This week was a solid mix of exploration, skill work, and a reminder that nature—and construction projects—have a way of humbling even the best-laid dive plans.

On Monday, Heather and I pointed the car north toward the Embarrass Pit, one of those delightfully unglamorous names that Minnesota scatters about like so much gravel. The pit, just outside Aurora, is another of the region’s abandoned iron mines, now quietly impersonating a lake. Last summer, I dove it solo to about 30 feet and remember thinking the place was suspiciously clear—and suspiciously dead. No fish, no weeds, no bugs, nothing. It was like diving in a glass of distilled water and wondering if it might dissolve you out of spite.

This time I’d done a bit more homework. Rumor—well, YouTube—suggested there were submerged mining structures lurking in its depths, waiting for divers like us to come along and explore. The video was ten years old and about the quality of early surveillance footage, but it showed divers driving in on a dirt double track. When we tried to find said road, it had a locked gait preventing access. So we gave up and launched from the boat ramp on the north side—the same spot I used last year.

Now, boat launches in Minnesota are usually tranquil affairs, but this one had a construction site right beside it. A serious operation, too—big cranes, industrial hoses, the kind of gear you’d expect to see if they were tunneling to China or summoning Godzilla. A pipe ran into the water, bubbling away like an unattended cappuccino machine. Whatever they were doing, I figured it was none of my business, which, in hindsight, was an optimistic miscalculation.

We geared up and dropped. At first, visibility was tolerable—15 feet, enough to make sense of the bottom contours—but as we followed the shoreline west and descended to 40 feet, it turned to soup. Visibility dropped to three feet, maybe two. The bottom was coated in fine black sediment, which made the world disappear into an unsettling, featureless void. For a few moments, I drifted in utter darkness, nothing to gauge my position. A quick signal later, and we began our ascent—time to call it a dive.

Rather than pack up and leave, we turned the dive into a skills session in the shallows. DSMB launches, diluent flushes, boom drills—practical, confidence-building work. After a while, Heather suggested no-fin drills. I’d seen them on social media—divers hovering perfectly still without so much as a flick of a toe. In reality? It’s like trying to balance a broomstick on your palm in a wind tunnel. We managed, eventually, but not without plenty of rolling and arm flapping. A great exercise for trim and buoyancy awareness, though. It revealed just how much I unconsciously use my fins for stability.

Tuesday took me to Whitefish Lake, normally my snail-collecting day, but that plan changed with a text from Karen at the lake association. Wisconsin DNR had confirmed Eurasian watermilfoil. For those who don’t spend their evenings reading aquatic botany reports, Eurasian watermilfoil is an invasive plant with a knack for domination. It outcompetes everything else, forming dense mats that tangle props, snarl fishing lines, and smother native species. To make matters worse, it hybridizes with native milfoil, so identifying it requires the keen eye of a botanist—or at least good photos. Instead of pulling snails, I spent the dive photographing suspect plants and logging GPS coordinates. Honestly, far more interesting than picking snails, and the work matters—uncontrolled milfoil can turn a lake from a healthy fishery into a weedy wasteland.

Tuesday night was quietly momentous—Shari and I celebrated our 30th wedding anniversary. Thirty years. On paper, that sounds like a geological age, but somehow it feels like yesterday that I was manning the floor-covering department at Menards while she was working in Human human resources at Progress Castings, and we’d meet up most evenings to work out at the Northwest Athletic Club. We were just two kids, sweating side by side, imagining a life neither of us could fully picture yet.

We marked the milestone at the Boat Club, perfectly perched on Lake Superior. On a summer night like this, it might be the single best dinner view within 500 miles—the lake stretched out like a sheet of blue glass, the air clean and cool. Dinner was wonderful, but what stayed with me was the simple fact of sitting across from Shari after three decades and realizing, with something close to astonishment, how lucky I still feel. The years have been fast and slow all at once—racing past, yet leaving behind the kind of life that feels rich enough to linger in. It was, in every sense, a perfect evening.