June 6-7, 1987

June 6-7, 1987

Aimee seems like a willing travel partner, so I asked her to make it permanent. While Aimee and her mom worked on the wedding and reception, not surprisingly, I was in charge of the honeymoon. I picked two weeks in Hawaii, my dream vacation. I am hoping to do some Scuba diving while there, so I convinced Aimee to get certified too. She took the course and now needs to get her Open Water certification at Pearl Lake in South Beloit, WI. To keep Aimee company, I sign up for my Advanced Open Water Certification on the same weekend.

Aimee does her checkout dives (e.g. removing her mask) with a group atop the roof of the sunken bus. My advanced training is with only one other student. It starts with underwater navigation, and continues with a search and rescue dive to find a milk crate and lift it to the surface, a deep dive (75 ft), and finally a night dive to a sunken submarine. Despite being summer, the lake is ice-cold and we have to wear a full wet suit for every dive. In particular the deep dive is bitterly cold.

After the certification I did a couple fun dives investigating all the other sunken items in this training lake. The most interesting is a large twin-engine airplane that looks like a DC-3.