Local divers spend a day cleaning up Lower Lake from the bottom up

By BETH FOLEY
The Palestine Herald

PALESTINE April 20, 2008 01:39 am

— The air bubbles kept coming, rolling upward and popping at the water’s surface, a few yards from the red and white plastic bobbers floating just off the fishing pier at Lower Lake.
As a handful of fishermen watched their bobbers and lines hopefully for tugs from fish, the bubbles kept popping, sometimes moving a few feet away but staying around the same general location off the end of the pier.
It wasn’t bass in the hydrilla causing the bubbles. It was the pair of divers in wet suits and air tanks, scouring the lake’s bottom for trash to remove.
By early afternoon, a small group of dive enthusiasts from the Palestine Scuba Center already had hauled a broken television set, a muddy Herald-Press newspaper rack, a rusted Century 21 realtor’s sign and a pair of lawn chairs from the lake.
This go round, they were after a yellow 55-gallon barrel someone had spotted near the pier.
While they waited for the others to cross the lake in a small jon boat, divers Jeff Cook, a high school English teacher, and Christopher Bartley, an Eagle Scout with Troop 424, chatted with the families fishing above on the pier, telling them the biggest fish they’d seen in the clear waters within casting distance were the little minnows darting around the hydrilla and suggesting another spot closer to the spillway where they’d spotted much larger bass.
Once the rest of the group arrived, Cook, Bartley, Joseph Thompson and group leader Dale Pletcher retrieved and lifted the rusted-out barrel to 14-year-old Michael Colgrove and 12-year-old David Gean on the pier so it could be carted away with the other items.
The growing collection of trash represented a good day’s work.
“We got some of the big stuff,” Pletcher said. “We got some surprise stuff because we weren’t expecting the lawn chairs or the real estate sign.”
While the lake’s waters are clearer than most in the area, once divers are under the surface and disturbing the silt, the water clouds and makes it more difficult to determine what’s where, he said.
“You have to feel around to see if it’s something to bring out,” he said, likening the process to trying to find something in an office with the lights turned off. “Here, though, you don’t have any idea what you’re going to come up with.”
Most items had been around the pier, where they apparently had been pushed, or in the case of the lawn chairs, had blown into the water. The divers also had planned to walk the water’s edge picking up trash but found that someone had beaten them to it, he said.
“The city kind of jump-started us,” Pletcher said. “They came out Wednesday and mowed and they got up some of the stuff on the shore.”
Mayor Carolyn Salter, who came out to watch for awhile, said she was always glad to see residents take pride enough in the community to want to get out and help improve it.
“I’m very appreciative of people who spend their time, money and resources to make Palestine a better place,” Salter said. “For the Palestine Scuba Center and the local divers to clean up the lake is absolutely fantastic.”
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Beth Foley may be contacted via e-mail at bfoley@palestineherald.com

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