More Underwater Dog Footage
Mocha the dog and her owner Chris of Duluth.
Mocha the dog and her owner Chris of Duluth.
Just a cute lil’ cave.
This slomo version is a composite of already released raw footage. I made three 30-second dives at the buoy. I am bad at estimating depth and I don’t have a depth gauge. I just wanted to reach a confirmed 30 feet, and diving the buoy was a way to do that since its depth is known. Maybe next year I will hang out down there a little longer since I can stay under a minute. But I was freaked out; although small potatoes in proper freediving circles, it represented a personal best and I wasn’t sure how difficult it would be. I also wasn’t sure what I’d find down there or what the visibility would be, so I approached it with trepidation. Visibility was decent but not great, so I remained wary of a small fear of being startled by fish emerging from the gloom. There had also recently been a prominent death in the freediving world. So to get psyched, that morning I read the comic-book version of H.P. Lovecraft’s horror story “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” about a man who (spoiler alert) discovers he is part of a lineage of half-human, half-fish monsters (found in “The Lovecraft Anthology vol. 1” edited by Dan Lockwood, published 2012 by SelfMadeHero.) As usual if I die, my brother is instructed to recover the camera and post the footage to PDD immediately.
Jasmine the dog, walked by lifetime Duluthian Jerry.
Swimming the shallows can be my favorite.
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Contains excerpts of the recent buoy-diving and swimming the hole at Uncle’s Harvey’s videos. Here you see them in context of the epic day crushing the best dive sites of the outer harbor. Canoe support crew was Jeff Greensmith and Sean MacManus. Dove the buoy and looked at railyard artifacts, ruins of the old breakwater wall, swam the hole at Uncle Harvey’s, and goofed around at its collapsed pillar. All the ruins are around 125 years old I believe. Topped it off with brews at Endion Station.
Depth: 30 feet. This is the red buoy in the outer harbor within sight of the Vietnam Memorial and Uncle Harvey’s Mausoleum. Thanks to my canoe-based support team, Jeff Greensmith and Sean MacManus, who towed me out there on my floaty raft. At the 1:18 mark you can see the concrete block the buoy is tethered to but the shot is brief as I didn’t want to dally.
Underwater footage of Uncle Harvey’s Mausoleum off the Duluth Lakewalk in relatively clear conditions. First I videoed the collapsed column in 9 feet of water, Then because visibility was so good, I swam around the base of the building structure too. That is 16 feet deep according to a depth chart I saw once.
Ruins of the column that collapsed this winter at “Uncle Harvey’s Mausoleum” off the Duluth Lakewalk. Water is really murky as its proximity to the shipping lanes stirs up a lot of silt this time of year. I intend to keep trying to get clearer shots but this is all I could manage during this initial foray. Water depth: 9 feet. Basically what you’re seeing here is a base of concrete sprouting metal bars and telephone-pole-like wooden posts that in some cases are splintered or splayed. The tops of some posts were sheared off and smoothed by ice sheet movement and lie just below the surface. The concrete top of the column lies on its side at the bottom, along with eroded steel jacketing that sheathed the base.
I was very cautious during these dives as the danger of getting snagged or nicked in the gloom was fearful to contemplate. I heard nearby swimmers claim a member of their party had scraped himself on the posts while swimming. Not to be a bringdown but this area has to be considered a hazard to swimmers and boaters alike. It is also the most interesting thing to look at in Lake Superior right now.
I was freediving Duluth’s amazing rock beach one afternoon, and started finding pot-smoking paraphernalia in a few feet of water just off shore. I realized I was reassembling some poor stoner’s fully stocked stash tray which he/she must have set too close to the waves. Within a relatively small radius I found pieces of two glass pipes (one largely intact), pokie tool, rolling tray, grinder, cigarette roller, and a broken glass jar. Archeological evidence of a beach culture of leisure.
A brief encounter with a Northern Pike in several feet of water. It looks injured as if by a propeller across its back.
