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

[popolarbear]

15 holes!!!!
that is unbelievable!

now I'm really curious. would you happen to have some average depths that most of those came out of. I'm also curious if this magical green lake has logs or something similar that so many anchors snag on?

also am i to understand that the magical technique was to do full 360 search, then the tender would bring in half of 25ft to do next search. I suppose if the vis is in the 10ft range 12ft would make for optimal search pattern.

also curious if y had hard bottom all the way from the shallow portion of the hole to deepest?

[popolarbear]

ohh,

might have to make a spiritual pilgrimage to this green lake. just to see it once. what makes it SO different to our city lakes that get much more traffic

[Shooter]

We used the anchor challenge for training purposes. When we get a call to recover something or someone from a body of water, we usually don't have precise Intel on the location. That means we need to cover a lot of ground, and make sure the object isn't in our search area before we move on. This is also why we chose to do almost all of our diving in Isanti County, to familiarize ourselves with the lakes in our county, when we get the call. My navigational skills continually need improvement. This type of search pattern proved very efficient and effective. I think the reason Green Lake had so many "mini archaeological sites"is the consistent poor visibility. In the summertime, the average is 1 to 2 feet. It is also a fairly large lake, with good fishing. Not many people want to dive it. There is another lake less than a mile away, spectacle Lake, which has 15 foot plus visibility in the summertime. Most of those "mini archaeological sites", have been plundered by divers with crowbars  :.
John, the author and architect of the [glow=red,2,300]master dive plan[/glow], perfected the art of overlaying a lake map, on a Google map with GPS coordinates. This would allow us to concentrate our search patterns on key highly fished areas. More fishermen equals more booty on the bottom.  ;D. we got really good at doing search patterns. When our lift bags got too heavy, we would swim back to the hole, drop off our treasure, swim a compass heading back, and resume the pattern. Just reminiscing about it puts me in a Zen-like state.  8) a very relaxing dive  8) 8). The patterns became a little more difficult with the varying depth and contours.

[popolarbear]

sounds very interesting. would love to see the masters at work. sounds like there may be a revival of the "cult of the crowbar". after all this is America and we pride ourselves in religious freedom.


might have to get a neckless with a crowbar . perhaps a crowbar shaped pipe, with an anchor like bowl that must be properly smoked before visiting such a holy ground as green

[Hydro]

getting gps coords on a map is actually pretty easy, look into google earth and you can measure out in feet right in the program with gps coords  ;D

Actually the problem I've run into is now there are so many sat scans I have to decide what one to use, winter, summer, old, new....

Yeah its interesting how some lakes see a ton of use and others are bone dry.

[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.

[Hydro]

hey be sure to fill us in on PR when you get back so I can check it out a week later!! 

[Terry]

[... none of this mamby pamby 15-20 minute stuff for us.



                               Hey John,,, you better head south,,,,do let me know when you've got better then 31 years in icing, hitting it hard one season is nothing but a (arc) flash in the pan, and in the 77 ice jumps I've done in these last three winter's, those in a heated shack I can count on one hand with cold fingers left over. Curious that the only ice dive I've EVER done in an area you guys had already "so throughly" swept, I brought up an anchor, one of you must of blinked, huh? In fact, I bet I've brought up more "mini archelogical sites" since Sept. then team Isanti has done dives since Sept. You do enjoy San Juan though, and remember the cold water will still be here waiting for you, when you get back. Do soak up that sun, surf, salt and some snuse/suds for me.       Trinity 

[DetectorGuy]

Just wanted to beat this dead horse one more time with that "mamby pamby" deal, and see if i can get you guys spooled up again  ;D. I need something to smile about when I'm so far from the ice. Some day when you get really, really old I'll show you my little book of secrets and you will see on page 48 that the place you found that lonely anchor was not where we had been.  ;D ;D ;D Maybe I'm getting old too... I can't remember what the ratio between the teams was that day... I remember getting a trolling motor, a Shimano Calcutta 300 reel on a Fig Rig rod, A generic aluminum Fortress type anchor, and a couple other anchors... just think how legendary I will be when I have been diving for 31+ years (of course I'll be about 74 years old then). Talk to you guys again on the 12th. 

[Shooter]

There is hope..........


MYTH: IS IT POSSIBLE TO TEACH AN OLD DOG NEW TRICKS?
.Finding: BUSTED

Explanation: In 1523, an English guy named Fitzherbert penned a treatise on animal husbandry in which he advised readers that "the dogge must lerne when he is a whelpe, or els it wyl not be; for it is harde to make an old dogge to stoupe."

Roughly translated from the vernacular, that's "you can't teach an old dog new tricks." It's a saying that's quite familiar today, even among non-pet owners. But is there any truth to it?

To take this timeworn adage for a walk around the block, MythBusters Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage found a pair of aging Alaskan malamutes who didn't know a single trick in the book. As 7-year-old canines, siblings Bobo and Cece were equivalent to a couple of 50-year-olds in dog years, arguably qualifying them for the "old dog" category.

After four days of training, Bobo and Cece proved Fitzherbert flat wrong. Each could heel, sit, lie down, stay and shake upon command from Jamie and Adam. And since malamutes are known to be stubborn, Bobo and Cece's stellar performances definitively busted the myth and represented for old dogs everywhere.

As seen in "MythBusters: Dog Myths."