Deep Blue Lake

Scuba diving is an integral part of the research I'll be conducting on Catalina. Somehow I managed to make it since last fall without diving, which is a crying shame. Tyler and I are both headed out to do research dives in the next week, so we decided to spend some time up at Lake Tahoe doing training dives.

From the north end of Lake Tahoe. Looks warm, right?

Diving at Lake Tahoe is not at all straightforward. It is a freshwater lake, and I am accustomed to diving in saltwater, where I have a different buoyancy. Tahoe is at 6200 ft. elevation, which means that all of our tables and calculations of pressure and accumulated nitrogen, calibrated for sea level, need to be adjusted. Most importantly, the lake is cold--and I mean COLD. Tyler dives in a drysuit, so he can adjust his thermal undergarment to suit the conditions, and he is a big tall guy with good circulation and pink cheeks. I, on the other hand, am short, with a high surface-area-to-volume ratio and perennially cold hands and feet. I've lived in hot deserts for enough years that it takes a 90ºF day to get me out of pants and into shorts. I used to dive in Puget Sound with chemical handwarmers stuffed into my gloves. In short: I get cold.

I also dive in a wetsuit, which is clearly a mistake in very cold conditions that I seem to cheerfully repeat. A wetsuit is a permeable neoprene garment that fits the wearer very tightly, and the idea is that a very thin layer of water is trapped next to the skin, warmed by body heat, and keeps the wearer very warm. This generally works great if the water is not 39ºF (4ºC, the densest that water can get). I used to dive in a crappy wetsuit with great big pockets of air which, when underwater, filled with, um, very cold water. I usually had at least a quart of icy water in each armpit, and another sloosh down my back. Now I have an awesome wetsuit, well-fitting and 7mm of neoprene and lined with Merino wool (seriously--they have a big sheep on the label). I was eager to try it out in Tahoe.

Tyler and I drove up Thursday night. There aren't any dive shops near the lake itself, so we stopped and rented tanks in Sacramento. We had to rent enough tanks for all of the dives that we hoped to do--and I was feeling ambitious. We decided to sleep in the back of the truck Thursday night. This meant that the tanks had to go somewhere else.

That's a lot of tanks.

On Friday, our first dive of the day was at a beach in a state park on the California side. I had some new pieces of gear, and wanted to try everything out. I decided to go in just a Speedo, awesome wetsuit, 3 mm gloves, and the rest of my gear. We got below the thermocline and holy crap, it was really cold. I'm pretty sure I have major tissue damage to my feet from some previous experience in a Midwestern winter, because my feet get numb and turn a strange color and stay that way, even after surfacing and getting out of the water for 20 to 30 minutes. To top it off, we surfaced right in the middle of a boat channel, with some peevish boaters peering down at our dive flag float and asking us to move. 

It takes a while to get all of our gear ready.

Bears in the bathrooms! Not an enticing feature for a dive site.

Tyler and I were both underwhelmed by the first site, so we decided to try out Cave Rock, on the Nevada side. This site was gorgeous and shallow, and we stayed warm. It also helped that I wore an extra layer of spandex shorts and rash guard under my wetsuit, and switched to 5 mm gloves.

View from the Cave Rock dive site.

We did a surface swim from the beach (far left, not pictured) to the mooring buoy of the nearer boat, and dropped down to about 20 feet. The topography underwater mimicked the surface topography perfectly, with granite boulders and big expanses of exposed granite, complete with potholes left over from some previous exposure at a lower lake level. For those who ask about "underwater geology", I think I finally found some worth looking at. I also had a few small battles with crawdads who challenged our presence. The beach where we entered was tiny, and completely mobbed by little children and families, and so, clad in all of our cold-water scuba gear, we had to pick our way through umbrellas and spread towels to charge into the water. The beach sand was so micaceous (=full of mica) that every step kicked up big glittering flakes that flashed like gold. It was like wading into a lake of Goldschläger, in some obscure German fairly tale involving gnomes, adapted for the clear air and snow-capped peaks of the Sierra Nevada. Tyler and I did 2 dives at Cave Rock, and decided to spring for a motel room in South Lake Tahoe--the California side, past all of the casinos on the Nevada State Line.

Some people check into a motel and get excited about hanging up their suits.
We did, too.

Saturday we did the big dive: Rubicon Point, on the west side, a huge wall dive that is rumored to go down to a depth of almost 800 feet. I'm pretty sure that the western edge of the Tahoe basin is bounded by a fault at least sub-parallel to the Sierran bounding fault, because that thing just totally drops away. We arrived early, before 9 am, and scouted out the site. It involved a steep descent to the beach on some long stairs, and a surface swim that turned out to take 20 minutes.

Rubicon Point beach entry, from the parking lot above

It's difficult to describe the feeling of diving next to a giant wall. You are weightless. Although "up" is the place that your bubbles go, and often the place where sunlight comes from, there is no real sense of "up", and that can be very disorienting. Many divers lose their sense of perspective, and descend farther than they intend. Our maximum depth was almost 70 feet, an equivalent depth of 90 feet at sea level, still intensely bright and blue but deep enough to feel isolating. Instead of locking into "up and down", like we usually do with gravity, you are completely focused on two different planes. One is a wall of rock that extends as a plane in every direction, studded with boulders and dikes and other genuinely interesting features. The other side is just plain blue, open forever in any direction you choose to look. There is a certain majesty to diving a wall that could belong to another planet. We dove with reverence, and worked our way slowly back along the wall and upward, savoring the feeling of being trapped between the wall and the blue. Finally, we crossed the thermocline, tore ourselves away from the blue openness, and slowly surfaced.

Of course I froze my butt off. I wore extra layers and sat in the sun beforehand and still froze. When we started our arduous surface swim out and around the corner, the beach had already been crowded with tourists, families. Now the entire cove was packed with boats. Swimmers thrashed between power boats and shore, and kayakers glided, swanlike (or maybe goose-like), across our path. It was nearly noon. A loud inboard filled with overweight young people and Lite Beer was blaring Sublime out of the speakers. We started the surface swim back, fearful of jet skis, me still towing our dive flag float and wishing for feeling to return to the soles of my feet.