9/11/2010 Saturday Dive

[Robert Berry]

This is the last weekend to dive before the Fish Ladder is open. After the ladder opens, the number of Salmon in the river dwindles considerably. Hope a few divers can make it. Plan is to be there 9:30 to 10 am and in the water before 11 am; then, out around noon, and per Andrew, lunch at the Boss Burger. I will just be doing one dive; but, I'm sure others will be doing two.

For everyone's info: The salmon stop running in November; but, there will be a few steelhead in the river up until Feburary.

[Robert Berry]

Here is a map:

www.mapquest.com/maps?address=Old+Ferry+Rd.&city=Oroville&state=CA

Here is the address:

Feather River Nature Center
Old Ferry Rd. & Montgomery St.
Oroville, CA 95965

[Robert Berry]

I'll post some pictures as soon as I get them loaded. They didn't turn out as good as I hoped for (someone opened camera w/o rewinding film). Still not bad. I also need kodak film instead of 99 cent only store film. No one around here sells it any more.

[Robert Berry]

Examples of why one should buy good film and not open a camera before rewinding the film! Some of the pictures still turned out.


Andrew checking out holes in a rock with crawdads living in them.




Salmon and other fish.












Crawdads

[duckbill]

Good pictures, Robert. Thanks for posting them. I think it's great that your son can now enjoy diving with you like that. I hope my sons will have a desire to dive when they get older too. Andrew needs to get his fishing license; Then he can catch and eat those mudbugs.

That first dive of the day was awesome! You already know "fishnbeer" from the Vintage Scuba Supply forum was my dive buddy, and that he brought along his video camera, but I'll tell the story for the others to follow. Fishnbeer has a lot of footage to edit. I can't wait to see how it looks on video. We were mostly on the east side of the river where the salmon usually swarm around. They didn't disappoint. Many of them came in pretty close. Fishnbeer got some footage where the salmon were silhouetted against the sun, and some where the sunlight was reflecting off of the salmon as they swam around us. His video footage should be the next best thing to being there.

Our second dive, however, was my best salmon dive, EVER!
First we were on the east side again watching the swarming salmon circling by us for a while, then we went to the base of the dam and swam up to the surface behind the waterfall. The roar is deafening! We submerged to a shelf at about 20 feet and watched the billowing globes of bubbles from the waterfall looming right above our heads. After that, we headed along the bottom to the west side of the dam and came across the most spectacular salmon sight I've seen of all the times I've made the dive. A huge, dark mass of hundreds, if not thousands, of salmon were right above us. They were not circling around like I have always seen them. They were all mostly just hovering there, facing away from the waterfall. The whole mass of them would slowly move from one area to another and back. Most of the time there was more of the darkness of salmon silhouettes than there were patches of light shining through them from above. They formed one big ceiling above us. We were at 30 feet and it was pretty dark at times. I started to feel undertrained for the dive as I've never had any formal training for diving in an overhead environment They were thick! Some of them were even down the full 30 feet where we were hanging out. After about 15 minutes or so of just sitting there taking in the spectacle of it all I started to get pretty cold. So, to conclude the dive we slowly swam up and through the mass of them.

Fishnbeer didn't have the camera on the second dive as the first dive used up the batteries. One thing I've found when video taping (on land) is that I missed actually seeing events due to having to concentrate on composing them in the viewfinder. So, that second dive is now recorded in our minds, as we got to fully take it all in. The fellowship before, during, and after was great. I'd say we have a pretty good group of divers forming. We should do it again soon.