Diving Munising and Isle Royale National Park in Lake Superior

Hello and welcome to Divers sync, the Netcast and podcast for scuba divers. My name is Rich Synowiec and you are listening to episode 526, recorded in August of August 7, 2024, only a month late. I wanted to do one of these every month and I'm trying to get to two weeks, but I am so busy trying to be busy that it's unfortunate. And I know that I'm making a lot of big mistakes when it comes to that. But I'm also doing some good things. I'm not saying no to a lot of things. I'm doing a lot of ones onesies and twosies. We're doing a lot of training. I got into hard because were looking at June. No one was coming out for open water, no one was coming out to dive. I got into hard.

We're actually doing now starting in July, we started doing discover scubas as if it was a resort course. So we have had really good success. So if you're a scuba educator listening to this, I'm going to tell you I am shocked at how many people come out for a $250 resort course at White Star quarry and think it's the coolest thing they have ever done. We are absolutely blown away by the amount of people and we give them two choices. If you want to just breathe underwater, it's dollar 75. If you want to go on a dive after you breathe underwater, it's $250. And we have had almost everyone take the more expensive option because it's way cheaper than the actual course and they can see what's going on in that. But we have had an unbelievable amount of people.

We've done them on the 4 July weekend. We did it the weekend after that, women's dive day and then the weekend after that. So it's been really cool to see people coming out that would normally not be diverse and that's really cool. So the July though is when we start getting into shipwreck diving. Now, June in Milwaukee, the end of June, went to Milwaukee and we had. We did a tech trip and it was really cool. We did two wrecks that were just. We did one wreck that was beautiful and were supposed to do a second wreck but it was the first of the blowouts but we had great deal. Good people, good food, good captain, just a really good, good time. And then Munising the next week. Now, Munising was weird in that.

Six months ago I only had two spots left and the day before the trip. The week before the trip, so many people called and canceled that it was pretty much a private trip for two customers and my family. Needless to say, a private trip with two customers in my family is probably the most relaxing thing I have ever done. Especially when we have six people that were paying for it. The boat was paid for, the diving was paid for, the lodging was paid for, and I didn't have to worry about where the money was going to come from. And it was just the continuation of the really weird summer. And the people were. The excuses were all positive. No one got hurt. Knock on wood. No one ever gets hurt. But knock on wood. The excuses are positive.

But the excuses were things like, my grandmother's going to have her 90th birthday and I'm not going to see her for very much longer. So I think I better go out there and do it. So they'd go and take a week on vacation and they couldn't get the time off to do that charter or I forgot that I was signed up for. It was my favorite one that's happened five or six times and it's just weird. So for the most part though, we had fantastic weather right up until everybody left. Now, the way that the Munising trip is and Munising.

You guys have heard me if you've been listening to this long time podcast, gone back 526 episodes every June, every July for the past twelve years that I've talked about this, we've gone, including Covid and we've gone up there and did this kind of diving. And we do a dive trip that's a afternoon on Saturday morning on Sunday. And it was originally set up to be able to get up there on Saturday morning really early and sleep in, or get up there Friday night and still sleep in and be able to leave work after work. And the only difficult thing was up there, it gets dark late, but it's still dark when you're trying to set up a tent.

So that's kind of a little bit of a hiccup, but we have lots of extra lights and electricity and it's someone's house is a friend of mine's house that has property way back in the woods. And one year we used to camp on a property that he had up there. But then one year he moved up there and we started camping there. But the whole trip turns into better things. So we had Internet, we had grills, we had a Blackstone, we had all these cool things that you could have and a campfire and just a really good group of people this time. And what happens on the weekend is that people get up there on Friday, we have a cookout. We have a cookout in the morning, then we go to the boat.

We have a cookout in the evening, and then we sleep in. We go to the boat in the morning. And then the idea is that we'd have an afternoon cookout, and most people go and enjoy what the upper peninsula is all about. Well, both of the guys that were the two customers that we had in my family, they had been up there before. They'd done a bunch of trips before. They'd done some other trips and had other trips planned. And they had to work on Monday. So they all bailed out in the afternoon on Sunday. So we had spectacular diving, spectacular weather. Even the bugs weren't even that bad. And then they go and leave and the rain starts falling.

But here's how it worked, is I knew that I was going to have a lot of downtime because in my kick for health, I don't need naps as much as I used to. And so the idea was that I was going to go up there with some of the projects. Up to this point, my summer had been a series of five minute projects that had added up to hours. So things like. Like, I'll give you an example. That's the easiest example is that when I went to Bonaire over Christmas, I had undone, I needed some bailout bottle rigging. So I took the bailout bottle rigging off of my bailouts that were spares because I have two sets of everything. So I taken the bailout rigging off of most of my spare sets, and I never put it back on.

It's a five minute job, ten minute job, but I've never been able to allocate having everything there at the same time. So I grabbed the trailer, everything into the trailer that we don't normally travel with a trailer, but we trapped everything in trailer, and I stacked that bad boy to the ceiling with all crates of five minute jobs. And so Sunday afternoon, I had not gotten too many of my five minute jobs over the course of the weekend. But Sunday afternoon, I knew I was going to have time because everybody had said they were going to go home early, and were done pretty much at noon. So I had a good evening to be able to start on these five minute jobs. So as everybody's taking down their tents and leaving, and my family is all going out, they went frog and hunt.

They went frog looking and taking the dogs for a walk and hiking through the woods. I worked on some of my projects. I got through. Of the 20 or so projects I got through five of them when the thunderstorm started and it was a boom that I heard in the air and I'm like oh no. And at this time the last guy was packing up and I looked right at my wife and I said hey, you know what, I'm, let's go ahead and start packing stuff up so it's not all wet. And so we started packing stuff up in the camper. We made alternatives of my friend to stay on their living room floor instead of in our tent. And because it's not set up for guests and for the most part we ended up the trip with pouring rain.

But everything's still dry and I got nothing done. So I got some things done. I'm not gonna say nothing, I got something done. But the weather at least held off until were ready to go home next morning. Got up, we headed home, got home relatively early, made it, made a few more forays in just getting stuff done. And that was the Munising trip. We are going back to Munising and we go every year in the second weekend of July. And it's a relatively inexpensive trip. So there's camp because there's camping. We can make hotel or airbnb arrangements for you if you want. That's additional. The diving is all relatively shallow. Deepest dives about 90ft. The infrastructure is pretty stable. It's one of the places that we don't get weathered out because there's diving to be done.

If you're okay with shallow stuff, there's diving to be done. Even when the weather's not cooperative and rough. We can dive in the rain. It's completely enclosed boat, so we can dive in the rain. But it's one of the few places where if you were never, if you were listening to this and you're not in the Great Lakes area, never done Great Lakes diving and you're not sure about your own level of diving, I'm going to tell you that it is by far the best trip for anyone to go on because there's some dives that are really warm compared to lakes, the rest of Lake Sapir, there's some dives that are not so warm compared to the rest of lake Superior, but they're all relatively shallow. You can get them.

There's one advanced open water dive that you can do with a good briefing, you can do as an open water diver. It's sometimes dark, sometimes not, which is why it makes it advanced. And it is deeper than 60ft, but barely deeper than 60ft for the cool stuff to see. But that's the deep dive and it's a trip that we don't put a whole lot of people in. And so I can give you. And my whole family goes, and most of my family are dive masters and instructors now, or at least that level. So if we have to buddy you up with somebody that you need, we've got that taken care of. But Munising has been by far the best trip for people that have never been up there. Now, that's not the end of July that we've done.

So in the middle of July, we do Isle Royale. Now, Isle Royale National park is considered the best park in North America, the prettiest park in North America now by one of the travel magazines, but it's still the least visited. And for anybody going up there diving, it's also one of the hardest things to do if you don't own your own boat, because you have to do a live aboard and there's only one live aboard charter up there right now. There's going to be two next year. But the Isle Royale National park is the most remote place on the planet. And so when you go up there, we used to have people who couldn't go up there because they couldn't be in, out of contact with your work and all that. Well, this brings me to the next cool thing and next big thing.

Just before the trip, about a week before Munising, I got an offer from Starlink. Because I used Starlink down at the quarry, because down there we had really bad service and it just wasn't working for the POS system that were using. And so I got Starlink down there and because I got Starlink down there and I've been a long time customer, they gave me an offer that I couldn't refuse and they love doing these offers. I have an offer. If you follow us on YouTube, Facebook. I'm sorry, follow divers incorporated on Facebook. You follow. Actually follow me on Facebook. As far as rich Sinowick's course director rebreather instructor on Facebook, there's a link for a Starlink referral code and you get a free month and I get a free month, but you also get a discount on the hardware.

It doesn't count for what I'm going to tell you about, which I just found out because a couple people reached out and said, hey, we tried it, we couldn't do the mini. So what it was an offer to do the Starlink Mini. Now, this thing is the size of a laptop, an old laptop. It's a big, heavy thing, but it's the size of a laptop. It fit, and it fit in an old laptop case. And it is a full Starlink with router in the size of a laptop. And we had this at Isle Royale National park at its maiden voyage. And it's going to be, it cost me a fortune to test it and I've got, I'm going to include it in the price of the trip next time.

But for what it's worth, we had the ability to call, we had the ability to post, we had the ability to surf the Internet, we had the ability to check Facebook, we had the ability to do email, everybody had the ability to. And unfortunately, one person found out, they had the ability to upload to the cloud. And when I'm paying per gigabyte, we had to have a conversation about turning all of that stuff off. And now it's in my briefing. But the Isle Royale National park with Wi Fi turns it into one of the coolest trips you can ever hope to have. And we now have Wi Fi. We will now have Wi Fi on every trip that divers incorporated sponsors going forward. It's expensive, but it's not awful and it's not as expensive.

And the kind of, the kicker was I came back and my roaming charges when I went to, even with Wifi on the boat, my roaming charges in truck, Lagoon and Guam were $1,150. And so that was just the overcharges of roaming. And so it kind of justifies what I paid for the Starlink in National park. Now, the Isle Royale trip was supposed to be a recreational trip. I had one guy who signed up for a recreational trip, learned a couple things about that in the world. Like after the first trip where people were like, hey, go ahead, take my money, I'm not coming. I called this guy and I asked him the same thing. Hey, you're the only guy signed up for this trip right now. No one wants to go recreational. They all want to go technical this year.

Are you going to be able to go on this trip or am I pushing a bad call? Oh, I'm not going. Well, when were you going to let me know? I was going to let you know in April for a July trip. Not giving me enough time. Well, it turns out that even finding out in March was not enough time to fill the boat. So I ended up getting a couple of last minute sign ups. Thank God and one guy signed up from Sweden, which was really cool. Another one signed up, gave me a deposit, but didn't show. But the June trip was only four people, including me. So it was really cool with the Starlink, with the four people, including me. And it was just really a way back, relaxed trip, because with the technical stuff, they're one or two a days.

We don't usually do more than two dives a day, and very, even rarely that much because they're all really deep. We're all doing. We were doing 250s, were doing 140s, were doing one hundred seventy s. And so you're doing one and twos because you're in one of the most remote places on the planet. And even though you have starlink, you don't have a Starlink chamber there. So you want to be real careful with how you're diving. And the water was cold, but not awful, but it was super duper clear. And that's another trip that, if you're a technical diver wanting to get into Great Lakes, that's another one where we don't normally get blown out. Now, we did get blown out one day. We had days where it was glass.

We had three days of glass, one day of eight to ten footers, and then two more days of glass. It was the most bizarre trip to go with one of the most bizarre seasons I've ever had. And I'll take it, though, because we had some great diving and little bit long getting home. And I had to teach on Sunday, on Saturday when I was home. So I basically got off the boat, came home, switched my. I was teaching an open circuit trimix course, so switched from my rebreather to my doubles and then had to go down and start that class. And the best line I have heard in a long time came out of my daughter as I was walking back from the.

We're at the quarry at White Star, and I'm walking back across in front of the concession with my doubles on, and I'm. They are a lot heavier than I remember them being. Let's put it that way. They're way heavier than my rebreather. Even with everything on and everything hooked up. Way heavier. And as I'm walking by with these. These monstrosities on my back, and I don't even have a really big rebreather or doubles, I walk in front of my daughter looks at me and she goes, my daughter Olivia looks at me, she goes, dad. I said, yeah. She goes, you looks like your price of your trip just went up and I chuckled because, yeah, it's exactly the thought that I was having is I don't want to teach this anymore, so I'm gonna have to raise the price.

I'm really good at what I do, and so I've raised the price twice. And it's not deterred everybody from taking it, and I'm really good at that. So, but, so I probably won't and quit Trimix. But it's a little bit more difficult to do the full Trimix class now that the standards have changed a little bit deeper. But that's another discussion. So anyway, that's our July. And that was kind of what's going on with July. And I think that, I mean, we, again, we're going back in July of next year for Isle Royale. We're going back in August of next year. We have a full August trip coming up in three weeks. And I've also got some really cool August trips that I've already put on the books.

A technical weekday charter and another weekend charter for that, if you're interested in Alpina and Presquille. So those are all cool stuff that's going on. And I'm hoping that weather holds out because the reason I can do all these today is I got blown out today, but it happens. There's lots of cool stuff to do. And we do the weekday ones where it's in the afternoon, so we don't have to drive all the way up there and waste a day. So until I talk to you in a little bit, I'm going to do another episode about August. So I'm way ahead of time. And until next time, we'll see you.