![]() ![]() With the help of area shopkeepers, Bartley befriended the quarry’s owner, who was using it as a private dive site.īartley’s first idea for improving the basin was to break up the sludge, using “large hockey-puck-like” pellets that a Kentucky firm had used to purify water in third-world countries. ![]() One long-time area instructor, Barry Burton of Smoky Mountain Divers, estimated that fewer than a sixth of his students at the time, most of whom were students at nearby East Tennessee State University (ETSU), never obtained C-cards, due to this lack of a local site for practice and checkout dives.īartley’s search eventually led to Gray Quarry. Driving the 150+ miles to the closest training sites-former quarries south of Knoxville, Tennessee-was an inconvenience that prospective divers either would not or could not manage. This calling took the form of a search for a place in northeastern Tennessee where people-particularly young people-could learn to dive.Īt the time when Bartley began his search, northeastern Tennessee had no good sites where novices could train. ![]() After earning his open water certification in 1995 and traveling to the Caribbean, Bartley felt “called,” as he put it in reference to his Christian faith, to share with others the beauty that he and future wife Debi had experienced as divers. Wayne Bartley, the guy behind Gray Quarry, grew up as a “water rat” along nearby Boone Lake. Aerator assembly dive crew with Wayne Bartley (far right). ![]()
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