Over the weekend, I took my boat out to Lake Amistad near Del Rio
Tx. Nine dives were completed and we qualified two new
pilots. As I have not completed the max depth unmanned
test, the deepest dive was 60 ft. As it was a cold,
windy and overcast day, the visibility was not all that great. The
dive site was about a mile from the boat ramp so we towed the psub over
to the dive site to conserve batteries. The lake was a
bit choppy.
Things got a little interesting on the last dive in
which we launched off a anchored 23 ft fishing boat. I
had a bow line on the psub as a safety precaution. While I was on the
bottom, the wind came up and caused the support boat to loose it
anchor and begin dragging me across the bottom. At that
time I decided to ascend to see what was going on. At
about 36 ft, the psub stopped ascending. I kept
adding more and more air to the VBT and still the boat would not resume
it ascent. I then started blowing air into my MBT which did
the trick and I surfaced. Upon surfacing, I was very surprised to
see that the wind had blown the tethered boats one mile
down wind. The reason the ascent was halted was that when
the psub got off the bottom, the support boat really started to pick up
speed and psub wings and control surfaces were holding it in a horizontal
glide pattern. My take away lesson was not to dive the
boat tethered to another boat in windy conditions. All in
all, it was a fun day.
Cliff