Lake Simcoe Temperatures July 29, 2018
Posted by Chris Sullivan in Dive Log, Ecology.Tags: Dry Suit, Lake Simcoe, Scuba Diving, thermocline, Water Temperature
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This chart is from Shanty Bay Ontario in 2017 and 2018 showing temperature (in Celsius) vs. Depth (in metres). I’ve only dived there twice this year so most of the graphs are from 2017 running from May until late November. The seasonal variations are quite apparent. In the late spring, the surface is cool at around 14C, warm enough to get students in the shallow water in wet suits. Throughout the summer, the water warms up unevenly, with the bottom remaining quite cold at 7-8C as it warms up very slowly, but the surface gets quite warm and nice in a wet suit down to 10m or so, depending on the suit, the length of the dive and whether you’re wearing a hood.
In mid to late September, the thermocline disappears, and the temperature is more or less independent of depth, as the two horizontal lines depict. Those two dives were relatively shallow so unfortunately I can’t show the effect all the way to the bottom, but from what I’ve read the relatively warmer water extends to the maximum depth of the lake. Also of note is the slightly more than 10C drop between mid September and late November, with the overall lake temperature almost as low as the lowest temperature I’ve recorded at the bottom.
In 2018, on 2 dives 4 weeks apart, the surface has warmed up a full 4C, whilst the bottom has increase a mere 0.2C. The fall seems to be a good time to dive Simcoe, when relative constant temperatures even at depth make excursions to the bottom more pleasant, although somewhat at the expense of the warmer wet suit conditions at the shallower depths. So here’s an update from my earlier chart with more data from last November onward. All temperature data is from my AP Inspiration CCR log.
I’ve also compiled some temperature data for Tobermory wreck diving. Stay tuned.
Lake Simcoe Temperatures January 4, 2018
Posted by Chris Sullivan in CCR.Tags: CCR, Dry Suit, Kempenfelt Bay, Lake Simcoe, Shanty Bay, Water Temperature
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As is it the closest body of water to my house I dive in Lake Simcoe relatively often. The drive takes about an hour, compared to 3 to 4 hours to the admittedly much more interesting diving in places like Brockville and Tobermory. While I’ve managed to do both of the latter sites as day trips, it is an arduous proposition compared to going somewhere from which I can get home by lunch time.
Simcoe is relatively shallow, with a maximum depth of about 42 metres and an average depth of 15m over its 725 square kilometre surface area. The deepest spot is the middle of Kempenfelt Bay, quite close to the hamlet of Shanty Bay where we shore dive, so we can get some depth there if we’re prepared for the cold water. As there are few fish, no wrecks, no reefs and nothing much but weeds and silty bottom, aside from looking at what was put there intentionally, garbage thrown overboard by passing boats, flotsam like deck chairs blown in from shore and the occasional golf ball, one can pass the time by doing drills and studying the marine environment.
This latter pastime caused me to stumble of the World Lake Database. The Lake Simcoe information dates from the mid 1980’s, and contains the following table of temperatures by month.
| Depth | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | 4.8 | 14.8 | 17.2 | 22.2 | 13.7 | 12.0 |
| 5 | 4.8 | 14.5 | 17.3 | 22.2 | 14.5 | 12.0 |
| 10 | 4.8 | 12.1 | 15.6 | 22.2 | 15.1 | 12.0 |
| 15 | 4.8 | 9.3 | 13.9 | 15.1 | 15.2 | 12.0 |
| 20 | 4.8 | 7.7 | 8.5 | 9.9 | 10.4 | 12.0 |
| 30 | 4.7 | 7.6 | 8.0 | 8.1 | 6.7 | 12.0 |
Depth is in metres, temperature in degrees Celsius. Station K45 is in the open water of Lake Simcoe, not in Kempenfelt Bay. There is a station in Kempenfelt – K42 – but so far I’ve not found any similar data from it. The October data looks suspicious with completely uniform temperature down to 30 metres, but I noticed from my own experience that the temperature becomes more uniform in the late summer so perhaps it is the case. 12C is quite a reasonable temperature so there is no reason to hang up the fins just because summer is over.
The chart below summarizes the water temperatures during my dives this year. In July my dry suit failed on a dive in Tobermory, Ontario and so everything after that is in a relatively thin wet suit, with nothing deeper than 20 metres or colder than 12 Celsius (and not for very long at that temperature I can assure you). Even the dry suit dives were curtailed somewhat because my hands were too cold.
You have to look at the chart’s legend to figure out when the dives took place. The ones that start above 20C are in July and August, the and the ones below 15C are from May and June. By the 12th of September, there was little difference in temperature between the surface and 15 metres.
The data were collected on my AP Inspiration EVP rebreather, which records depth, temperature and many other data points every 10 seconds to a precision, although not necessarily an accuracy, of 10 centimetres and 1/10th of a degree Celsius. For each day’s diving all of the data were summarized to the nearest metre by averaging the temperature readings. The result is not a dive profile, but a thermal profile by depth.
So the temperature difference by depth is greatest in the mid-summer months. By September, the temperature at depth is higher than in mid-summer. It is considerably warmer than the September average in 1984, but the dive was only 1 day in September and in a different part of the lake, so it would be hard to draw a conclusion from that difference, although the City of Barrie has published a Climate Change Strategy which indicates that there is warming trend in Kempenfelt Bay based on K42 data.
I’m looking forward to gathering a lot more data in 2018 after the ice melts. The broken dry suit has been replaced with a better one, including a thicker hood and for the first time ever, dry gloves! So next time there should be a lot more data from the depths.
Solo Diving Together November 3, 2009
Posted by Chris Sullivan in Dive Log, Training.Tags: Adventure, Big Bay Point, Dive Training, Diving, Dry Suit, Lake Simcoe, OMS, Outdoors, SCUBA, Scuba Diving, Scuba Training, SDI, Solo Diver, Solo Diving, Sport, Training
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No, this isn’t a harangue about “same day, same ocean” dive buddies. I’ll save that for another time. On Saturday (October 30th) we headed up to Big Bay Point to finish our solo diving course. The purpose of the in-water exercises is to promote self sufficiency. For this reason, we spent some enjoyable moments having our air shut off, are masks removed, and ourselves entangled in line.
We all had our own issues. I’d not thought everything through properly. I took the backup reg set from my technical setup for the AL80 on my back, and one of my deco regs for the pony. I’d not realized that this would only give me one LP inflator, which meant that with my dry suit I’d have nothing to use for my BC. It had been 26 years since I’d dived using oral inflate only but rather than switching over to my recreational reg with its “extra” second stage, I decided it would be good practice to try it on this dive. Despite what you might read about *OMS) bungeed wings being impossible to inflate orally, I had no problem with it, although I did have to blow a little harder than with a regular wing.
After dropping my pony bottle (more like a quarter-horse bottle as I used my Faber steel 45) on the bottom, I did my giant-stride off the end of the dock and releasing the minimum amount of air to submerge, fetched it and hooked it on to my BC while swimming out to the descent line.
The first exercise was replacing my mask with my spare. I was glad to do this as while I always carry one, I’ve never actually practiced replacing it. I didn’t find it difficult, although it took a while to get the pocket open, retrieve the mask, orient it properly and put in on. The first time through this exercise we were on the bottom. Following that we did the out of air drills. This didn’t go so well. Inadvertently I’d looped the regulator hose around the bottom clip, so it would not pull out. So I had to lean forward to keep the reg in my mouth while I unclipped the tank to free the hose. Manageable, I suppose, but not something you’d want to have occur in a real out-of-air situation.
After that, we did the same drills while swimming, with our friendly divemasters shutting our air down or removing our masks at various times. The hardest thing was maintaining depth without a mask. I could feel the air expanding in my dry suit and quickly moved to dump some air. I felt like I was still ascending but emptied my lungs and found that I was at about the same depth once my mask was back on as when I started. Looking at my computer log it there only seems to be small incursions so my perceptions were no-doubt amplified by my imagination.
We also had lines tied around us and masses of silt blinding our vision. Perfect for a day’s outing. Both the water and the air were about 11 degrees C (52-53 F). There was little evidence of a thermocline down to 63 feet, although I’m sure we would have hit one if we went a little deeper.
That’s fall diving in Ontario, and why we like our dry suits.
Anyway, congratulations to Marty, Steve, Rich and Carlos on becoming SDI solo divers.
Boat Divers October 14, 2009
Posted by Chris Sullivan in Dive Log.Tags: Adventure, Boat Diving, Diving, Dry Suit, Lake Simcoe, Outdoors, SCUBA, Sport
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On Sunday (October 11th, 2009) 4 of us went out to dive some lesser known sites in Lake Simcoe. This is the first time, at least to my recollection, where I’ve been out diving on a private boat rather than one belonging to a charter operator.
Our problems started at the boat ramp, situated on the North shore of Kempenfelt Bay. The water level of the lake seemed lower than that for which the ramp was designed, so the back wheels of the van were in the water before the boat would float. The small dock near the ramp wasn’t out far enough into the water to be a suitable platform for embarkation, so the owner, Ken, moved it to a nearby public dock that was much more suitable and we met him there, unloading the gear down the hill.
While maneuvering near the dock, Ken decided to back up quickly. The inboard-outboard engine is quite powerful, and I had to throw the line I was holding in my hand back on to the boat. Unfortunately it slipped off, and fouled the prop, so Ken spent the next 45 minutes or so anchored 100′ away, finally donning his wet suit to dive down and free it.
The three passengers by that time were all dressed in dry suits and began loading equipment on board. As we were loading my doubles, we had them perched on the starboard gunwhale while I tried to step into the boat. The constriction of the dry suit cramped my movement at exactly the wrong moment and I fell unceremoniously onto the floor of the boat without injury. Ken fortunately was able to keep the doubles steady long enough for me to scramble to my feet and help him with the heavy unit.
Michael loaded his next, and wearing the same type of dry suit as mine, did exactly the same thing, and was also unhurt. Rich, now wiser from the experience of his shipmates, was much more careful in the way he stepped down onto the boat.
The first site we wanted to visit was a long way off, and Ken didn’t inspire confidence by continually voicing his doubts about the amount of fuel he was carrying. His fuel gauge wasn’t all that reliable, it seems. We were also experiencing high winds, waves and cold temperatures to make the journey more interesting. When we were within 2 miles of the site, according the several GPS units we had with us, we found the waves were too much and with uncertain fuel and queasy stomachs we all heartily agreed with our captain that we should turn around.
The second site was in calmer water, being closer to the shore and somewhat sheltered from the wind, and by 3pm (almost 6 hours into the adventure) we managed to get wet, although we found nothing interesting on the bottom. It was desolate even by Lake Simcoe standards.
Once we made it back to the ramp, we unloaded on the large dock and spent about 1/2 an hour getting the boat onto the trailer. But as the wheels were off the concrete pad and onto the bottom the van couldn’t pull the trailer. Finally, pouring on the acceleration we managed to disable the trailer when it hit the ledge on the end of the pad (which we then measured as 5-6″ high).
This put us in another conundrum as to what to do, as the light was beginning to fade. We slid the boat off the trailer and into the water to moor it on the large dock, and then pulled the trailer up the hill, despite the fact the rear wheels on the left were now touching each other. We determined that the front axle had slipped backwards on the left hand side about 8-10″, so we loosened the u-bolt holding it in position and started whacking it with a 2×4 block of wood.
It made some encouraging movement, and by jacking up the back of the trailer and using the boat winch for additional persuasion, we finally moved it back into position. Not wanting to use the ramp again, Ken decided he would drive the boat into Barrie and use the public ramp there, which was much more friendly. I had to drive his van there, and the final insult (at least for me) that night was it took 10 minutes to get his boat key off his key ring. I was showing my impatience as it was now almost 7pm and I figured my wife would be on the phone to the lawyer to file the divorce papers by this time, but we made it the rest of the way without a problem and Mike volunteered to wait for Ken to arrive in the boat. I managed to get home by 8:30 with take-out food in hand and opened a bottle of wine to ease the pain of my long absence.
Rich and I were long gone by the time he made it in. He had indeed run out of gas on the way, and made the final leg using the small outboard motor, which also ran out of gas just as he was arriving. But the boat was loaded and that was that.
We all agreed that we’d learned a lot that day and are looking forward to trying again when the weather warms up next spring.
Setting up for an Advanced Course September 2, 2009
Posted by Chris Sullivan in Dive Log, Training.Tags: Advanced Open Water, Big Bay Point, Dive Training, Divemaster, Diving, Enriched Air, Lake Simcoe, Nitrox, Outdoors, SCUBA, Scuba Diving, Scuba Instructor, Scuba Training, Sport, Training
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Matt & I conducted an advanced course last weekend (Aug 22/23 2009) consisting of Peak Performance Buoyancy, Navigation, Search & Recovery, Deep and Enriched Air Dives. Once again, logistics were the key. Our students were Les, Diana and Sarah with Sarah’s husband Darren along as a divemaster candidate. Les had started diving in the 70’s, stopped, and then decided to try again this summer, requalifying as a PADI Open Water Diver and now taking the Advanced Open Water course. Diana had recently done her Open Water course in Australia but hadn’t dived since. Sarah was comparatively more experienced having done a range of diving with her husband.
Before all the students had arrived, Matt and I were in the water to set up the course. First, our two standard dive flags were set up, with the first in about 8 feet of water about 100 feet from the dock, and the second, which included an ascent line, about another 100′ away at 30′ depth.
The next step was to set up the buoyancy game for the peak performance buoyancy dive. The shop has a set of 8 diamond shaped (actually they’re square but they’re turned 45 degrees) tubing assemblies about 4′ on each side. They’re connected with shock cord and in one corner the tubes abut, rather than connect, so when these are placed on top a diver can ascend without obstruction. Thus there is not the slightest concern about an overhead obstruction in an out of air emergency.
We attached these at about 10′ intervals on a line that runs west of the main dive flag buoy, and pointed them in slightly different directions. Each has a line attached for that purpose, and the tubes are hollow to admit air to make them positively buoyant so they “hang” from the bottom. I swam the course to make sure it was reasonably easy to do, which it was.
After that we laid out a timed underwater swim for the navigation dive. I recently purchased some large orange tent pegs (about 14″ long) that answered very well to the task of marking a position and holding a line in place. We used my penetration reel to mark the course between two of the pegs, and I’d tied a loop at 100′ on the line before we went in. Unfortunately the reel tangled as we deployed it, but it only took a few minutes to get it sorted out and we ended up with a nice run in about 20′ of water.
After 22 minutes underwater we emerged to greet our students and get ready for the first adventure dive.
Depth and Colour August 15, 2009
Posted by Chris Sullivan in Photography.Tags: Big Bay Point, Diving, Lake Simcoe, SCUBA, Scuba Diving, Underwater Photography
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It’s amazing how the eye compensates when a camera cannot. These pictures, both taken of the same object at 40′ in the fresh waters of Lake Simcoe on the first dive last Wednesday Night, were taken a minute apart. The first was with flash, and the second with natural light.
This gnome sits on the bow of the inboard/outboard boat, and you can see its outline in both pictures, although the remaining background is black with the flash photo, as the exposure time is too short to pick up the ambient light.
Even at much greater depths in the same location, colours are still quite apparent. On the Deep Adventure Dive, I’ve pulled out coloured objects and we’ve noticed that even orange and red are quite discernable at that depth, but every photograph taken even at shallower depths is predominantly green.
“Rude” scuba divers taking over docks August 14, 2009
Posted by Chris Sullivan in Miscellany.Tags: Big Bay Point, Diving, Lake Simcoe, SCUBA, Scuba Diving
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An article on the Simcoe.com web site bearing the above title appeared yesterday, the day after my last dive off the Big Bay Point dock which it cites as the main location of the problem. After registering at the site and logging in, it still wouldn’t let me express my view of the situation, which is very in keeping with the one-sided viewpoint on the issue expressed in the article. Whether the opinion of the councilor quoted, who I met a couple of years ago on the very dock mentioned in the article, was mindlessly parroted or indeed if the reporter is complicit in this attack, it shows wanton disregard for the principles of good journalism, tarring an entire group of people, including me, with the same brush as an alleged obnoxious few.
This same councilor appeared on the dock one day two years ago, identified himself as a councilor and property owner not far from the dock, and gave us much the same story as recounted in the article. It makes me wonder whether he is exploiting his position to pursue a private vendetta on behalf of a small number of property owners living nearby, who probably would like to have this public facility all to themselves. The south shore of Kempenfelt Bay in Lake Simcoe has a pitifully small number of public access points. In fact the Big Bay Point dock is the only one I know. No wonder it gets crowded with divers wishing access to a resource which is the property of the citizens of Canada. We were polite to him but I can understand how someone might get irritated with a local politician try to throw his weight around on a federal dock.
What really irks me is the winging about dive flags. Sure they’re important, article implies that this caused the death of poor Aviva Barth, who was hit by a boat traveling at high speed between a dive flag and the dock. Since then, divers have conducted campaigns to educate boaters about their responsibilities around dive flags, but the problem withe reckless boaters still exists. When we met this councilor, he went on about dive flags to us, even though we had two flags displayed at intervals right in front of the dock. It wouldn’t surprise me, given the venom of his exaggerated commentary, if he does this just to entice divers to be rude to him so he has something else to complain about.
He also cites a diver telling two senior citizens to dock somewhere else. On the rare occasion I’ve seen a boat dock there, the divers have helped with the lines, assisted boaters on and off the dock, and advised them on the depths of the water. When people fish from the dock, divers invariably stay away from the area where their lines are cast, and we’ve occasionally advised them on what species and size of fish we’ve seen. Divers also politely answer the questions of the kids who come on the dock and want to know what they’re doing and clean up junk thrown in the water. Many divers I know belong to law enforcement, or emergency services, and most, including me, are trained in emergency first aid. These are people who are responsible in their actions and I would trust with my life, and should be considered a positive influence, not an intrusion in public places.
Troublemakers come in all shapes and sizes, but you’re just as likely to find one in a business suit as in a wet suit.
New boat, a tour and a lost bag August 12, 2009
Posted by Chris Sullivan in Dive Log, Training.Tags: Adventure, Big Bay Point, Dive Training, Diving, Enriched Air, Lake Simcoe, Nitrox, Outdoors, PADI, SCUBA, Scuba Diving, Scuba Training, Sport, Training
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A week after the dive on the Tiller Wreck, on August 23rd, 2008, I was back at Big Bay Point. There were lots of students there and my first dive was with Brad and his student on an Advanced Deep dive. It didn’t take long and I used up the rest of my air in the shallows looking at two new inboard/outboards that were lying a little east of the main line at 40′ depth. I had noticed them on the way down. There were also some new gnomes standing here and there. I had refilled my deco bottles from the Tiller Wreck dive and so had EAN33 on dive #1, and lasted 50 minutes despite having been deep for the first bit.
The second dive was an an open water student who I ended up taking on an underwater tour. I took him to the new boats which he thought was fun, and once he learned to adjust for depth changes his buoyancy was great. I only used 600 PSI on my second tank (now EAN43) .
When I got out Brad told me his life bag was missing so I searched around for another 35 minutes using my remaining gas but was unsuccessful.
Chronicle of an older diver 