Autumn does not really start on the Lake's bottom until October. All the seasons in general lag a month behind the seasons found on shore. The Lake's water temperature does not fluctuate as the land's does. There are no Indian summer days; no early frosts. The temperature never varies more than a degree or two throughout a day or even a week. In spring the Lake gradually gets warmer one degree at a time and in the Fall the decrease proceeds in the opposite direction on the same slow scale. Summer usually extends till the end of September because of the retained heat of the water and winter carries over into April and even sometimes into May, depending upon the amount of ice built up over the winter. Generally it seems the Lake cools quicker than it heats up. This might be because when ice covers the water the suns energy does not penetrate into the water but is reflected off by the ice.
       One of the first signs that Autumn has arrived on the reef is that the sponges begin to form gemmules bodies. Both the green and brown sponges begin to change colors just as the leaves change colors in the trees on shore.
                            Below a sponge surrounded by laison growth beginning
                                to form gemmule bodies as it prepares for winter.

           The laison on the rock's surface is slowly disappearing and the algae, cladophora, is also becoming shorter and less abundant.

                        Below, most of the rocks are free of laison and the
                           cladophora is quite short on the boulders.

              All of the rocks seen in the photo above and below are rocks that were dropped from the glacier that formed the Lake. In the lower photo can be seen the "bedrock" of the reef, the hard blue clay. This clay is one of those little mysteries I love and one I'm sure a geologist could clear up in a minute. When I think of rock stratification I assume that clay should be on top of rocks. That clay when it is compressed by overlaying sediment turns to into slate. But in the case of the area at Avon Point the clay lies some twenty feet below the shale. The fact that the clay is under the shale is one of the reasons the shale cliffs collapse. The underlying clay when it is exposed to wave action rather quickly is eroded away causing the overlaying shale cliff to fall into the Lake, thus the reef was formed. Why the clay is under the shale I would guess is because two different geologic process occurred. First the clay was deposited and than the silt that would later become shale overlaid it. but not enough shale was laid to form enough pressure to turn the clay into slate. All speculation but mental fun.
 

     And while were on the subject of clay and mysteries the photo below contains two of my favorites. The picture is a clasp of small ridges formed by the clay. The ridges are about two to three inches high and about the same across ( look closely at the photo and you can see Zebra mussels living on the ridges which gives a good indication of their size) These ridges run parallel to the shore and the mystery is what formed them. My guess would be that the stream that used to run off from shore at one time extended further out into the Lake. The original stream is only a trickle of its former self since a a larger ditch was cut to drain the wetlands that surrounded this part of the Lake. The erosion of that stream is what formed the small ridges, again pure speculation.
     The second mystery are the gray bands running at the top and bottom of the ridges. I haven't a clue what geologic process laid those beautifully uniform ribbons.
 

     This spring and summer have been terrible for someone wanting to do underwater photograph, between the wave action and the runoff from the rain the Lake never had great visibility all summer. Only this month, October, have there been day with enough water clarity to take any photos.

     Below are photos that give a sense of what the reef looks like

       The importance of scale was first brought to my attention on studying chaos theory. How long is the coast of Maine? The answer to that question is determined by scale you measure it with. Measure it around each bay you get one figure, measure it around each small rock in every bay gives you another larger figure, measure it around each grain of sand and the coast of Maine becomes enormous. For some reason, underwater, gliding over the reef, I loss the sense of scale I have on land. While the rocks above are no more than one to one and a half feet in height they seem to loom much larger. The rock below tilts up only between two and three feet above the bottom but it dominates the whole area. I think several factors are responsible for this. One, the perspective from which their viewed has changed from the parallel to looking down. Two, the horizon is so much closer and the field of view so much narrower that those things that stand out clearly appear larger than they would on land, related to this is that viewing anything underwater through a diving mask magnifies what is being seen by 1.5 time. A rock five feet in length will appear to be seven and a half feet long.

     While I may be at peace swimming around these rocks I realize that this sense of peace is only held because of my size. I'm the biggest animal on the reef. This is not a serene world but one of swift violence. The violence of the wave generated currents and the violence of the hunter. Because animals are so much more numerous in an aquatic system then they are on land it seems at times that all about me are gnashing teeth, slithering harpoons, and filtering traps. Small teeth, harpoons and traps when compared with my scale, but innumerable and deadly on the scale that life is found on the reef.
 
 

       What I'm always so startled at is the difference in worlds that are juxapostioned so closed together. Cars are racing along the road that follows the Lake's shore and people everywhere meandering through their lives while in the world pictured here, a rock's throw from land, life goes on as if it were on a different planet. While the biological processes are the same: the suns energy, DNA, evolution, metabolism, birth and death - the processes take place in a different medium, water rather than air which changes the whole physics.
        This is realm of animals. Because algae multiplies so quickly and pound for pound algae is more nourishing than cellulose containing plants the waters of the Lake are able to support a far greater number of animals in a given area of space than the same amount of land area. The algae grows all through the water column of the reef as the water never attains a depth that sunlight can't reach

      I use to wonder if perhaps I had some kind of mental aberration in having spent so long studying this small area of a very great lake. I have no illusions of the scientific community taking my research seriously but that doesn't matter, for I'm doing all the things I really love. I feel at home in the water, I was never any good at any sport but I can swim well. And to explore a new world, to really get to know a place totally foreign is an adventure not to be missed. The chance to discover new things, like the growing cycle of the Zoothamniums (see Peritech link) or the disappearance of the snails are what keep whole project going. And the danger, this isn't Disneyland, to screw up down here may mean death, as careful as I am I know that this whole fascination of mine can in an instant be fatal. That possibility adds a certain charm to the whole undertaking.
 

   Somewhere too, down here, is a ship that began this whole project. After all these years I know where it is not. Whenever I talk about the Lake's biology, a subject I tend to expound on, people's eyes seem to glaze over and they generally loss interest in any thing I have to say. But if I mention the word shipwreck, men especially, suddenly take a keen interest and they keep trying to steer anything I have to say back to that subject. This has always been a mystery to me. What is so compelling about shipwrecks? The only thing I can think of is that the word shipwreck is unalterably linked in peoples minds with treasure. Now I can be almost positive that the wreck that took place somewhere around here has no chance of having any treasure associated with it. I'm only interested in it because it displays a type of construction never seen on the Great Lakes. Wooden ship hull construction is one of the rather arcane subjects that I have had to pick up along the way and the hull of this ship has a couple of bizarre characteristics.

       But even if I never find the ship I will always thank the shipwright who on building his boat in such an unheard of fashion opened the door for me to the hauntingly beautiful world that is photographed here.