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Scuba Diving Bruno’s Reef and Beer Can Island – Mallets Bay, Colchester, Vermont

Scuba Diving Bruno's Reef and Beer Can Island - Mallets Bay, Colchester, Vermont

I had the opportunity to go out diving today with Steve and Matt.  We took Steve’s boat out from the state launch in Malletts Bay, in Colchester, Vermont on Lake Champlain.

Steve and I launched earlier then we had planned, and were at the dive site, when Steve’s phone rang, and it was Matt.  He said he was on his way to meet us to dive, so we lifted the anchor, and went back to shore to meet Matt.

When Matt arrived, we loaded his gear onto the boat, then went back to Bruno’s Reef, Malletts Bay, Lake Champlain.

After trolling the bay looking for the spot using the depth gauge and GPS, we found the spot.  It is between Coates Island and another, the name of which I do not know, and a red house with a white garage door.  I write this so that I can find the spot in the future, as it took us a while to zero in on the spot.  I’ll get GPS coordinates next time I am out there.

Once we were on the spot, we splashed, then I went down and secured our anchor.  The visibility sucked.  I came up, waited on Matt and Steve, and we started our dive.  Down the anchor line we went.  We couldn’t see more than 2-3 feet.  This whole dive was in around 20-35 feet of water.  We did the dive, staying down for around 35 minutes, before I went above them, to do my safety stop.  They got to the end of the rock, and joined me in their safety stop.  I surfaced first, we were around 150 feet from the boat, so we same to the boat, changed our tank, then lifted the anchor to move to Beer Can Island.  

We did our surface interval, while moving to Beer Can Island.  Once we were there, we dropped anchor, then splashed.  We dove around the whole island, which was very neat.  I’d do the island again.  I’ll be adding this location to my dive sites listing, once I have more information.  It’s a little island, kind of near Marble Island, but across the mouth of the bay.

There were a ton of fish around here, and our max depth was around 17 feet.  My dive time at this dive site was around 36 minutes, or so.

We went back to the boat, then unloaded my gear and all of the tanks to my Trailblazer, so I could take off, as I had a date with Sarah, that I was already late for :(.  The two of them loaded Steve’s boat onto the trailer and away they went.

For the record:

I dove with around 10 pounds of weights, and was fine, until we were shallower than 10 feet, then I had to fight to stay down.  I used around 2300PSI on the first dive, and 1800PSI on the second dive.

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