Fantasy Lake: Scuba divers can explore an 1800s rock quarry in Rolesville

Amy Paur and her two students have the largest scuba diving park on the East Coast to themselves. All 70 acres. They’re wearing dry suits, meaning, if the dive goes as planned, only the space around their mouths and eye masks will get wet.

Earlier this morning, Paur joked about the water today being the coldest she’s ever dived in.

“Hopefully it hasn’t hit the 30s,” she said, wrestling her bright red Chuck Taylor high tops over her dive boots. “If it has, I might cry a little into my mask.”

But out here at the descent buoy, she displays the signature stoicism of a seasoned diver. Her eyes are bright, voice steady as she leads her students through a series of in-water stretches.

Before she descends, Paur asks to take a selfie. Then, regulator in mouth, she raises the hose of her buoyancy control device, a type of inflatable vest, above her head. She presses the deflation valve and begins to sink down, down, down – Chucks first – to a wooden platform 20 murky feet below.

For Paur and the hundreds of other avid divers living in and around the Triangle, Fantasy Lake – no matter the temperature – is a scuba paradise. And it boasts a long, strange history.

First came the great flood.

Next: the owner of a hair-styling school, a 310-pound bearded man called “Cannonball” and a traveling burlesque show.

That’s the story behind the creation of Fantasy Lake Adventure Park, and it begins all the way back in the 1850s, when the site was home to the Rolesville Rock Quarry.

By the late 1940s, the 100-acre quarry was one of the largest in the nation, supplying construction of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel. In 1948, the Raleigh Times reported that the quarry produced more stone than any operation south of the Mason-Dixon line.

In 1950, operations at the quarry ceased after a spring was hit, and the site began taking on water quicker than workers could bail it out. Twenty years later, Raleigh-based developers had the idea to transform the quarry into a Disney-esque water theme park called Crystal Lake. That idea was abandoned after developers discovered that the lake was still taking on water.

In 1979, Doye Sherrill, then-owner of Sherrill’s University of Hair Styling in Raleigh, bought the lake and the surrounding property.

In the time between the quarry’s closing and Sherrill’s acquisition, the lake had become a local hangout for sunbathers, swimmers and scuba divers, and it had garnered a seedy reputation in the process. Rumors floated around about an illegal moonshine operation, a forest-dwelling gunman targeting divers, midnight drug drops from a four-seater plane.

“We’d go out in the mornings and the deal was, there was a guy who lived in an old trailer and you’d just slip a dollar under his door,” diver Dave Farrar told the Raleigh News & Observer in 1995 when asked about the years before Sherrill took over.

In the early 80s, Sherrill transformed the lake into a scuba diving haven with the help of Paul “Cannonball” Bloch – a former carnival manager who met Sherrill in 1961 while managing a traveling burlesque show. Cannonball had taken his performers to Sherrill’s salon to get their hair done.

“Almost 20 years later the men came across each other again. This time in Key West, Fla.” wrote the News & Observer in a 1989 profile about Sherrill. “They had a few laughs and Mr. Sherrill brought Cannonball back to North Carolina to settle.”

At the time, Sherrill wasn’t a diver himself, but after buying the property and meeting with the fishermen, swimmers and divers who frequented the lake, he settled on a scuba park because “divers would be the easiest to deal with because they were the nicest.”

Sherrill fixed up what used to be a diesel truck maintenance shack, according to his son Sonny Sherrill, and called it home. With Cannonball’s help, he installed docks and underwater platforms, sunk a 1960 Volkswagen and erected a watery replica of Elvis’ grave. A small dive shop opened on the property and the lake became a hotspot for divers around the country.

It caught the attention of an international diving magazine and served as a set for John Shultz’s second film, “Bandwagon.” In the late 90s, the divers from East Carolina University who discovered artifacts from Blackbeard’s ship, The Queen Anne’s Revenge, trained in the lake. People were married there – underwater.

“He had worked hard all his life, and he was ready to recreate,” Sonny Sherrill said. “I think that Fantasy Lake was his dream work. Here was a place of escape. It was a place where he could just be himself.”

Sherrill died in October 2021 at the age of 87. A memorial service was held at Fantasy Lake.

Today, the park features a variety of underwater attractions, including a sunken plane, a basketball hoop with bowling balls to shoot, and three deep holes with depths from 60 to 80 feet. The entrance fee for divers is $20 per day and $5 for non-diving guests. The park also offers primitive campsites for $5 a night.

As in the days of Sherrill and Cannonball, the park attracts divers from all over the country. For North Carolina divers, part of the pull is the proximity of the lake in comparison to other underwater arenas, such as the Graveyard of Atlantic off the Outer Banks.

“For the Triangle community, Fantasy is like 45 minutes (away),” said Cat Harris, research associate at Divers Alert Network in Durham. “So, if I wanted to go to (somewhere farther), it’s a whole lot more planning than, ‘Hey, when we get off today at 5, let's go over to Fantasy.’ ”

In June 2021, Daniel Cox purchased the 100-acre property for $2.2 million.

The summer prior, he’d trekked out to the lake from Raleigh for an afternoon dive with his son. There, Cox saw an opportunity: the property was in need of renovations, and he owned a landscaping and grading business.

“(Owning a scuba park) was definitely not on my radar,” said Cox, who began diving seven years ago. “I've always liked new ideas and new ventures, and recreation was definitely not part of one that I've ever thought of. But it's here, so we'll make the best of it.”

Evident in the crews of landscapers that have been a constant at the lake over the past few months, what Cox lacks in scuba experience, he makes up for in his commitment to restoration.

Cox and his crews have repaired dilapidated docks, built gazebos, installed turf and more.

“We want to beautify the whole property and make it into a destination spot for divers and for recreation,” Cox said. “I know that the safety aspect of it is the number one key just because of the dangers of cliffs.”

In the summer, crowds can reach up to 200 on the weekends. Cox wants to continue with that kind of turn out, and, he hopes, increase it.

Down on the wooden platform, Paur observes as her students complete a series of skill checks. They remove their masks, replace them and clear the water by pulling the seal away from their cheeks and blowing bubbles out of their noses as they gently tilt their heads to the sky.

Next comes the fun part: a chance to explore. Following the yellow rope zig-zagged across the lake’s floor, Paur leads the divers toward a large white object. A few feet closer and you can make out a window at the nose of the structure, a dull red stripe painted down the body. Even closer and what was once a blurry blob becomes the skeleton of a sunken plane.

The divers flutter past the plane as small silver fish dance below them. A few minutes later, a sunken bus comes into view.

This isn’t the scene of a crime, or of some terrible accident. Both vehicles were logged with water on purpose and they’re here to be admired, explored. But still, down in the murky blue water, fingers numb, there’s an eeriness to it all.

Cannonball put it best in 1989: “It’s part of the mystique of rock quarries,” he told the News & Observer.

To non-divers – and new divers – swimming past these sunken giants can sound nightmarish. Wearing what looks like a blacked-out spacesuit, you splash into frigid waters and drop down to the floor of a lake where you can barely see. On the way down, you have to remember to pinch your nose and puff your cheeks with air, equalizing, so your ear drums don’t burst. You have to breathe slow and steady, and monitor your body for signs of hyperthermia.

But for some reason – maybe it’s the wonder of exploring what seems like an entirely different world; maybe it’s the chance of seeing one of the giant orange koi Sherrill released into the water decades ago; or maybe it’s the adrenaline that accompanies the inherent danger in diving – it’s worth it.

“It’s incredible,” Paur said. “The feeling of weightlessness and some sensory deprivation gives me so much peace in such a loud world.”