Finding the Deep Water
You stair out across the a new emerald puddle just waiting to be explored. Its surface is like glass, the pines around is shores like sentries to your entry, and its depths lay virgin to your eyes. But where do you start in undressing this aquatic masterpiece? I mean…where the hell is the deep water? Or is this thing only 3 feet deep?
Play a game with your friends and colleagues. Pick a random body of freshwater in your region and ask them how deep it is. You’ll find the public as no idea how deep a given body of water is. And while “deep” is a relative term for nondivers, “deep water” has a specific meaning to avid divers. After all, we place certification limits on particular depths. We are looking for minimum depths and gradients to achieve our desired dive profiles. But how do you find the deep water? Well, there’s two methodologies; historical data and doing it yourself. Both have advantages and disadvantages.
Historical data is always your first step. This is obvious - look before you jump. Google search, Wikipedia, park and municipal websites, Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) resources, and may the scuba forums as a last resort. This historical data varies in quality but will get you close. In the case of the USACE, it may be live data on depths, flow rates, carrying capacity, and availability of boat ramps. Other times it can be decades old data from a study that is no longer viable due to silt deposits, fool occurrences or infrastructure projects. At the time of this publication (February, 2025) I’ve become a fan of a crowdsourced application, i-boating which has proven to be reliable for bodies of water commonly fished and recreated by boaters. However, crowdsourced data is only as good as its data sets. And sometimes, no one as ever taken the time to stick their finger in the water.
Yes the idea of being the first is enticing. We live in a world with nearly every corner of the map filled in. Nothing is unknown. Accept for what lies beneath the surface. How does that saying go, “we know more about the surface of the moon than the bottom of the ocean”. The same goes for many lakes, quarries, ponds, and rivers. Data can be lost, environments can change, or it simply has never been collected. Sometimes its necessary to formulate a strategy to manual collect data with a depth finder, or even by just jumping in and finding out for yourself. Manual collection of data has its own challenges, chief among them, adding the time to your expedition to collect the data with your instruments, proof it, and then dive to confirm it. How DIY can it get? Check out DEP’s Calypso II project in the Project Workshop to see how out of control that can get.
Live data is great, but it comes at a cost. Yes, time is sunk into the collection process, but proofing your data by physically diving the location is hazardous. Case in point, during DEP’s initial exploratory dives of Summersville Lake in West Virginia last year, we had difficulty finding deep water. This led to us conducting three divers over the course of the day, each getting substantially deeper. Certified divers will point out that consecutively deeper dives is the exact opposite of the profile you’d want to follow. Our dives should be getting shallower over the course of the day, not deeper. Our last dive was hit a max depth of 85 feet which lead to a narcosis event that lead to the dive being called off. Not good.
In conclusion, when looking for the deep water, do your search, don’t wing it. Start with historical data and check its validity. If you need to confirm the depths yourself, use proper instrumentation, that means a depth finder and a water craft. Yes, that depth finder can be strapped to the side of kayak if necessary. Finally, your first dive at that location is proofing your data, take the necessary precautions to dive a proper profile. While we all seek adventure, Dive Every Puddle seeks fortune and glory for the sake of making diving more accessible to others, not to give authorities another reason to take resources from us.
Have you ever looked at a body of water and thought, “how deep is that, what’s in there?” Tell us about it, and we maybe able to help you get answer to that question.