the habitat, lake mendota

[underwateraddict]

Can anyone tell me about this?  Are there precise coordinates for it?  Where do you park? How do you get to it?  Can it be an ice dive?  Thanks in advance.

[schultz]

What do you want to know about it?

The Habitat was a research facility the the UW-Madison Limnology department anchored at the bottom of lake Mendota back in the mid 70's. It was build out of a huge wine fermenter that one of the UW professor's couldn't use since it held something like 700 gallons. As a home wine maker, Federal law prohibited his making anything over 200 gallons.

To make a long story short, the Limnology department took it off his hands, and they converted it to something like the lunar lander from the Apollo missions. They used it for studying fish populations as well as early diving physiology.

If you want coordinates for it you might want to check .

Unfortunately you cannot drive there. The university used to issue driving permits to the tip of Picnic Point, but they stopped that about four years ago when someone complained about vehicles going out there. I was the last person to ever drive out there with dive equipment.

It was about four years ago was when we attempted an ice dive out there with members of Hoofer SCUBA and Four Lakes SCUBA. It was NASTY cold that year (19 degrees below zero) and the ice was about 26 inches thick... unfortunately my chainsaw was only 24 inches...

Long story short, we got through the ice, but with the cold air, the dives were short since EVERYONE freeflowed (you name the reg, it flowed).

If you want a map of the divesite, check out the .

Hope this helps!

[ethanb]

I've got a few photos of it online here (Courtesy Tamara Thomsen)




We did the 2004 Four Lakes SCUBA Club Ice Dive there on January 30, 2004.  The low was -13 and the high was +5, with 10-15 mph winds all day.  It first got above zero at about noon (we were out there at 8 AM).  I temporarily put my pictures up here:


It's a fun dive, through the ice, from a boat, or on foot.

Ethan

[schultz]

Nice photos Ethan. What time of year were those taken with vis so good?

I forgot to mention that there are usually lines running from each underwater object. Most of the time they are there, but once in a while they get pulled up by fisherman either by lures or their anchors.

One item not on the map provided by Four Lakes is a boat 240 feet due east  from the habitat. It's a small boat that can be best described as an underwater .

[ethanb]

I'm not sure when Tami took them...  They were scans from prints and so they don't have EXIF tags - the file date is Jan 24, 2001, but that was just the time she sent them to me.  She was doing some training with the Dane County Sheriff's Office Dive Team when she took them (hence the full-face masks in some of the photos).  I can ask her when she gets back from Door County today.  In the early spring (March) or late fall (November), viz can be 20 feet or more.  She took those with a wide-angle lens, so it's hard for me even to guess what the viz actually was.

Here's the last one in the set:


Ethan

[underwateraddict]

Thanks for the info....