I got together yesterday with a couple of new dive buddies, Roger and Skip, and we spent the day diving Stillhouse Hollow lake in Belton, near Killeen Texas. We made our first dive just before lunch and Roger and I stuck around for a second mid-afternoon dive. This dive was definitely cold, and murky due to very light silt that stirs up into thick clouds with even the slightest touch, but the company was good and the dive was fun. It’s always good when you can get together with a couple of great people and spend some time under water challenging yourself.

This is a pretty easy dive with platforms about 200 yards off shore and guide-lines leading from the platforms to various underwater objects. The average depth is somewhere around 40 feet in near the shore, though you can get down to 100 feet in some areas. One of the attractions there is a medium-sized sailboat with a resident catfish about as long as my arm camping out in the cabin. There is also a cement plant not far off, but not being tech divers we really just grazed the top of it and peered down through holes in the top. They tell me there are also some houses on the bottom that were there before the reservoir was flooded, but we didn’t make it over to those.

Roger (mrcorvette96) took a few pictures and hopefully he’ll post a few of those. I took a camera, but was a bit too busy dodging silt clouds to take any pictures. Besides, I had a small disposable camera and Roger had an impressive looking professional rig.

For those who want numbers, here were the conditions at the lake yesterday:

Date: March 27, 2010
Visibility: 10-12 feet
Air Temp: 65 first dive, near 80 second dive
Water Temp: 53
Current: none in the morning, mild in the afternoon near the surface due to a strong wind.
Waves: none in the morning, mild chop in the afternoon.
Bottom Comp: Thick, light silt. Very slippery algae on the rocks at the entry.

As always, I had fun and hope to dive with these guys again. Stillhouse Hollow is close enough to be a good day trip dive location and I’ll probably dive it again soon; Perhaps after it warms up a bit ;-)