====The water is cool on the skin, but that’s OK because it’s a 91-degree, cloudless day in Wisconsin’s Oneida County. I pull on my fins, spit in my face mask and rub the saliva around to keep it from fogging up. I rinse the inside, slip it over my face, and, breathing through my snorkel, glide over the sandy shallows of Clear Lake. Floating face down in the clear shallows, I watch the sunlight play on the green and gold bottom. Fish dart and hover, at times coming up to peer into the mask of this strange interloper.

My wife, Kathy, and I were first drawn to snorkeling, and its higher-tech cousin scuba diving, after experiencing coral reef snorkeling in Florida and around several Caribbean islands some 15 years ago. The otherworldly aspect of crystal clear waters inhabited by blue, yellow, green, red and silvery fish swimming in gardens of hard and soft corals hooked us big time. But these days, we can’t afford to visit these destinations very often. There’s also that feeling of guilt we get about the depth of the carbon footprint left behind by taking such trips.

So a number of years back we began to take our snorkeling gear up to Devil’s Lake, about an hour north of our home in Madison, Wisconsin. It’s a landlocked, spring-fed lake in Wisconsin’s busiest state park. It’s beloved by rock climbers for its 500-foot-high quartzite cliff faces and to hikers for its miles of trails that wind throughout the park and up the steep bluffs. Divers and snorkelers from southern Wisconsin and northern Illinois flock to the lake for the chance to experience clear warm water and some prime fish watching.

Devil’s Lake gets roiled up by the hundreds of swimmers on the beach in the water by midsummer, so two years ago, we decided to go a little further afield for our underwater fix. Besides, we were looking for some place new. I found a website that measures lake clarity using satellite imagery. The color-coded map images of the lakes in certain areas of Vilas and Oneida counties showed the best visibility in the state. The clarity of the water up in these counties give rise to lake names like Sparkling, Clear, Diamond, Crystal and Star. In my Gazetteer, I circled a handful of lakes in the Minocqua, Woodruff and Boulder Junction region to visit during a four-day trip of snorkeling, biking and hiking in the Northwoods.

As I propel myself gently using only my fins, I leave the little bluegills behind and head into deeper water. I can see down to the bottom some 10 or 15 feet below. Ripples on the surface filter the sunlight, and sinuous lines dance across the gold sand bottom. Where there’s a weed bed or a rock pile, there are fish, ranging from 4- to 6-inch bluegills, 8-inch black-and-silver crappies to chunky largemouth and smallmouth bass that can get up to 24 inches in size.

We swim over to the rock pile we discovered the day before. Keep your arms still, I remind myself. My stealthiness is rewarded as I hover over the boulders. A half-dozen bigger bluegills appear beneath me, their orange mottled sides flashing as they spar over a scrap of crayfish tail, swarming around it and dashing in for a quick nibble when they can. The ruckus attracts a couple of crappies, bigger duskier fish than the ‘gills. They drive off the sunfish and take up the feeding dance. Then, just like that, everybody’s gone!

Out of the corner of my mask, I see the reason why. A much, much bigger fish is barreling up from the depths. Almost too fast for my eye to capture it, this bullet train of a smallmouth bass charges and in a millisecond, bass and crayfish tail have vanished, and the bluegills venture back out from their rocky hiding holes.

There’s a lot of life under the surface. Early in the season, we’ve watched panfish in their brilliant spawning colors frantically protecting the eggs they’ve laid in their scooped-out, bowl-like nests in the gravel. If you’re lucky you’ll find perch, walleye (gotta go a little deeper for them) and Northern Pike finning motionlessly in the submersed vegetation. I’ve floated in huge schools of drifting silver-sided minnows in a tangle of branches in 2 feet of water. In Devil’s Lake one morning, I was finning along in a few feet of water when I found a school of small bass sound asleep, their heads buried in the weeds.

Witnessing the lives of fishes, their interactions, feeding, nesting, is one of my favorite aspects of snorkeling. Whether you do it in the Caribbean or here in the temperate lakes of Wisconsin, swimming with the fish opens up a whole new world to the amateur naturalist. Take a bit of cheese for bait, and hungry panfish encircle you nipping at the bait and you. The silence, as you dive down to swim underwater, is total, and the ease of skimming along 5 feet down using just fins for propulsion is just plain effortless. With a little practice and a bit of mental yoga, a snorkeler can reach farther and farther into the underwater world.

Next month: Free diving

There’s an edgier side to the diving experience that allows you to truly penetrate the depths on one breathful of air to find bigger fish and gives you a great aerobic workout, too. It’s called free diving, and next month I’ll explore this more extreme sport. I’ll talk to Jon Zeaman, one of its biggest proponents of free diving in Wisconsin. He’ll relate some wild stories about diving to depths of over 100 feet or free diving in the middle of a Wisconsin winter.

James Sajdak is an English teacher in Madison, Wisconsin. He’s been exploring Wisconsin lakes on a breathful of air for several years and its byways by bike for many years.

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