Well I am not much for blogging but I suppose I will give it a shot! We did the annual Pumpkin Carving Dive last weekend at Gilboa Quarry in Ohio. It wasn`t a carving contest as in past years. We just decided to get together and have a good time.

There was roughly a dozen divers in the group, but the quarry was busy with other dive classes and fun dives going on. We seemed to be the only group carving pumpkins and we got lots of strange looks too. Which seemed odd to me, because I thought everyone knew about Underwater Pumpkin carving. Isn`t that one of the basic skills to pass O/W? Well anyway, it was fun to enlighten some folks on the crazy antics that seasoned divers have to keep themselves otherwise amused on a familiar dive site.

Our first dive was to decorate the platform at 25 feet where we would be doing the carving. So I joined the carving MC, Ber Rabbit, and we hung pumpkin buckets and skeletons and other spooky surprises on the platform to enhance the aura of the carving dive.

The second dive was the main course, and we all headed to the water with our little orange friends! What we didn`t realize, was that WE were the main course while carving the pumpkins. The quarry has a rather large population of rather large trout! And they seemed to be very interested in our pumpkins. We usually have fish food for them, but they appeared to enjoy the orange floaties just as much. I had to tuck my fingers inside the pumpkin head more than once to avoid a nasty encounter!


So once the carving was done, we headed back to the shore and waited for the sun to go down. We had a nice pot luck dinner with some refreshments. And lots of conversation of dive trips and locations and dreams of the same. I put a couple green glow sticks in my pumpkin, which gave it this wicked luminescent smile. Once the sun dipped below the horizon we were at the waters edge. All the pumpkins were perched on the wing of the airplane that sits at 30 feet and we had a nice easy night dive. I snapped a few pictures of some of the pumkins but the lighting wasn`t good enough for the glow sticks to show up. So the flash from the camera overcame any other illumination. None the less, it was a sight to see, all of the green and red and blue smiles staring back at us. The only thing missing from this dive adventure was the company of other DiveBuddy members. Although I did manage to hand out some DiveBuddy.com stickers.