Diving for Moorings

My grandparents have kept a few mooring on the lake they live next to for many years, and it is always an adventure getting them ready for the summer. Two years ago I had to dive and snake cable through 20 cinder blocks for the pontoon boat, and this year it was locating sunken mushroom anchors. Apparently they had sunk the moorings for the winter, but ice still developed too much and ripped the chains off, leaving the anchors sticking up some where on the bottom. I thought that they might have fallen over, but the mud ends up covering it rather well and securing it to the bottom.

As you can see from the picture my uncle and I went off from the beach and swam towards where they should be. The problem was we did not know exactly where they where, and swam around the area for about ten minutes till we found the first one, it was sticking up with a rope still floating off it. Still it was about 10 or so feet down and took a bit of looking to locate it. The second anchor was far worse, we had hopped that it was in a straight line, but some how ended up twenty feet off in the deeper water. I must say we where lucky to even find it, because we had to dive down about five feet just to see it, and took another ten or so minutes to actually find. Then even getting down to it took a full breath. I am used to diving five or eight feet but I usually avoid past ten because the pressure really starts to hurt my ears. Fifteen feet was really pushing it and that was just to get to the eye of the anchor! Still after several dives down we got it secured and ready to be pulled up later in the week.

It is funny, because I always end up doing something with the mornings every time I am down for the summer, yet my discomfort with diving in areas I can not see the bottom never goes away, what is worse is that at those depths even on a sunny day the water is too murky to see the bottom clearly. So I always have this vision of going down and meeting up with the huge snapper that lives in the lake (I have seen it it, is huge!), On the swim back near the shore we actually did end up swimming by a big snapper, so I guess my fears are not completely unfounded.

UPDATE: Upon pulling them from the bottom, they ended up not even the ones we where looking for. Oh well still cleaned up the lake!