The Safari Hunt, known to some of us “experienced divers, as the Gorilla Hunt,” is approaching very quickly………. You need to make sure you get your tanks filled BEFORE you head to the lake, Wednesday or Thursday is the best options to get this done.
As most of you know, your friends at Extreme Sports Scuba, put on a wonderful event every June, now known as “The Safari Hunt”. Your favorite Instructors, Assistant Instructors, and Dive Masters go to hide various stuffed animal in Beaver Lake for you to find. There are marvelous prizes for those lucky divers that find one of these animals. Sadly, however, not all of the stuffed animals are found, well, not found that day.
And so the story begins….
A few years ago, Grady, Jared, Doug, and Dan set out on our fun task of strategically placing these stuffed critters in the lake. We want you to find them, but not too easy. Where would the fun be in that?
That year, as in years past, we had some white scuba diving gorillas to hide. We go and place or stuffed critters and shortly after that, the divers make a mad rush in the search area, looking around, and in, and under, and proceeding to stir the heck out of the bottom, resulting in areas of visibility that extend all to way to the lenses on your dive mask. And yes, divers have a blast.
Back to the story…
that year one of the gorillas went missing. It seems Jared Weston had done too good job of hiding the gorilla, or maybe the divers just killed the vis. The prize associated for the gorilla went into a drawing so all the prizes could be given out.
Now comes October and Diver Dan is taking a student on her first open water dive. Ten minutes or so into the dive, he sees something not made by nature, partly buried in the mud and sand of the bottom of the lake. As they swim by he reaches down and pulls up the missing white gorilla. Poor monkey, he has been lost for over 3 months and is now covered with mud and muck.
With a smile on his face, he stuffs the gorilla in under his chest strap on his BC and continues the dive (similar to the picture above). The dive had been going great until that point. But now, he has to motion for her to “buddy up” and swim closer. She gets closer, but in a few seconds, she moves away. This happens several times during the last ten minutes of the dive.
The dive is over and they surface near the beach. Dan looks around and sees Deb and Grady. He gets their attention and holds up the filthy, mucky, missing gorilla. They start laughing. His poor student, who has again distanced herself from him, asks what was going on. “I just found a missing stuffed animal form our gorilla hunt, it has been missing since June.” She looks at the sorry looking thing and smiles, saying “I thought you found a dead cat!”