All spring long I have mentioned that the rain equals diving. Boy does that feel like the understatement of the century after this weekend, whew!
First off hopefully everyone had a wonderful Memorial Day. After a very rainy weekend, Memorial day here in the Ozarks turned out quite beautiful. As for the rest of the weekend, well… what can we say… it rained. We had flood warnings. But rain equals water for diving… it’s all good, right?
Last Tuesday I looked at the weather for Garfield, Arkansas (it’s right there by where we camp…) and the forecast didn’t look good…
Now the exciting part of this forecast is it changed almost every hour. That is the fun when the weather is involved.
I want to state right now, the fact that it was chilly and breezy and definitely rainy didn’t slow us down at all.
Saturday morning around 8:30am we gathered at the dive site.
It was time to get to work, certify some new divers and get some great dives in.
Steve Sweet, Dan Hayworth, and Lee Lake
The thermocline was around 30 feet. At 22 feet down I registered 68˚F. To say it was cold, eh… below 30 feet I got cold but others were able to venture and be fine. It was definitely 5mm dive suit water except for those who wore 3mm suits. See cold is a relative term.
Although it was raining, like I said, this didn’t stop us. Deb Weston stayed on shore on lightening patrol.
Saturday the rain held off most of the day. In fact a few sunburns happened. YIKES! and ouch! Sunday though it rained the whole day.
Grady and Deb brought Kayak’s down to the lake as well. Sunday we put them to use. Hey it might have been raining, but there was no lightening so it’s all good.
Nicole Willoughby & Tori Willoughby
Once the wind picked up and the rain really started pelting though, we did come in out of the rain. Bailey Hayworth really wanted to play in the sand. Momma told her no, she shouldn’t go play in the sand in the rain, so she improvised and brought sand into the pop-up tent with us. Hey she was bound and determined that the rain wasn’t going to stop her from playing in the sand!
Once certification dives were complete on Sunday we loaded up and dispersed for most of the afternoon, until that evening. Plans were to have Dan’s famous chicken and suzie q’s for a big group dinner. Rain and mud didn’t stop 30 people from hanging out and having dinner. 5 pop-ups later and we were all dry-ish. You know, as dry as we could be….
And dinner isn’t complete without the community ice cream (or so we called this bowl…). Saturday night was really the big dinner but there was enough leftovers that we had dinner all ready for Sunday night as well. Why did I call this dish here the community ice cream? Mark Willoughby, Lee Lake, Deb Weston, Nicole Willoughby, Addison Willoughby, Cailee Lake, and Kim Brungard ate out of this dish. We are all one big happy family .
And because Sunday was Deb’s Birthday, it was complete with a birthday cake.
But as you’ve learned from this post… our momma’s apparently didn’t teach us to come in out of the rain. Some days you just make the best out of the conditions that come your way!
Cam Parrish, Tori Willoughby, Cailee Lake, Ashlyn Hayworth, Bailey Hayworth, Chloe Lake
Now make sure you come back to check out the water levels post later this week. I went through my 895,532,234 photos and had to narrow it down to just 15 in this particular post. And that might be a stretch on the number of photos taken, it might have been 895,532,233. Either way about it I needed to break this wonderful weekend down into a couple of posts so I didn’t completely bombard you. But just know that the Christmas tree which is usually top end at 10 feet was at 25 feet top end on Saturday before the big rains!
Finally we would like to congratulate our new Open Water Certifications
- Braden Atnip
- Josh Karhoff
- Chris Krei
- Austin Martin
- Brice Martin
- Lincoln Martin
- Kris Rexwinkle
- Tammie Thiele