I recently took a SCUBA class (from Jon at Underwater Adventures and did my checkout dives in local waters. When the visibility is ten feet in these waters, that's pretty good. Since then I have seen better visibility in Kauai, but I signed up for a class in High Altitude Diving because it was given in Lake Tahoe where the visibility can be 60 feet! My brother Paul also needed to do a high altitude dive as part of his SCUBA Master Diver checkout so we arranged to camp out together at Lake Tahoe.
The class involved two dives at Sand Harbor, a night dive at Meeks Bay, and two "wall dives" at Rubicon Point. This point was a kilometer or less from the beach at our campsite, so Jon suggested that we bring a couple kayaks. On Sunday morning Paul, Jon, and I loaded our gear onto kayaks and headed for the point. The rest of the class (about 5 more people) came out in a Zodiac that someone had brought instead of a kayak. The water temperature was about the same temperature as the ocean back at home, but when you got out at the end of the day, we didn't have to wash the salt water out of all our equipment! (Tahoe is a fresh water lake).
The two wall dives at Rubicon Point were spectacular (although we didn't quite have 60 foot visibility). The bottom of the lake drops almost vertically 1400 feet here and we swam out off the edge of an underwater cliff with the abyss dropping down under us. The edge was rugged with several "peaks" we could swim between at our maximum depth. On several of these peaks we stopped to look off the edge. With the good visibility and the interesting terrain this was the closest I have come so far to the feeling of flying while diving. I discovered that I had to work at enjoying this feeling. There is a lot to worry about when you are a beginning diver like me: I had to check my buoyancy a lot, check the time, check the depth gauge, check the remaining air pressure, look around for my buddy (Paul). The narrow visibility of the mask makes it difficult to take in the enormity of the view around us. I think a good imagination helps piece all the details together and the fun of flying underwater takes place as much inside your head as it does in the water.
If I wanted to spend a lot of money on this sport, I think the first thing I should get is a mask with a better field of view. But I would also like one with a heads-up display that shows all my readings without having to grope for a hose and glance down at a meter. If they make masks with displays in them like this, I'll bet they are very expensive.