This was a combined effort with the Valparaiso Scuba Club; Dive Quest. We camped at Hidden Paradise in St. Paul, IN. The camping was quite nice with our sites situated along the flatrock river. The campground is clean and there are enough trees to be scenic without completely blocking all the sun. Hidden Paradise has a small quarry on site called Dream Lake. It is open for diving. more on that later.
Saturday we first went to Blue Springs Quarry. Many of you remember this as "chigger city" from back in the early 90s when we camped there. The quarry is relatively small, roughly the size of France Park. It is 52 feet deep. The visibility was mediocre at best at about 12 feet in the shallow areas, but only 8 feet or so in the main quarry. Below the 48-50 foot level it was mud. The bottom water was in the low 50s, while the surface was in the mid 70s. We found most of the diver attractions in the quarry including the boat, truck, omni, tubes, and the flying saucer (2 satellite dishes glued together). The attractions are roped so even in the low vis we were able to find most of them. We also saw a few fish and turtles, but not a lot else. Bottom line: worth doing again, but probably later in the year when the vis is better. cost $10 air $5.
Saturday afternoon we checked out another nearby quarry called White Rock. This is a much smaller quarry near the campground. This was set up mostly for swimming and cliff diving. They didn't appear to have a lot of diver interest. The quarry was long and narrow and 20 feet deep. There was essentially no thermocline. The visibility was lousy at maybe 6-8 feet in some areas, 3-4 in others. There were quite a few fish in the quarry, mostly medium sized bass and bluegill. There is a schoolbus and a boat in the quarry, but not much else except thousands of beer cans. The bottom line: looks like a fun place to go for a summer swim, but not really worth diving again.
Cost $10.
Sunday morning we dived the onsite quarry Dream Lake. We had done this last year and it was kind of cool. this year the vis was much worse. At best we had 6 feet and in some areas we had almost none. The quarry is small and only 25 feet deep. We were unable to find the bus, truck, motorcycle or any of the other items in the quarry. We did see several very large paddlefish and the one critter we came there to see, the freshwater jellyfish. The quarry has thousands of these little guys. They are about the size of a nickel. Apparently they have no ill effect on divers. There were some bass and bluegill in the quarry, too.
Bottom line: worth doing as a quick dive, but again probably better later in the year when the algae has died off. Cost $8 air $5.
