We had our Annual Treasure Hunt/Clean Up/BBQ down at Sand Hollow this year. Sand Hollow is a reservoir outside of Hurricane near St George. We had heard good things about it but since it is a 4 hour drive we had never made it. Well, everything we had heard was true.
The water was warm, the vis was great and it was a good time.
We got down there late Friday and the the first you notice is the heat, is was still hot at 9pm! The forecast was for a high around 105* We rolled out of camp around 9am and went over to the lake to start setting up and sneak in a dive. The dive area is located to the right of the boat ramp in a buoyed off area where no boats can come. The dive area extends out to some rock islands about 100 yards off shore. The water is a short walk down from the parking area. You can enter from a relatively sandy area. We were on the look out for a platform, a VW bus, a buoyancy course and an airplane. We found the platform right away (the fact that there is a buoy on it might have helped), From there we left on a heading of 60* for about 100 feet and ran into some pipes that you can swim through. We headed up a canyon and found more of the buoyancy course. Rings and hula-hoops you can swim through that are anchored to the bottom. On the right hand side, top of the canyon we found a concrete block with a rope attached. This lead us to the VW bus. Some of the doors are off so you can swim inside if you are careful. At this point I needed to head back so I missed the plane.
I have heard conflicting reports on the location of the plane. There is a larger island directly off shore and if you drop down on more of the left hand side you should see it on the bottom at about 40'.
The visibility was great. When we got in it was 30 feet. By the end of the day with about 70 divers in pretty much the same area, it was still 15'+. People who had dove earlier in the week said it was 40'+ when no one else was around and there were less boats in the water. The water temp was in the high 70's. There was a thermocline around 40 feet. There were plenty of fish including some good size small mouth bass.
The BBQ/Dive Along was great. We got about 3 big garbage bags full of junk from the lake. People dove all day and had a great time. We had a lot of stuff to give away from our manufacturers. We placed 30 numbered golf balls out in the lake ( about 7 are unaccounted for) and between the garbage and the golf balls almost everyone went home with a prize.
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