Rewind:  August 15, 2024

Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus –

Here in Warren County!

Our friend and local author, Dr. Dan Way, took a trip back to his younger days growing up here Warren County.  Read about his days of SCUBA diving in Lake George.

Scuba Diving in Lake George

By Dr. Dan Way

        When I was a young boy in the late 1950’s, television was in its infancy.  Our first TV was a tiny gray screen in a huge wooden console, and the images were blurry, black-and-white, and fascinating!  Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers were still ten years in the future.  The earliest shows I remember were crude, studio-based children’s shows such as Kukla, Fran and Ollie, Soupy Sales, and Chief Halftown.

          As I got old enough to read, I found it interesting to look through my father’s subscription to National Geographic, especially Captain Jacques Cousteau’s stories of under sea adventure with the relatively new technique of SCUBA diving.  So, when a TV show came on the air in 1958 that featured scuba-diving adventures every week, I was immediately hooked.  Sea Hunt, which aired 155 weekly, half-hour episodes from 1958 through 1961, starred Lloyd Bridges, a former UN Navy frogman during World War II.  He was a handsome and muscular self-employed diver-for-hire who would rescue trapped divers, find treasure, explore old shipwrecks, fight underwater bad guys, and engage in all sorts of other underwater melodramas.

          Since much of the time he was underwater, he would narrate the diving scenes after the fact, which would often include technical and educational information about the risks and pleasures of scuba diving.  For instance, he would explain that there was only about thirty minutes of air in a single scuba tank, and that you could get the bends if you surfaced too quickly, which could lead to a horrible and painful death from nitrogen bubbles developing in your bloodstream.

        One of the things I appreciated the most about Uncle Dick Garrett was that he trusted me to explore and experiment on my own; he didn’t feel the need to watch me every second and trusted me to keep his own two sons busy and entertained when he was at work in his dental office in Glens Falls.  As we grew in size and experience, he allowed us to use his aluminum Grumman motorboat with its 5 ½ horsepower motor, his Sunfish sailboat, and by our teens, his wooden Lyman motorboat with a 40 HP engine.  When Uncle Dick bought a scuba tank in the early ‘60s to use in Lake George, it was one of the happiest days of my childhood.

          By my early teens, I had already been snorkeling in the lake and was comfortable being underwater with facemask and flippers, just like Mike Nelson!  I could hold my breath long enough to dive up to 40 feet down to the bottom of the bay near our camp.  So, my cousin Rick and I would take turns using the scuba tank around the dock in water up to thirty or forty feet deep, and somehow it seemed so natural that we never got into any trouble from running out of air or getting the bends.  I simply remembered Make Nelson’s rule:  “Never surface faster than your air bubbles!”

          Even exploring around our dock was exciting – we discovered old milk and medicine bottles from local dairies and apothecaries sticking out of the mud, and even some old-World War I rifle ammunition across the bay.

        After a couple summers, we obtained a second tank and regulator, so Rick and I could dive together.  We would go off to some likely spot for diving, such as a favorite fishing spot just north of Dome Island, where we would bring up handfuls of fishing lures and even a rod or two from as deep as sixty feet.

         I remember surfacing from that depth would make me dizzy and lightheaded – probably from the nitrogen bubbles forming in my brain, but again, we weren’t fazed.  Diving off Hens and Chickens Island at the southern entrance to the Narrows was a favorite diving spot, since we could picnic and sunbathe from one of the island’s campsites when we weren’t swimming or diving.

          I recall one dive when we were cruising along together about thirty feet down when I had the eerie sensation I was being watched.  I turned suddenly to look behind, and was startled to find myself face-to-face with a large lake trout, who was following me a few feet behind, with what seemed to be a very curious and baffled look on its face.

           Soon after, we came across a lump of rust the size of a basketball stuck to some rocks on the bottom.  It had obviously been there for many years, and it was difficult to break loose.  There was a metal ring sticking out of the top, so we grabbed it and pulled until the rusty lump came free.  When we brought the treasure home, we wondered what could be under all the rust.  I remember thinking, “This thing must be fifty years old!”  Using a couple of screwdrivers, we chopped of the rust until we found ourselves looking at an old grappling hook.

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Photos courtesy of the Internet.