hi, i found a website showing clarity of minnesota lakes so i started searching local lakes. i found square lake and a few other ones that have been mentioned a lot but lake elmo seems to have good visibility and nobody talks about it at all here. is there something else wrong with it? anyone dive there?
I've gotten mixed advice. Mostly it's not real friendly to divers. Limited access and boats. Plus the vis has gotten bad with all the chemical lawns.
The data is 14 years old. I wonder why?
If you want to dive it pick a day and we'll go look for our selves.
We dove it last year in late May. One of our divemasters knows someone on the lake so we dove off his property. You are not allowed to dive from the county park unless you have a boat that you are putting in and diving from that. I had asked them about diving there several different times and that's the response I got. We had 10 to 12 feet of viz so it wasn't to bad. Not a lot to look at where we were but there are some fish in the lake. There was not a lot of structure in the area that we were diving. It does get deep if you have a boat. If I remember right it gets down to like 120 feet.
thanks guys. yeah i guess i didn't notice the data was so old. the data is a lot newer for other lakes like square. i guess i'm just looking for some options for the summer. the plan is to hit up the madeira and the hesper, square lake, calhoun, wazee, little long, christmas and then depending on how adventurous i'm feeling maybe i'll hit up crosby mines and some other northern dives. i just figured i'd look into other local lakes that i could go to for a quick weekday dive.
Picking up an old topic:
I've been able to dive Elmo 2 times this summer, 2 dives each. I think it's a good lake but you do need a boat or permission to trespass I guess.
Boat traffic is a little heavy but they go down the middle and with a steep shore profile you're real close to shore but still in 20+ feet. Vis right now is about 10, deeper it gets a lot better, Maybe 15-18 with lights. It's not too dark at 100. Soft but some odd bottom features like steps in the clay. Lots of old steel beer cans with good paint still on them.
The north end is mostly hard on the east side, north of the boat ramp (on the opposite site). South of the ramp has hard spots going to soft to very soft (bottomless)
I have not dove the west side.
I pulled one nice 8lb mushroom anchor, "Hooker USA". Yes, It's for sale
It bottoms out at 127'. Nothing down there.
You know it. We turned at 112' and it was heavy silt/clay. The bank between 45 and 15 is hard with exposed rocks and some sand. Much of it has less than 2 inches of silt but it's spotty. Swim 50 feet and it could change but the North East was almost all hard.