for miles and miles.

(Here's a pic of them we got on the return trip when we finally got to take the cruise)

It's is like this for miles and miles. But anyway...

It was too windy for the big boat to maneuver near the cliff face, so we took a "glass bottom boat" tour instead, since it stuck to the sheltered cove. It was on that cruise that we saw a bunch of neat wrecks, and it planted the seed of coming back to dive. We went back over the Labor Day weekend with the sole intention of diving.

We planned two days, two dives each day. We booked a charter with the same company that ran the glass bottom boat, and Cap'n Joe ended up being very cool. He let the wife come along for free since she wasn't going to be diving, only "bubble watching." The charter we took out in the Atlantic that time charged all peeps on board $100 for the charter, the idea being we were paying for the boat ride... whether or not we dove when we got out there was our concern. But Cap'n Joe was cool.

And even better, it was just me and my kid booked that day, so it was private and cozy and personalized. He took us wherever we wanted to go. We stuck to the plan, though. Plan your dive, and dive your plan.




One of the great things about having a kid is that you have a built-in dive partner.

It was a gorgeous day, a light wind but from the south... land... which means no big waves coming in from the deep part of the lake. Perfect day.

Anyway, the first stop was the wreck of the Bermuda.

The BERMUDA is a very popular for both beginners and advanced SCUBA diGetInline-3vers. A merchant schooner of 394 tons, she was built launched from Oswego, NY, in 1860, and sunk with 3 lives lost of in October 1870. Although this wreck lies in only 30 feet of water, it is protected from ice and wave damage. The result is an intact 136 foot schooner sitting upright and waiting for visitors. The BERMUDA was 26 feet in beam and l l feet, 9 inches in depth.

Now, you may ask how a wooden boat that sunk in 1870 is still so intact. Here's a little snippet about a tree stump that was found nearby.

A mysterious tree stump was found in the wreckage of the Herman H. Hettler. Suspecting that the tree was extremely old, Captain Pete Lindquist sent samples of the wood for carbon dating. The laboratory results showed an age of 7,910 years plus or minus l00 years.

Basically, fresh water and cold temps... shit don't rot. That wreck could be there for thousands of years.

It was a giant-stride entry from the boat, and a ladder (sometimes bouncing in swells) to get back up.

The water was 66F, my kid dove a 7mm suit with hood and gloves... he lost the hood after the first 5 minutes when it was interfering with his mask. I dove a 3mm suit with no hood or gloves... I seem to have some amazing cold tolerance. People commented on it on this trip, I'll talk about that more when we get to that point in the trip log.

Anyway, we swam around it, over it, and inside it, about 35 minutes total. Here's a 3 minute clip of somewhere in the middle of the dive.



It was a great first dive, we knocked the rust off the skills again (a month since our previous dive), and while going to the next spot we changed out our tanks for the next dive, the wreck of the Hettler.

Oh! Last time we were in open water, we got seriously seasick, remember that? This time we had patches behind our ears with medicine... supposedly they were good for 3 days, but they pretty much washed off during the first dive. But we'd had them on since 3 hours prior so our systems were flooded with whatever the medicine was.... I will pull out the box for the next post and tell you what it was... and we had not a bit of queasiness, not even the next day when we had some actual rough water.

But I digress.... the next dive was....

I find the sphincters in the cliff wall funny.

So after we dove the Bermuda we changed tanks while motoring over to the Hettler site.

The Hettler is mainly a debris field, there's not much left that looks like a boat, a bit of decking...but it's still neat.

The Hettler was steaming from Ludington to Duluth, under the command of Captain John M. Johnson, with a cargo of 1,100 tons of bulk salt when it got caught in a severe November gale. As Johnson attempted to run to shelter in Munising Harbor in the dark of night and in a blinding snow storm, the ship drove up on a rock reef off Trout Point, just outside the east channel.

One report said the steamer struck so hard that the Hettler’s bow lifted about three feet out of the water. The 16-man crew spent the night working the pumps and attempting to back the vessel back off the reef, but to no avail. The next day the crew launched the life boats and got towed into Munising by a passing fishing tug.

...

She is now at 20'- 40' of water. On the inner edge of the reef where the Hettler struck, her boiler can be found in about 25 feet of water, along with part of her hull and a field of debris such as mechanical parts, tanks, piping, and even a bathtub.

Among the wreckage is that toilet in the previous post, the kid was greatly amused by that. We were able to see it from the glass bottom boat, so it was something he was looking forward to. He stuck his head inside it and said, "World record for deepest swirly!" but I am guessing that record is held by some navy squid on a submarine, somewhere.



And here's a few minutes from some point in the dive. Very interesting rocky bottom. The toilet makes its appearance at about minute 2.



Water temp was 66F, calm seas, great weather.

It was a great first day, and after we grabbed some food and then hit the "Sunset Pictured Rocks tour" the wife wanted to do... and that was a giant boat with a couple hundred people including a shitload of Indian people who had no concept of personal space (I literally got sat on by some swarthy fucker trying to cram into the seat next to me) and literally spent the entire cruise taking selfies and pictures of each other in every possibly mathematical combination of people. In fact, there were so many cameras going that I wonder now if they were some sort of Bollywood celebrities, or something. Then when we would pass other tour boats, you could look over and see they were packed with Indians, too. I have no idea what the Indian Department of Tourism is telling people about the UP over Labor Day, but something's up.

Anyway, it was past dark again when we finally got back to the cabin. That brings us to the 2nd day of diving....

These are great trip reports. Is there wildlife down there?