 It isn’t just that I miss scuba diving. Going from Caribbean waters to Arizona’s perpetual water shortage was bound to affect my diving. No, what worries me is that our murky, little local lakes are beginning to look like viable dive sites. I paddle Watson in my kayak imagining I’m below the surface, strapped into my dive gear.
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People dive for lots of reasons: the opportunity to see underwater life, treasure hunting, and even caving and wrecking, my own personal favorite. The longer I live in the Prescott area, the more I realize all these opportunities are right here. For instance, any diver who has experienced a silt-out will likely recall that sudden blackness with a variety of feelings, none of them fun. If you haven’t experienced a silt-out, imagine looking across our landscape, then having someone suddenly put a bag over your head – pitch black so dark you can’t see your hand in front of your face. You can get that same great feeling diving in most of our local lakes! The visibility is so nonexistent in Fain Lake that it took police divers several efforts to find a stolen car resting at the bottom. Want great practice in low/no visibility diving? Dive Prescott Valley. Too bad it's illegal.
One of the greatest joys is night diving. Much like visiting Heritage Park Zoo in the dark, when nocturnal animals come out, night diving offers a completely new view. My favorite night dive was at English Harbour in Antigua, where phosphorescent plankton coated everything: us, anemones, corals, crabs, fish and nurse sharks; we all glowed softly with every move. The creepiest was a quarry in Pennsylvania when our flashlights created shadows in a sunken forest, shadows that seemed to reach for us, grabbing at our tanks. Several people commented on how they felt like the trees had come to life and were hunting us as we swam through them. (This, by the way, is the only dive I've done where someone got caught in a tree.) Here in Prescott, we don’t have to wait for night to experience a night dive. With the natural murkiness of our waters, a diver could be 10 feet down at high noon and experience the same nighttime thrills. Without the phosphorescence, of course. Or the fish. Or the sharks. Anyone wanting to experience forest diving, as in a quarry, would find Willow Lake with its reeds and trees to their liking. Well, they would if Willow were full.
Diving coral walls is extremely popular. We have walls here to dive - we call them “dams.” Of course, in a natural coral wall, there are coral, shellfish, plants and all kinds of sea creatures to see. The colors can be stunning, and a great wall dive is something you'll remember forever. We don’t have any kind of life on our dams, unless one counts the mud swallows on the Willow Lake dam. Nevertheless, what these walls lack in amazing life forms, they do make up for in the overflow races! Diving the dams on a high water day could be the most exciting (last) moment in a lifetime.
Sightseeing underwater is also popular: rock formations, big fan corals, brain corals, wrecks and even buoy chains overgrown with seaweed. Limestone ebbs and wears with currents, creating tubes, caverns and spires. Watson Lake offers similar opportunities for sightseeing. There are countless towers of rock throughout the lake. Ask anyone who has paddled or sailed Watson and he or she will have at least one story about the rock they never saw. A great advantage of local diving is that on a clear day you get to see all the rocks you didn't see in time when you were kayaking.
Seeing new fish is always fun, and many divers keep logs of fish they have seen on their dives, like birdwatchers. In our local lakes, fish watching is a little frustrating. If you go down the road though, Lake Pleasant has some exotics. Piranha are a tropical fish; those in Lake Pleasant are exotic only in the sense that they are not indigenous to Arizona. Somebody dumped them in the lake, probably after they ate everything else in their tank. Arizona Game & Fish says these piranha are vegetarians, like carp, but if that's true, then why are they trying so hard to get rid of them? I did see one exotic fish on a very short, unscheduled dive here in the Verde Valley when my kayak rotated 180 degrees. Before I did my wet exit, I nearly shook hands (fins?) with what someone told me was a trout. OK, it was exotic to me.
I don’t know why the local lakes keep calling me. It must be desperation – it isn’t even legal to scuba dive the Prescott area lakes. Yet the craving to dive is taking its toll; every time I find a fossil seashell in my horse’s corral, I go sneak a look at my dive gear. Diving Arizona isn’t the same as ocean diving, but it may have its charms nonetheless.
(Cheryl writes from Chino Valley, where she stares longingly at her scuba gear when no one is looking. Contact her at
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