Last year about this time I took a class in high altitude SCUBA diving. When the class was offered again, both my brother Paul and I decided to drive up and take the opportunity to dive in the deep clear water of Lake Tahoe. We definitely wanted to do a “wall dive” off Rubicon Point, but were interested in seeing some other areas of the lake. At the kiosk by the ranger station we found a pamphlet about diving in Tahoe, and it described wreck diving in Emerald Bay. This is a small elliptical bay near where we were camping that had a little island in the middle of it with a little castle on top. I wanted to see the castle up close anyway, so we decided to dive there.
Emerald lake turns out to be difficult to get to by any means except by water. This is usually fine with me because I know so many places that are only accessible by boat. We looked on a map and estimated that a wreck marked by a buoy was only four kilometers from the beach at D. L. Bliss campground. I told Paul this would only take an hour to paddle and we started off. We had all our SCUBA gear on the backs of two Frenzy kayaks, plus water, sodas, and lunch for after the dive. I was in seventh heaven. Kayaking past a beautiful shoreline and the opportunity to dive in clear fresh water to boot. I might have been extending my brother a little making him paddle this far in a kayak.
When we turned into Emerald Bay we saw a continuous progression of motor boats touring the lake around the island. It seemed a popular spot for people to view from their boats on the way by. As I predicted, it took us around an hour to get to the dive site. Some friends of Paul’s were camping near us and they had zoomed out here in a Zodiac. As we approached the buoy marking the wreck we saw them start their dive. We watched their bubbles go back and forth as we put on our equipment and got ready to dive. They came up just as we were ready to descend and reported briefly that it was an interesting place.
As I learned last year (and Paul several years before) there are several problems with diving at altitude. One is that the standard depth gauges you can buy for SCUBA are calibrated for sea level and always read off at altitude. Another is that high altitude diving is usually in fresh water, and the gauges slowly get farther and farther off with depth because they are designed for heavier salt water. I discovered that the programs I had stuffed into my pocket calculator last year were still there, and used them to write dive tables down on my slate. Paul did the same thing for his dive computer, which was supposed to automatically compensate for altitude and fresh water. He reasonably chose not to trust the computer and compared its remaining dive times with the tables he worked out. (The computer turned out to be correct according to his calculations).
I was glad I had written out the table for a bunch of different depths, because the conditions were not quite what we expected. The brochure indicated that there were two barges sunk in 35 feet of water here, but when we followed the anchor line down we found ourselves in 63 feet of water according to Paul’s dive computer. My depth gauge read 55 feet, and the calculations for altitude and fresh water indicated we should treat this as a 78 foot dive. Paul had lost a lot of air to a leaky regulator and we didn’t have enough air to stay beyond our no-decompression time anyway.
The bottom had been stirred up by the recent passage of our friends, and we could not see a wreck anywhere when we looked around. We had felt a current moving south on the surface, so we struck out in the opposite direction first. We saw a few timbers lying around on the bottom, perhaps that was the remains of the wrecked barges? We turned back after a short while and finally saw something above us in shallower water. It turned out that the wrecks were in 35 feet of water, but the buoy was a little farther from shore than the wrecks. These were large flat wooden barges with gracefully curved ends. When we made it back along the first barge and swam over to the second one I saw the anchor line for the buoy through the murky water. If we had been more observant, we should have seen the barges on our way down!
The second barge was in better condition than the first. We could stick our heads into the flotation compartments through missing boards in the. Both Paul and I considered swimming into a few of these that had several exits, but both of us decided not to. The brochure had also mentioned that the area west of this barge was a former dumping ground for an old lake resort and we would find junk on the bottom. (Although all the features of the bay, including the old trash, were protected and we could not remove any of it). We saw evidence of this in the mud, including half of a teacup and half of a saucer to go with it. About this time, Paul indicated it was time to turn back. We paddled along the edge of the barge and then I lead the way across to the buoy line that I had spied out earlier. It is always easier to ascend up a line, and a precautionary decompression stop is infinitely easier when you have a line to hang on to. Because of the complications in calculating dive times at altitude, a safety stop at ten feet is highly recommended, and we stopped there for five minutes.
I am looking for containers to put electronic equipment in under water. There is a company that makes small waterproof boxes in a variety of colors, including clear plastic that you could read a display through. I have been suspicious of these and afraid to waste the money to buy one and try it out at depth. But recently I found some on sale at a department store for 99 cents and bought one to try out the experiment. For 99 cents they didn’t have one of the clear plastic ones but I figured if this one worked, I’d be willing the pay full price (around ten dollars) for a clear one and repeat the experiment. I had sealed the box dry and empty and strapped it into my BC (buoyancy compensator) and then forgotten all about it. Hours later I remembered to look, but the results of the experiment were still valid: When I opened the box up, it was one third full of water after a dive that was equivalent to a 78 foot dive in sea water. (If you measure by volume change). So the cheap plastic box failed the test.
Paul and I loaded up all our equipment, which is difficult to do in the middle of the water. I suppose it is even more difficult on the ocean with swells so I suppose we had it easy this time. Then we paddled over to the island to have lunch in the castle. Actually, the stone structure on top of the island is not a castle, it is just a 10 foot square open roofed room. It is called the “Tea Room” because it was originally built for sitting in and having tea. Paul observed that this was particularly appropriate for us after having found some old tea settings on the bottom of the bay. We sat just outside the tea room on the rocks to improve the breadth of our view and watched the progression of motor boats go around the bay while we ate lunch.
The trip back took a lot longer than the trip out. If it hadn’t taken us only an hour to get there I would have said that the map was wrong about the distance. There was a mild headwind which normally I wouldn’t have paid any attention to, could it have been responsible for our return trip taking 2.5 hours of paddling? Perhaps there was also a surface current that we were unaware of.
On the way out we had passed a rope swing on the side of the lake. It was in an awkward position over a big rock and too far from the water. I wondered how well it really worked. On the return trip we saw a bunch of boats clustered there and kids hanging around the shore. We watched one kid swing out, let go, and make it into the water. I wanted to see this action closer so I paid special attention to the next swinger as we paddled by. This guy climbed way back up the steep bank, started swinging down, then lost his grip. He slid down the bank and slammed into the back of the rock under the swing, hitting it on his side but somehow coming to a stop on his back with his head snapping back violently. He hit so hard that water showered off of him at the impact. We watched him sit up and move around a little, then lie down on the rock. Paul saw bruises start to develop on his side an predicted broken ribs. From the way he twisted onto his back, I predict back problems. Not to mention neck problems from the whiplash when his head snapped back. He had his friends and a motor boat to take him to wherever he needed to go next, so we just kept on paddling past.
We tried to stop at Rubicon Point for a rest where we parked kayaks and dove last year. There is a shallow shelf of rock here that should have been a good place to pull the boats out and rest. But the fully loaded kayaks were more difficult to move, and the surf was up. Motor boats were buzzing around the area like flies and churning up continuous choppy water. This made pulling the kayaks out of the water too much trouble, so we tried holding onto them and standing on the rock. That in turn was so much work in the motor-boat-driven-surf that we gave up trying to “rest” and got back in the kayaks. Mine fell over in the fray and the weight belt slipped off to the end of the bow line it was attached to. When I pulled it back in it fell heavily on the patch over my hatch cover. I put a hatch in front of the seat on this Frenzy and then discovered that they break every time I jump into the boat in rough water on the ocean. After replacing the hatch several times I gave up and just covered it with ductape. I keep meaning to get a piece of plastic and permanently patch the hole I wish I had never made in my boat. When I dropped the weight belt on this patch, the hatch under it broke farther and the ductape started leaking in a big way. With the weight belt, tank and the rest of my gear on the boat the puddle I was sitting in was already lapping over the patch. As I paddled the rest of the way back to the beach I watched this water between my legs get deeper and deeper. But I made it OK and lived to dump liters and liters of water out of the boat when we landed.
The next morning, after putting a fresh ductape patch on my kayak, we started out early enough to get to Rubicon Point early with everyone else. Paul and I were on kayaks again, but it was only a few hundred meters from the beach. Because we were not taking the class we were able to get ready and get in the water first and try out the water in the morning before any other divers had stirred up the bottom. The visibility was not as good as I remember from last year. The clarity of Lake Tahoe’s water is supposed to be declining but is it really getting turbid fast enough for me to tell from one year to the next? I’d say that I have seen enough of Lake Tahoe for a while, except the US Geological Survey is going to map the bottom of the lake soon. Apparently this has never been done before and nobody is really sure how deep this lake really is. When that data becomes available I’d like to check it out and see if there are other places with topology like Rubicon Point. Perhaps we can find an area with interesting geology that we will want to go check out with SCUBA gear.
When we got back to the point, the class was still out in the water somewhere. Jon Valez, the instructor, had anchored a float in 15 feet of water and had left a small tank with regulator at the bottom of the anchor line. Paul and I went snorkeling for a few minutes, and I could not resist swimming down and stealing a few breaths of air from this tank. This is not a safe thing to do without proper training (which I supposedly have) because you can overpressure your lungs ascending after breathing compressed air at depth. I was paranoid about this so I completely emptied my lungs before ascending and then kept trying to blow bubbles on the way up. As a result I was safe from lung embolisms, but totally out of breath when I made it to the surface!
Paul and I had another full take of air each, and decided to use them up doing a shallow dive along the top of the wall at Rubicon Point that everyone dives over the edge of. There is a submerged telecom cable running around the lake at around thirty feet deep and we decided to follow this for a while. The cable runs up and down and sometimes rises to within 3 meters of the surface. Controlling my buoyancy close to the surface like that is difficult so I lead us around rocks rather than follow the cable up and down. The cable when over one rock that had a cave underneath. It was a tight fit, but I decided to go through this one. When I turned around and watched Paul starting through, I saw him having trouble. His tank was loose on his BC and was running down the left side of his back. This didn’t cause him any problems in the water, but the cave was a crack leaning to the right. The combination of his shoulders and the tank on the left did not fit into the crack leaning right, so Paul quickly gave up and signaled that he would go around and meet me on the other side.
We soon used up half of our maximum dive time and had to turn back. When we paused in the shallow water for our safety stop, Paul pulled out his Xmas present. Last Christmas I bought him a dive gadget that he had been lusting after: A Spare Air. This is a small tank with a regulator and mouthpiece integrated into it. If your regulator, spare regulator, first stage regulator or tank somehow fail, you can pull this completely separate tank out and breathe from it for a while. Paul let me try it out for a few breaths and it was a little harder to pull air out of it than our normal regulators. Then he did the entire 5 minute safety stop using the air from this small tank. At a depth of only 10 feet it was impressive to see the little tank last that long!