Gotta brag on myself a bit. Tomorrow the scuba club is doing a “Zombie Apocalypse” dive, (I’m Dr. Romero), and one of the stations is going to be an underwater zombie shooting range (with spearguns). I got tasked this evening to setup that station.

The shop owners (both very experienced divers and instructors) had gotten 2 of the styrofoam arrow backstops. The idea was that I would take them down to 20 feet, anchor them down, and stick the targets on them. They are about 2 foot high / wide and a foot+ deep. That works out to about 4 +cubic feet.

I asked, “and how do I get them down to the bottom?”, they said “no problem, you can handle it”. (love that confidence) I ran the numbers in my head, cubic foot of water appx 62#, I’m displacing 4 of them… lets see, going to need about 250 pounds of dead weight to get them to sink. Pointed that out, they agreed that “might” be a problem.

We came up with a couple of other things we could use, I’ll have plenty of time tomorrow to come up with a working solution. Probably use some sheets of 3/4 inch foam I’ve got lying around, make a back stop with that. The spear guns aren’t that powerful, and it won’t have to last too long.

Damn, it feels good to spot a problem that would have butt-bit us tomorrow.

RBS