I was originally going to name this post “Diving With the Mohawks”, then “Every Dive Makes You Better”, but I settled on “Cold Ass Honky”, because I really, really was. Not in a Macklemore way either, more in the thermocline and water at 5 degrees centigrade (41F) kind of way. Without exaggerating one tiny bit, it felt like little needles of burning pain all over my body. You know you’re in trouble when you’re the only guy at the bottom without a dry suit. Still well worth it though, that’s diving for you.

D&C member and all around good guy Charles showed up bright and early (by my standards) on a Saturday morning. You might remember him from rocking one of the club t-shirts in Paris a while back.

I got into his car that perpetually smells of diving gear (a large improvement over the previous perpetual smell of hockey gear, sorry Charles) and we headed to the dive shop to pick-up his cylinders and some cold water equipment for me. My Caribbean wet suit wasn’t going to cut it.

The shop was still closed when we arrived so we just chilled in the parking lot, not at all looking like creepy middle aged men up to no good.

As the door finally rolled up, diving goodness was revealed.

We picked up four cylinders, two standards 80 cubic foot tanks and two 117’s. It was to be my first time diving with the much heavier 117 and I was curious about the effects on my buoyancy and trim. I was in for a little bit of a surprise.

We loaded up the car and hit the road. We we’re headed for Mohawk territory…

…but first we needed some tunes.

Unrelated sidebar: I just learned that Greenland sharks reach sexual maturity around 150 years old and they can live several hundreds of years. How cool is that?

By comparison, here’s one of two fishes we saw on this expedition, not the same ballpark obviously.

Kanhnawake, where we were going to dive, is a First Nations reservation just south of Montreal, it belongs to the Kanien’kehá:ka, the “People of the Flint”, which we usually refer to as Mohawks, they are part of the Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy. Historically this reservation goes back to 1673 (or 1680 depending on sources), when the French crown granted the land to Jesuits, so they could “take care” of Mohawks that had converted to Catholicism. Riiiiiight.

The reddish area on the map below is the reservation. Figuratively within a stone’s throw of Montreal, yet a very different land in many ways, signs are mostly in English, police officers are called peacekeepers and there’s a bunch of businesses that would be illegal on the outside. You can open the image in a new tab to get a slightly bigger/better view. The large blue blob is where we dove.

There is a well known diving spot on the reservation that’s been pretty active for several years now. Classes are being held there regularly, people are trying out funky gear (it’s the deepest dive I know of this close to Montreal) or divers just come for some underwater lollygagging.

As you could have guessed from the satellite image below, this is not a natural lake.

It used to be a quarry, which means its banks are mostly cliffs, you can wade a few feet from the shore, but then the bottom just falls away and it gets deep real quick. Max depth is around 100-110 feet, there are some slightly deeper pockets but not by much. Tales of cranes at the bottom and 300 feet of depth are the scuba diving equivalent of fishing stories, or of bro stories about threesomes. Fun fact: some of the large blocks that went into building the supporting piers of the Mercier bridge were excavated here.

I expected the water to be pretty cold, so I had opted for a 14mm with hood and gloves. For good measure I also wore a rashguard underneath, no clue if that helped, but it did make the suit easier to put on.

That’s a pretty bulky getup. On the surface it is super sweat inducing and it constricts movement and breathing, once it’s on you want to get into the water rather swiftly.

Charles was wearing his much more comfortable dry suit, so much for sharing my pain.

We were trying out a pair of 117 cubic foot tanks. Surprisingly heavy, but it was a good feeling looking down at the gauge and seeing 3500 psi.

I had not been diving for a while so I was really looking forward to this. I’m a sucker for adventure. I felt a little bit of excitement as we started assembling our gear, and also that small thrill I get from (somewhat) competently preparing for something a little dangerous. I wouldn’t say scuba diving is as risky as bungie jumping or rock climbing, but don’t kid yourself, a lot of things can go wrong real quick. Scuba is not very forgiving of mistakes.

We had smiles on our faces as we got into the water. It was cold but not so bad. We swam out to the descent line. We made sure everything was in order and gave the signal, it was time to go down. The descent rope underneath stretched into the bottomless blue. Viz was great.

As a general rule in scuba you want to do things slowly, you go down slow and come up slow. Falling like a rock to 100 feet is a good way to rupture your eardrums, coming up like a rocket from a hundred feet is a recipe for several different kinds of disasters. In both cases just don’t do it. With that in mind I cautiously let some air out of my BCD after we exchanged the going down sign.

Descent speed was good at first but I soon started going a touch too fast for comfort. My BC was straining against the added weights I took to compensate for the thick wet suit, the heavier tank and the lesser buoyancy of fresh water. I knew I was heavy when we did the pre-dive check but at 4 feet of depth it was well manageable. Rookie mistake. As I passed 50 feet I could tell by the rope flying by and the pressure in my ears that I was falling too quickly. It took serious inflation of my vest to slow me down so that I did not hit the deck. I have to be honest, there was a brief moment I thought about dumping my weight belt. If I had heard the noise from my BC’s overflow capacity valve I would have surely done so. Like I said, rookie mistake.

Any time you change any variable in the complex equation that is a dive, be it seemingly as trivial as weight placement or fresh vs salt water, you owe it to yourself, and your dive buddy, to take things extra slow. Here I was guestimating four major variables, six if you count the depth and temperature, and the tests I did were not sufficient.

In the end did we have a great outing? Yes. Was there potential for a mishap? Certainly. Did I learn stuff? A ton. Every dive that teaches you something (without killing you or seriously injuring you obviously) makes you a better diver, but it’s certainly wiser to learn from other people’s mistakes than your own…

After our second dive I felt like a rag doll left in the freezing rain overnight. I asked my buddy if he needed a towel, he just looked at me and smiled, “no thanks dude, I’m dry.”

So much for sharing my pain.

He did buy the beers and bbq afterwards so it was all good. The evening ended with a bunch of us from D&C soaking our feet in a kiddie pool under the stars. All around good times, and it also meant I was not alone in the shower the next morning.

See you soon.

P.-S.- I knew I had a great uncle that had been a diver in the navy and had to stop diving because of an accident. I never met him or saw a picture of him. Recently one was found, so since the internet is forever, I give you my great uncle Tadeusz on his wedding day.