Nova Tech: Northern Virginia's Technical Diving Community

Dive Reports > 2/16 & 17/2002. Mt Storm, WV. Dave Dalton

Photos are in the photo gallery

Both Saturday & Sunday (2/16 & 2/17) of this past weekend found members of NOVA TECH doing practice dives at my favorite local winter dive site, Mt. Storm Lake (AKA: VEPCO Lake) in Mt Storm, WV. The lake has many features that makes it attractive for practice dives, not the least of which is the temperature of the water. Constructed as a cooling pond for a coal fired power plant the lake rarely gets below 50 degrees in the dead of winter and often is in the 60's. It also has depths to 130 ffw and platforms at 23 ffw, 50 ffw & 90 ffw.

Water temperature was 60 degrees both days up several degrees from last weekend. The elevated temperature allows for much longer dives and much more practice time than one would normally endure in a 35-45 degree quarry in mid February! Both days saw the teams run times in the 70-80 minute range.

Todd, Allyson & Allysa Clagett and Dave Dalton braved the cold winds to dive the lake on Saturday. While stiff winds lowered the effective air temps into the teens, the water temp couldn't be beat! Todd spent his time working on the weighting of his new Gavin
scooter. They come slightly buoyant and require the owner to trim them out to get them just right. Todd had added weight to the scooter but found that although the overall buoyancy seemed right he needed to shift the weight to the rear. Dave and Allyson
worked on general dive skills including reel work, lift bags and s-drills. Allysa worked on rock skipping! As stated water temp was a pleasant 60 degrees and viz varied from a low of about 10' to a high of about 30'.

On Sunday Todd, Allyson, Allysa & Dave were back, this time joined by Johnny Morris, another of the NOVA TECH crowd. While the water temp was still a pleasant 60 degrees, we found icy roads for the last 5 miles and lots of snow (ow you know where the name came from). So much snow in fact (6" in the parking lot) that Dave opted to ferry gear for the Clagetts in his 4 X 4 so
that Todd's 2 X 4, F-150 didn't get stuck. The wind was howling, fog blew in along with snow, but the diving was great. Todd found that 3rd time was charm with the scooter weighting and it couldn't have been better. He spent time towing others and couldn't have
been more happy with his acquisition. Johnny worked on some changes to his gear configuration, jury is still out on some of that.

Next weekend some of the NOVA TECH crowd will be headed to Lake Rawlings to join up with the VB-TECH crowd for more practice. Come on out and join us!

Dave Dalton

Dive Reports > 2/18/2002. Mt Storm, WV. John Morris

All:

Yesterday Dana and I went back to Mt Storm; most of the snow was gone and the wind had died down. Fairly calm weather. We did a 105 minute run time, 115 ffw max depth. While the dive was good overall, I spent a lot of time jackin' with the lift bag/reel config. I tried it on my right waist strap, d-ring behind can lite. Seemed okay on the surface but once in the water there were several obvious issues:

1. Probably most important: in this config it hangs on the right side and obstructs rapid deployment of the long hose. You must get the hanging reel and bag out of the way to deploy full 7'; in a series of tests we did, 4 to 5 feet would flake out and then you had to reach down and jack with the reel and bag. Not good in an emergency; Dana and I discussed and felt this jeapordized long hose deployment in an emergency.

2. Reel would tangle in can lite power cord

3. Since the lite was moved forward to accomodate the d-ring, the next issue was with the back up lite. It would hit the switch on the top on the can and shut it off

4. Tried the rear scoot ring again but still no good.

Conclusion: Stowing bag/reel on right side waist d-ring was unacceptable for us, primarily due to #1 above. Still working on it. We'll try something else this Sat at Rawlings. I think I'm going to experiment more with the Dalton "stap it across the top of your ass/bottom of backplate" method for the bag. Reel? I'm thinking about it.

Johnny Mo'