Having SCUBA gear would have been great!!!!! I would dive the club lake, and did a lot of stripper cut and mine shaft diving. I used to be able to go deep free diving with only goggles and chem sticks.
I hold few if any doubts that has a great deal to do with my inability to dive deeper than 8 to 10 feet nowadays. My ears begin to feel like an ice pick is being shoved into them. It is not much fun to dive under those circumstances. I found out the hard way the last time I went deep and when I surfaced my ears were bleeding.
I used to love going deep, but all I have now are the memories of what it was like. To go really deep and stay deep, an old trick was to take a hundred foot hose along. Stake one end high and dry and take the other end in your mouth and down you go. You can inhale through the hose and exhale out your nose. The hose is too long to inhale and exhale through it. If you ever got disoriented under water, which is easy to do with only a glow stick, just watch which direction your bubbles go. Then you know which direction is up.
Golf club lakes and such were not bad at all. Stripper cuts were medium risk, but shaft diving was/is dangerous.
There is usually nothing in club water except for some limbs now and then if close by trees. They are usually clear water with sediment and with a green glow stick, the balls all look like alien eggs giving off a green glow to them.
Stripper cuts were medium risk, as there can be old piping down there, and even old equipment. I dove one where they left actual heavy equipment there and just allowed it to flood over. Odds are it died and was not worth hauling out at the end of the job. You can get hung up on that stuff if not careful.
Now old mine shafts, VERY dangerous. Often they are filled with junk over the years, the least being broken glass, up to equipment, steel stakes, old rebar, if it fits down the shaft it may well be found down there. On top of that, the shafts are highly unstable and the walls can give way real easy. Sometime you have to thread the needle so to speak to get through debris in your way. If not careful, you can dislodge the junk to come down on you, get your hose hung up, just plain get stuck and have to back your way out. Backing out of a debris filled shaft you are unable to turn around in sounds easy, but trust me, it is NOT, especially when you are trying not to disturb the junk around you.
When I dove mine shafts, I could only do it twice a week at best. It just drains you. You don't feel up to diving it two days in a row. You dive, then you don't have it in you to dive it again for a couple two or three days. Dangerous as all get out!!!!!
But it is a whole different world down there in that soft green glow. Near weightlessness, silence except for your breathing, the glow only extends so far and beyond that blackness. It is just you and the glow.
And yes, I have come across some interesting things diving. Nuff said. *G*
