Roger on a dive at Lake Beulah, near East Troy, last month, coming up to the ice hole.

For most of us, winter means staying warm and dry and cozy indoors. But for help desk manager and scuba diver Roger Arnesen, it’s the best time of year to get in the water.

“It’s much nicer in the wintertime, because the water clarity is better,” he says. “Also, you can bring your gear right up to the hole and leave it on the ice, and not have to walk a block from the car carrying all this heavy stuff.”

Roger started diving nine years ago, after getting the name of an instructor from an acquaintance, and began making it a weekly practice a short time later. He’s part of a group of about a dozen members who met through the dive shop where they were certified. About eight make it out each week to whichever Wisconsin lake they happen to settle on.

“It’s kind of like a coin toss,” he says of how the group decides on its destinations. “We really should make a wheel with the names of the lakes and spin that.”

Roger’s friend Pete getting ready to enter the water at Lake Beulah.

Roger’s dives usually take him between 30 and 80 feet underwater. Air tanks and hoses are cold-water-ready when purchased, but he does don a dry suit at this time of year. (Some of his companions stick with wet suits, filling them with hot water before entering the lake.) During the winter, the group splits into two for safety reasons, so that the tethered divers always have someone to haul them back up onto the ice in the event of an emergency. The divers typically stay within 200 feet of the hole while they’re under. “If something happens, the person tending the rope is gonna be pretty tired by the time they pull you back in,” Roger says.

The deepest he’s been is 200 feet — he did what he calls a “bounce dive,” just touching down and then heading right back up.

Roger at the bottom of Lake Beulah last month.

Roger names Okauchee Lake as his favorite, and says the group also gets out to Pewaukee Lake and Pine Lake regularly. Some of the divers collect antique “torpedo” bottles, which beer and soda and other beverages were sold in during the 1800s, and it’s routine to find plenty of other artifacts on a lake bottom, such as fishing poles, sunglasses, and anchors.

On a warmer dive in Cozumel, Mexico, he once got to touch a 4-foot-long nurse shark.

“It was sleeping underneath a reef, and when it woke up and came out, we were within a foot of it. It was like a petting zoo!” he says.

During the winter, similar encounters with the shark’s northerly cousins are even easier to have, he notes, because fish slow down considerably in the chillier water.

“You’re not supposed to grab them, but you could,” Roger says. “It’s pretty cool.”