Madeira dive conditions 8/26/12

[suddha]

I was thinking a local dive conditions subforum would be nice... water temps, viz, new hazards, etc. Just a suggestion.

In any case, my wife and I dove the Madeira this past Sunday. We were expecting warmer water temps but my computer saw 43 degrees at the bottom. Viz was good, not great - maybe 15 feet? Great dive as usual. I love getting up there once a year. This was my wife's first Great Lakes dive and she did it in a semi-dry. While she enjoyed it immensely, she's already talking about getting a drysuit.

Safe diving!

[jasondbaker]

That's a good suggestion. I'd love to see it go even further. Imagine a database where divers can input conditions at various lakes. The database application could be tied to current weather forecasts to give divers a good understanding of potential conditions before they head out to the dive site. We could even make the data available via a mobile app. If anyone is interested in working on this project let me know.

[ScubaDad]

I'm actually working on an online dive log site (browser plugin will allow direct upload of log data to site and then editing of conditions, etc)  from this data I was planning on pulling the last couple condition reports (from most recent logs at dive site) to produce reasonable and historic conditions.  I was also going to implement the ability to average these out on the dive site report as well. 

We are building the dive log site in such a way that would allow it to integrate into other existing sites (iframe,etc...) to allow all forums and/or dive shops to integrate it into their sites.

Also, this would be a FREE service considering we noticed there is no "central" online dive log site and most OEM dive log software just plain sucks.

If anyone has any requests for features please let me know as we are currently in the development phase.

J

[popolarbear]

I think you could get rough trends, but vis varries some years being good and others not. might be due to underground water table and surface run off paterns not anual cycles. on some lakes i suspect vis is affected by chemical pesticides in water table. those lower the daphinia concentrations and thus lower the lakes ability to remove green portion... square lake comes to mind. I know people will argue that vis on this lake droped due to introduction of trout. but i have trouble believing that soo many trout were introduced that this could have effect. instead i know some people involved in freshwater plankton, and they have seen masive swings in the populations. this was atributed to chemical spraying. and spraying some distance away. actualy for aphids in trees.regardless of how much you like clear water in some of these lakes, the spraying isnt going to stop. on tonka vis varies from bay to bay. and even from one side to the other of a bay. partialy due to wind currents. partialy due to boat trafic. water gets clear zones from the mussles and weeds. there are zones of clear water that are close to the mussles and weeds, but only with just the right direction and speed of wind curents. today we had about 8-10ft vis on lower good side of lake. and wind was strong...by the way muskies(and bass) are crawling in the shallows.....superior is same way. vis will go up and down with currents.