Ice Diving @ Lake Wazee - March 9th

[FreediveWI]

If I could gifure out how to post pictures on this forum I would show you. ???

We wear freediving wetsuits. These are quite different from scuba wetsuits. They are much better for coldwater diving as they are:

1 warmer
2 thinner for same warmth
3 use less weight
4 more flexible

They have a biotermic coating on the inside to stick to your body- Henderson finally caught onto this a few years ago and gave it some goofy name like Gold Core. Freediving suits have had this for a long time.
They also have wrist, face, ankle, and waist seals - they are almost totally dry on the inside. We wear icecaps under our hoods along with 3 finger mitts and socks that seal as well.

For freediving under the ice I wear a standard ice harness and keep it clipped off to a weighted rope that runs straight up and down in the hole. I can swim freely up and down along this line.

Lake Monona has a warm water power outlet on it that thaws the ice back a couple hundred yards. The water is 57 in the pipe and 37 away from it. We spent 3 hours moving back and forth inbetweem the warm/murky water and the clear/freezing water.

Jon