"Zipper goes in the back," he said, using the patient tone of an instructor accustomed to correcting students for any number of silly errors. I looked down. That would explain why the wet suit's protective knee pads were instead guarding the back of my knee.

Waechter and I were standing on a bluff overlooking Fantasy Lake Scuba Park, the one-time quarry turned dive mecca just southeast of Rolesville. The quarry, where Waechter's Capital Scuba dive shop is located, is celebrating its 25th year as a dive destination, and the occasion made me a little nostalgic. I'd gotten my open water certification there in 1994 but have dived less than a dozen times since, the last probably five years ago. I was curious as to how much the sport had changed.

Quite a bit, it turns out. For one, these new-fangled one-piece wet suits, as opposed to the old two-piece farmer Johns, bib overalls and a jacket (that zipped up the front).

Other changes revealed themselves during my onshore refresher course and ensuing half-hour tour of the quarry's bottom.

Some changes were relatively minor. For instance, there's now a bottled liquid called Sea Drops that you spread inside your mask to keep it from fogging. Ten years ago, we used a liquid called spit. The masks themselves are made of a more pliable silicon material and snuggle up to your face better. And they now make a split fin that makes it possible to really zip through the water, though the logic of that advancement baffles Waechter.

"I like to go slow and look around," said Waechter. They now make a fin that's better for that, too.

Quarry to dive mecca

Surprisingly, for an abandoned quarry, there's a lot to go slow and look at.

Like a monstrous rock crusher that sits in 35 feet of water.

Fantasy Lake began life in the 1850s as a quarry. From this 50-acre pit came a good bit of the rock used to build the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel. The quarry was active into the mid-1950s. Then, one day, the quarrymen struck a healthy spring. It wasn't economical to pump the water and keep mining. Though it took 30 years to fill the pit, the spring's initial flow made it impossible to retrieve the crusher.

The quarry closed and for the next 20-plus years, it was the domain of various "recreationalists." Swimmers, divers and bikers staked their claims, as did moonshiners and drug dealers. When Raleigh businessman Doye Sherrill bought the place in 1979, he assessed the various user groups and decided the scuba divers were the easiest to deal with. A barbed-wire fence went up around the 100-acre compound, admission was charged ($15 a day now), and Fantasy Lake became a dive resort (primitive campsites are scattered about).

And the rock crusher became one of the quarry's main attractions.

Sheila Johnston Sherer of Wake Forest and her father, Paul Johnston of Raleigh, got their open water certification in May to celebrate Johnston's 60th birthday. One highlight was the quarry's stellar early season visibility -- the distance you can see underwater -- of 40 feet.

"You could snorkel at the surface and see the rock crusher plain as day below," Johnston said.

"It was like flying over it," Sherer added.

The price to be paid for that crystal visibility was a chilly 59-degree water temperature. Two months later, the water was nearly 25 degrees warmer at the surface -- and the visibility just 10 to 15 feet. The culprit: algae.

That was another change I noticed from the mid-'90s. Then, the quarry was regularly treated with copper sulfate and summer visibility in the 30- to 40-foot range wasn't uncommon. In the late-'90s, it was deemed environmentally unhelpful (particularly to aquatic organisms) to treat large bodies of water with the chemical and its use was restricted to ponds of five acres or less. The tradeoff: better visibility the rest of the year.

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