I will try and get some photos up and video as soon as possible. I am sore at the moment after only three dives of a very short duration – 6 minutes each. We drove up to the dive site Lake San Isabel near Rye Colorado this morning and then cut a hole in the ice. Unfortunately one of the instructers fell on the ice dislocating his shoulder. It took 2 hours to make the hole and a total of 7 dives were completed. If you went deeper than 15 feet it was pitch black above that it was light. The tether line only allows you to move 130 feet maximum away from the hole. It is hard to deal with a first as you are tethered to your buddy. Communication is by a jerking on the line to the line tender on the surface. If for some reason you have a problem you surface to the ice and stay vertical. There is a rescue diver always at the ready at the surface with a 200 foot line. If there is an issue they go down and start circling the hole and their tether line will eventually catch on the missing diver.

It was best to stay in the light zone as the visibility was poor in the first place. A much more exhilerating experience was surfacing under the ice and then looking up through the ice and seeing all the variations and cracks in the ice and looking up through old ice fishing holes. The air you exhale forms a bubble moves randomly on the underside of the ice causing black shapes that move kind of like ink puddles. The first dive went well, the second we were tangled in the tether line and spent a lot of time trying to get out of the human knot, then my mask kept on flooding so I told my buddy I wouldn’t mind surfacing – I wasn’t comfortable. The third dive I went down with the rescue diver as the instructor and my buddy were done with the cold. It was a much easier dive as I was a little more comfortable with the situation and we had fun walking on the bottom of the ice.

Anyways off to soak in a bath and bed time.