Tuesday, July 19, 2011

Frozen Flight Scuba Cache

Received notice on Facebook that a caching team from Memphis would be at Mermet Springs, IL to conduct their open-water check dives and invited to go after Frozen Flight Scuba Cache. I accepted the invitation and check my equipment. It had been a couple of years since my last dive and except for some cleaning, my equipment was good. I also planned to rent anything else I would need.

Upon arrival, I registered and went to the rental section. One of the staff saw my shirt with the geocaching logo and knew exactly what I would be seeking. I was fitted with a 7mm wetsuit and hood. Met up with bitbrain, Tiger130 and their family. Since Tiger130 was going through her check dives, the cache would have to wait. After the family went into the water for their instruction, bitbrain and myself prepared for the deep dive. Thankfully, bitbrain was more rehearsed in diving and aided my setup. After reviewing the map we hit the water and swam to the buoy for the 65 foot platform. However, I was not able to descend at all. The added layers of the wetsuit made more for buoyant. Bitbrain attempted to give me a 2-pound weight that I dropped. In disgust, we swam back to the dock where I got out of the water, took off the equipment and rented 10 pounds of weights. With the added weight we hit the water once again, swam to the buoy. I let the air out of my vest and sank like a rock.

We descended down to 65 feet, which later I would see my gauge was at 68 feet, this would set a new personal dive record for me. We swam around in the cold dark water and finally found sunken Cessna airplane and found the cache. We signed the log and then I noticed bitbrain was not wearing dive gloves. I knew how cold my hand were and I had gloves. I helped him close the cache and we gave ourselves a thumbs up and ascended back to the surface.

When I reached the service I noticed my air gauge, I was at about 1,200 pounds of air. I began with 3,000! We took a break while on the surface for 30 minutes and did a shallow dive of 20 feet to wrap of the dive.

This was an awesome experience and with this, I plan to dive at least once a year to keep my skills up to speed.

Thursday, July 7, 2011

Joining the Fizzy Club

Over the holiday weekend I hit a major milestone, I chose Well Rounded Cacher (Fizzy Challenge) to be my 3,000th find. Having the morning of the 4th free, I left home a little after 5 am to head to the cache location. Upon arriving, I recalled the area from a previous cache hunt, 2 years earlier after a kayak run of the Ghost River. Found the first stage easily and a few minutes later was signing a log for a cache I have wanted for over 3 years. I was delighted to sign this log and joining the Fizzy Club. Browsing the statistics of many cachers in the West Tennessee, Northern Mississippi, Western Arkansas and Southwest Kentucky, I have determined that about 1% or less of all active cachers have or will hit this mark.

After making the find, I headed to the landing area of the Ghost River, where I unloaded the kayak and found Up the Creek with Half a Paddle. This was a challenging cache since I had to paddle up river, something that I have not had much experience. After dodging some downed trees, I paddled within 40 feet of the cache, got out of the boat and made the find.