TRINITY'S 1st Annual 2010/2011 Icing/ Anchoring Challenge

[DetectorGuy]

Yep 15 holes. We tried to put the hole in about 14' deep on a drop off. The top of the drop off would ideally be 10' at the top and 22' at the bottom. Not all ledges are the same, so with a 150' primary rope, we would sometimes get to 4' deep at the top end and like 30' at the deeper side. There isn't much for logs, big rocks, or snags in Green Lake... must be just rotten rope, poor knots, or sheer number of fishermen increasing the odds of a lost anchor. The 360 degree search would start at the 25' marker. The rope length would be the hypotenuse, your depth would be the rise, and the horizontal distance from the hole would be the run. After the diver would make a full circle based on the rope direction hitting a theoretical index mark on the triangle shaped hole, the tender would give two tugs and let out two arm lengths (plus a little) to make a 12.5' larger radius. Next full circle the tender would tug twice again, and let out line to the 50' marker. This would go on until the diver found an anchor. If the diver see's something outside his reach of the radius, the diver would tug twice and let the tender know that he needs more slack to check out something. If the item of interest was nothing, the diver would give two tugs again and the tender would pull in the required amount of line to put the diver on the exact radius he was on. If the diver found something and wanted to swim it back to the hole, the tender would constantly be monitoring the amount of line played out and the direction so that after bringing the item to the hole, the diver could return to the exact spot he left off and keep searching. The amount of interval can be adjusted to what ever... depending on the visibility or depending on the size of the object you are looking for. If you are looking for something small like a ring, you probably want to use a smaller radius than if you were looking for something like a boat. In a perfect world if the viz was 10', you would be able to see 10' left and right. With out any overlap (and being able to look left, then right, then swim two fin strokes, and look left, right, swim ETC...) a 20' interval would work fine. You know that it is not a perfect world, so your radius should be less than double the viz. This eliminates missing something on the right at the edge of your viz when you are looking left. The bottom we would try to cut our hole over would be sand or rocky if possible. Of course anchors don't always get lost in these pristine conditions, but that is where they are easiest to find. Sometimes the bottom would vary on a large radius from thick weeds at the shallow end through the gravel/sand going down the slope to muddy silt at the flatter bottom. Some of the silt can be 3-4' thick and all you can really hope for is to see a rope floating out of it. If it were a search for something more important like a body, then a guy would need to get in there and "rope and grope"... viz goes to zero... and the dive shop later complains that they found chunks of wood in your regulator when they service it (been there, done that). The weeds at the shallow end of a radius can be a real pain to drag a rope perpendicular through but the good thing is the depth is usually shallow there so you can take your hand (that is holding the loop on the rope) and stick it way up against the ice sheet and miss most of the weeds.

Love talking about this, but I need to pack my stuff. I'm going to Puerto Rico tomorrow.