Entry: Diving Lake Jocassee

I completed my Level II ("advanced") checkout dives this weekend up at Lake Jocassee. Talk about a ton-o-fun!

I've attached images but I must warn you that they...well...they SUCK! This was my first time playing with my camera underwater and I can tell you now that I am completely ineffective with it. Firstly, I don't know how to handle the flash at all. Secondly, my camera has issues focusing at depth. And thirdly, I have yet to do anything to compensate for the light absorption (which is why everything under the water appears to be nasty and green).

A shot of the "dive boat". A big thanks goes out to Josh for letting us use this for our dives.

Put'in in.

A shot of the cliff adjacent to the dive site.

Random shot over the dive site. I think they said the site was called 'The Junkyard'. Makes sense considering what we saw down there.

Now, remember what I said about light absorption and the color green. EVERYTHING is green from here-on out since we were cruising at an average depth of 60-65 feet. The blurriness is from my simply being an incompetent photographer.

My dive buddy, Andrew, at the Tic-Tac-Toe table pondering his next move.

Signage.

I think that everyone and their cousin had a sign down there.

My experimenting with the flash. Probably the ONLY clear picture in this entire set.

Andrew standing next to a mast of one of the sunken boats. Of course, the mast just happened to have a giant Jolly Roger flag on it and a plastic skeleton (which can be seen here).

Random picture of me.

Scary-as-hell picture of me.

This shot reminds me of that movie, 'The Fog' (the original...not that horrible remake). It's Andrew sitting on top of a boat hull.

Anyone who's read 'World War Z' will appreciate this.

A random floating drum.

There were a lot of cool things down there that I didn't get shots of. I REALLY wish I could have gotten shots of everyone on the motorcycle!

But all was not fun and games (and let this be a huge lesson to me). I suffered a pretty bad case of dehydration during these dives. I saw the symptoms the day before and tried to be diligent about handling it (bananas, water, no caffeine/sugar, etc) but failed miserably. The splitting headache started right about the time I got back to the surface and lasted for a few hours. This was accompanied by the obligatorily horrible case of nausea. I mention these details for two reasons....1) because I'm a dumb*ss and 2) for other people to learn from my mistakes.