Our Owatonna Dive Club Annual New Years Ice Dive

[Adam6521]

‘Go jump in a lake’ — a new year’s tradition in Owatonna
By: Clare Kennedy

Posted: Friday, January 1, 2010 10:56 pm

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By CLARE KENNEDY

ckennedy@owatonna.com





OWATONNA — It started with a dare at a New Year’s Eve Party at the dawn of 1963.

“We were a bunch of teenagers and somebody says, ‘Why don’t you go jump in a lake?’” recalled Don Matejcek. “So the next day we said, ‘OK, we’ll go try out Lake Kohlmeier.’”

That day they hauled a hay wagon loaded with a fish house over the ice and snow, cut a hole and took the icy plunge for the first time.

The rewards for their bravado were small.

“I think, if anything, they bought us supper that night,” Don said.

What began as a folly of youth has turned into a tradition. Forty-seven years later, Matejcek and his fellow divers are still sounding the frigid depths each New Year’s Day. Nowadays his son Troy is in on it too.

This year, conditions were merely average, Troy Matejcek said. The mercury was hovering around zero degrees and the ice was about a foot and half thick. Friday morning, they chainsawed a triangle into the lake’s surface and took turns swimming through the murky gloom beneath the ice pack.

Once under the ice, the divers search the bottom for interesting objects. The day’s take was nothing spectacular, Troy said — a bullhead and an old diving mask. But over the years, they have found an endless array of goods beneath the surface — bicycles, picnic tables, innumerable golf balls and even a diamond ring here or there.

“We used to dive underneath Morehouse dam before it was redone, and we found wedding rings all the time,” Troy said. “You can find all kinds of junk down there.”





But it’s not the promise of treasure that keeps them going. It’s the challenge. Diving in such biting cold is not just a test of will, it’s a logistical trial as well. It’s very hard to keep the equipment from freezing up.

Friday’s dive was Waseca resident John Underwood’s first time. Underwood has only been diving for a short while — he got certified in July after he took a class at the Waseca water park. He soon moved on to bigger and better things — during summer and fall he explored shipwrecks in Lake Michigan and Lake Superior, but the New Year’s dive was something else.

“Made it,” Underwood announced to the other divers, his wet suit still steaming in the polar air.

There were a few tense moments when his line snagged on the ice and his breathing apparatus needed thawing after a dip, but all in all, it was a successful dive. Underwood tried to explain the strange appeal.

“I wanted to go on an adventure, and here I am. It’s actually not too bad,” Underwood said. “Once you get below the surface, you can see the ice shelf above you. Then five feet down you can’t see anything. You can’t tell which way is up or down.”

Eventually, you start to adjust to the gloom and the dark shapes of underwater weeds pop up as you swim along the bottom, he said.

“It’s different than diving in Cozumel, that’s for sure,” Troy said. “Sometimes it can feel claustrophobic under the ice, knowing that you can’t readily break the surface.”

Nevertheless, Underwood is a new convert. “I absolutely love it. It’s a lot of fun,” he said.

[doug67]

Nice story.