I couldn’t get this Metallica song out of my head for the entire evening before heading up to Morrison’s Quarry for my first ever ice dive. I was really excited leading up to the date, but suddenyl I felt extremely nervous and worried. What if I actually ended up under the ice and couldn’t surface?
To address this very real, and very scary reality, I decided to do some research. I came across other blog posts like one by Tom Ward, and another by Alexander Nilsson to fill in the gaps of my understanding. Reading through these gave me more information about what it’s like. The difficulties of cutting open the ice, staying warm, and staying safe.
However, I was still really nervous about the whole thing. So, I went back to the roots of my personal journey in meditation and used the tactic of visualization to process my feelings and concerns. What I found was that by picturing exactly how the dive would go gave me a sense of calm before bed that night. I was able to process the fears and “see” through my mind what it would be like to be under the ice, to reach relatively shallow depths without the freedom of surfacing wherever I would like. I knew that I would have a lanyard on, that I had two competent buddies, and that safety was collectively our biggest priority. After this relatively short but dedicated process of about 10 minutes with my eyes closed on the floor of my room, I crawled into bed happy, calm, and unencumbered of thoughts about the dive.
I was very zen the the next morning. The drive was a little different than usual, as snow was covering the ground and the car heater was going full blast for the first 10 minutes. I make it to the quarry a little late, and I’m surprised to see several scuba divers planning out their underwater voyage that day.
I link up with my two dive buddies and we prepare for the day. Mostly by standing around and looking at our “hole” in the ice. We did not bring the proper tools to get the big chunks out of the water, it turned out to be much more challenging than any of us imagined. We donned our wetsuits and got to wrok hauling the chunks out as best we could, swearing up a storm as our appendages became soaking wet with the water below. The hole was finally clear though, and it was time to jump in! And holy smokes it was cold!!
We had a great time in there, situated right next to the sunken airplane in Morrison’s Quarry. My buddies had some great dives, reaching close to 10m in depth. Unfortunately I was limited to around 6m as I was having some EQ issues in my frontal sinus, which would be a recurring issue in Mexico the following month. At the time I thought my mask was shrinking in size due to the cold and squeezing against one specific spot on my face, but as the issue resurfaced in Mexico I think it was caused by a snot blockage in my frontal sinus. Fantastic imagery there, right?
At the end we goofed around just unde the ice for some photos, but my GoPro 5 really can’t capture the beauty of it. Plus, the ice was covered in a layer of messy snow which significantly reduces the light that comes through, decreasing the charm of the photos on this day. Overall I’m extremely happy that I tried ice diving, it truly pushed my comfort zone and introduced more complexity, but also more reward, to a regular diving session. It was very uncomfortable with 6 degree water temp, but we survived and I’ll definitely do it again next year.
But maybe with a 7 mil!!
