As we were gearing up, Heather discovered she’d forgotten her primary mask and her heated vest controller. She had a backup mask, so I took the opportunity to register, very subtly, my amusement at this unusual oversight.

A few minutes later, chest deep in the water, rebreather loop in my mouth, ready to descend, I reached for my own heated vest controller.

Dead battery.

I pulled the loop out of my mouth. “Karma’s a bitch,” I said. “No heat.”

Heather laughed ~ not sympathetically.

We dove anyway. Mid-May had arrived topside with sunshine and temperatures pushing sixty degrees. Lake Superior had not received the memo. At depth she offered 35-degree water with all the warmth of a DMV waiting room. Heather in a leaky backup mask with an outdated prescription. Both of us without functioning heat.

We lasted just under an hour before admitting defeat.

It was an excellent reminder that the expensive heated vests we purchased last year were not, in fact, a luxury item.

The following day I was back underwater in Wisconsin ~ solo this time ~ collecting invasive Chinese mystery snails in nearly 60-degree water. After Lake Superior, it felt genuinely tropical.

There is something quietly satisfying about a solo dive. No hand signals. No keeping track of another diver. No social contract underwater. Just you, your equipment, and whatever is going about its business down there.

Whitefish Lake has become something close to familiar. I’ve made more than 170 dives there. Descending through the green water feels like a neighborhood I know the layout of. The snails were back in numbers roughly similar to last year, perhaps slightly down.

Whether we’re actually making a difference remains genuinely unclear. We’re probably not eradicating them. Maybe slowing their spread. Maybe just delaying the inevitable while getting paid a surprising amount to do it.

It’s an odd job. The stories are better than the pay, and the pay is much better than you’d expect.

Apparently those stories are interesting enough that Lake Tides magazine recently ran a piece on the removal effort. Most of the photos they selected featured my daughter Grace ~ who spent two weeks in July doing this, once, and has somehow become the public face of invasive species management in Wisconsin. I have been doing this for five years. I appear in zero photos. Grace shows up for two weeks, lands the magazine spread, and when I told her about it she thought about it for approximately three seconds before moving on with her life.

Lake Tides has an excellent editor.

Not long after the article ran, I got a call from Colleen, director of the Fish Lake association. Another Wisconsin lake. Another snail problem. She’d seen the article ~ the article featuring my daughter ~ and wanted advice.

This is how I accidentally became one of the people Wisconsin calls when it has a snail problem.

After a call and several emails, I agreed to do a survey dive and document snail concentrations around the lake. Fish Lake is extremely shallow ~ bottoming out around 25 or 30 feet. For much of the dive I was filming near the bottom while my tank occasionally broke the surface above me. It felt, not to put too fine a point on it, like I was wildly overdressed. A snorkel would have handled nearly all of it.

I put together a detailed report and video for Colleen. She offered to hire me for collection work.

I sent her Heather’s contact information instead.

So yes. Busy.

That was just yesterday, so we’re still waiting to hear if Heather has a new career in underwater gastropod retrieval. Life takes some unexpected turns.

As for the retaining wall ~ I’ve been considering my options. Do it myself, which is how I got into this situation in the first place. Hire someone. Let nature do its slow restoration and check again in fifty years. Or simply avoid looking at that corner of the yard until the problem resolves itself, ideally on someone else’s watch.

My back voted. It was not close.