We are certainly not bored with the normal cycle of Florida, Mexico and France but the opportunity arose to get in a couple of days diving in the Dominican Republic.

Booked on a family holiday, resigned to the prospect of perhaps a few days reef diving there, which is OK diving but not great, we leapt at the opportunity to go see some new caves.

Trying to find out about the caves in advance proved a little difficult as there were not too many photographs immediately available so Alastair stole most of the children's baggage allowance and worked out how to get his DSLR and strobes into a conventional holiday baggage allowance.

I hope seeing what he managed to capture you will agree that it was worth it!

Day 9 - Eagle's Nest

Having stopped hating my RB after Ginnie mainly through being away from it, and reflecting on the fact that the dive in the Nest would be more like the conditions we are used to in the UK and France, we agreed to go dive Eagle's Nest after Kevin Jones invited us to join him.

Some agencies say that if you have never seen the Little River well pipe, done the Peacock Grand Traverse, and hit the Hinkle restriction, all on a swim dive, then you probably should not be diving here. We've done all three so I guess it's time. Except....

It's funny. The only map I remembered seeing of Eagle's nest is the one in Sheck Exley's book. It shows a pit with a short tunnel and a debris mound - and it is where Sheck got his first deepest cave dive world record. For this basis, I've never been that interested in diving it. I'm not into depth for depth's sake - only if there is something to see and a pit with a debris mound is not worth the effort in my view. I said as much to Kevin when he asked us - and he laughed. 

"There is 2,250 foot of cave upstream" he said "About a 40 minute scooter round trip. Cave that is big enough to drive 4 large trucks side by side, boulders as big as buses." "You don't want to see that?"

Erm..... 



So, predictably I guess, Saturday found us heading to Eagle's nest. Eagle's Nest is a large cave system on Chassahowitzka Wildlife Management Area property about the woods near Weeki Wachee. 

The good news is that a good road has been provided all the way to the sink and a wooden deck and staircase have been installed for easy access. The bad news is that the sink is now 12 miles from the current access even though it is less than a mile from the closest paved road. Getting to the nest can be as hard as the dive and it is best to go with someone who had been there several times before since the hunting roads can become an incredible maze. 

We geared up with Kevin and Freddie - Kevin's buddy - who unfortunately had a scooter failure prior to the dive so did not end up coming along. It was very, very hot. 100 degrees at one point which saw Kevin towelling off before the dive.

We headed in, Al and I on RB80s, Kevin on a KISS, each with 3 deco gases. We dropped O2 on the log that Kevin pointed and headed down. The trip down the shute was fun - Kevin headed down fast but after a solid week of diving we were protecting our ears and took it a little more slowly. Our eyes adjusted and we followed the line down to the top of the debris cone at around 38 metres where we dropped both our O2 and our 35/25. We had dropped down on 35/25 so had to switch to 15/55 for the dive which took a minute or two and then unpinned the scooters.



There is little chance of going wrong at Eagle's nest. The lines are almost idiot proof and the huge oversized line arrows even have upstream and downstream written on them. I guess it was designed for the deep air divers who explored this cave.

We headed down and down to the duck under at about 85 meters, maybe five minutes or so into the dive. This is where Sheck's record breaking dive, and therefore his map, had ended. We had only just begun.

First the super room - and my god it was super. A huge, huge room which the three of us managed to light by distancing ourselves abreast on the line. The tunnel loomed ahead, huge and blue with slabs which were the size of family cars lying about on the floor.

King's challenge was another huge room, although it could have been hard to judge where tunnel ended and room began such is the scale of this place. Al's light caught the ceiling and I stopped, marvelling at the sight of the scalloped cave ceiling so massive a force of nature had been required to make this wonderful place. I then caught sight of my gauge and saw it was 75 metres or so and stopping was maybe not that bright.

After 20 minutes of bottom time I thought about turning the dive. A 40 minute dive at 80 odd metres is quite a burden for decompression. I moved over to the line to read the distance and saw we had a bare 100 feet to go to the end of the line. Impossible. This huge cave cannot end in 100 feet.

But it did. Like someone had slammed a door shut. There was a small crack low down which if where they are looking to extend the cave line a little further but it pretty much ends as dramatically as it started. Kevin hollers like a redneck and scooters round in a neat loop - although a barrel roll would have been far more flash and we go out. 



I'm supposed to lead out having been in position three on the way in but I don't want to. I'm selfishly enjoying the way that the others lights light up the immense space and am jealously guarding every minute, trying to commit it to memory.

About half way out Kevin starts to slow down. I look back and his scooter is stopping and starting. Hey ho - time to try that new way of towing I think - when I realise that he is fossil hunting. 

A rock as big as a bus full of sand dollars, another full of shells and urchin spikes. We are at 75 metres, 30 minutes in to a 45 minute bottom time and we are fossil hunting. I check my gas and I've used 20 bar. My rebreather becomes my friend again. 

Deco. Long. Worth it.

Deco from 36 to 21 is in the cavern roof - we find nooks and crannies to peer into and it passes quickly. 

Deco from 21 to 15 is in the shaft. Not fun with so little room to move - we are stacked like pancakes. Kevin and I have a conversation via wetnotes with him on his back - cheeks puffed out like a hamster.

Deco at 6 is long. Very long - but they have at least installed a very large catfish in a hole in a tree trunk for entertainment. Kevin tries to attract it to his light head - and it bites it.


I ask Al for his wetnotes - and I write...

Don't want to dive tomorrow. Want to do something else. Can't top this.

He nods and I know he feels the same way.

Thanks to 

Extreme Exposure - especially Paul who bent over backwards to help us. 
Halcyon - Casey who is a pleasure to dive with and could not be more encouraging or helpful and Corey who again did all that he could to help us go diving.
Cave Adventures - Edd it was a pleasure, you and Stacey are the only way we want to dive the Millpond - you are a credit to the diving community. 
Kevin - a good laugh and a very solid buddy who was a joy to have along. can't recommend him as a driver to get you home though

Whilst we gassed up for the Ressel, we make contact with some of the guys from the EKPP and are invited to go to Doux de Coly for a dive. The Doux is located in the Dordogne, in the middle of France, about an hour and a half north of where we are staying. The profile of this cave is similar gas wise to our planned dive at Ressel so we head over for a dive.

We start putting the kit together and start labelling the 14 stages we need – to find that one of the rebreather deco bottles is missing. It is a two hour round trip but there is no choice, John heads back to Lynne’s whilst Simon and I continue to build and check the kit.Doux de Coly is a beautiful setting and after getting very hot lugging and prepping the kit, we took photos and relaxed in the sun, joined by AM and JP after their first dive. Our intention had been to get everything ready to go when John came back. With Simon able to build John’s RB this worked quite well although, due to Bastille day, his round trip took him nearly three hours which was no fun at all.Finally we were all at the site, ready to go and we started kitting up. We had put the stages in on a line but unfortunately one of the scooters was so heavy it had dragged everything into a mess in a muddy pile so it was a bit of a lucky dip trying to get the six stages I needed in some semblance of order. A bit of confusion about light heads meant that AM and JP had to help us sort out our lights in the water but finally we were good to go. We dropped down in to the cave and John led off. The passage in the Doux runs at between 4 and 8 metres for about 300 metres before getting to a shaft which is between 6 and 36, the cave then drops down quite quickly to between 50 and 60 metres. It is wide and the viz was around 10 – 15 metres so a very nice experience for me on my first visit there. It was obvious quite quickly that Simon was having a miserable time – his stages were not sitting properly and he was being twisted in the water by them. I asked him to come up into position two so I could better keep an eye on him and, knowing that things would improve once he could drop some of the bottles, we continued to limp into the cave. The trip in took us 25 minutes – over twice as long as it should have done but we were able to drop the O2 bottles at the top of the shaft and start to drop down. The shaft itself is stunning, red rivulets of rock forming a wide shaft easily large enough for three divers kitted up as we were with redundant scooters and large numbers of stages, to sit comfortably and drop down. I had four bottles to move at this point so it took me a fair bit of time to get sorted and comfortable. I was only at 32 metres but it was amazing that getting on to the trimix still had a noticeable impact on my comfort and I relaxed. John waved Simon through and he led off. The tunnel is perhaps ten or so metres wide in points although at two to three metres not very high. Viz remained good and we made good progress with Simon much more comfortable now he had dumped two of his bottles. Following the line (or indeed multiple lines) was challenging at times and I spent a fair while studying the passage to be confident that I could navigate out if needed. We had done about 1,000 metres again when John indicated that he wished to turn the dive. We headed out quickly and, unsure whether anything was wrong when we got to my first stage drop I just picked it up and hip clipped it without switching to it in case speed was required. I had plenty of gas and 60 meters down, a kilometre back in a cave is not the time to stop to ask questions.We reached the shaft and I first switched back on to the 36 metre bottle and then sat there sorting out everything for the ascent. I knew that having used this gas on our protracted entrance to the cave I would not have enough to see me to 21 through the stops so monitored it and switched back to back gas for the last couple of stops. Simon and I remained quite concerned about John despite his assurances that he was good and boxed him in quite tightly in case of issues – leading to him remarking after the dive that he was sure that the shaft had got a lot smaller whilst we had been diving.The main body of the decompression is made midwater in the shaft at the Doux. We made all the required switches and after sitting for a while on O2 at the top of the shaft we scootered the 600 metres out to the cavern area where we completed the remaining deco with a total run time of almost exactly three hours.

Surfacing, John explained that he had just had one of those dives, the stop start nature of the entry had been very difficult for him as the scooter he was towing was very negative and each time we stopped he had struggled to get it clear of the floor or the line. Going further than 1,000 metres at that depth was just not somewhere he wanted to be that day which was fine. Simon suggested that it would be good to have a sign underwater for ‘I’ve had enough but all is well’ for those moments when the planned dive is no longer desirable to one of the divers but there is no problem that the team should be aware of.

The kit went back in the van very quickly and painlessly and we headed back to Cales where we headed straight for dinner. Tomorrow will be a day off – we are all shattered and have kit to fix and gas to blend for Monday’s big dive.

Day 8 - Alachua

Back to Open Circuit for a dive at Alachua Sink. Alachua is a guided only dive (100 cave dives post-full certification required) due to the extreme low visibility of the site and the depth. Access to Alachua is strictly controlled by the NSS-CDS as they are responsible for managing the property to protect the resources. We've not dived it before but had arranged to go diving with Bill Main (yes - Bill Hogarthian Main - the grand daddy of cave diving - and he offered to take us to Alachua. I thought all my birthdays had come at once.

Going diving with Bill was a joy, an education and a humbling experience. This modest, unassuming guy who was diving in the year I was born had so much to tell. Diving Alachua was a pleasure too. It's bent rather a lot of divers due to the steps up from the dive, the extreme saw tooth profile and the depth. Not a great combination. Because the cave is not that often dived and policed quite hard, the beautiful stratified clay banks are almost untouched - despite their massive vertical profiles stretching perhaps 15 or so meters in depth.


We swam upstream almost to the end where the cave got smaller, siltier and more like twin cave in Marianna or the back of Ginnie. Deco was slightly interesting given Bill's choice of gases but we all exited without issue and steeled ourselves for the climb back to the cars. Bill mentioned that his main regulator is older than Alastair - which made for much merriment and then another diver who had arrived with his guide to dive the site came up and simply asked to shake Bill's hand. A living piece of history - but with very much emphasis on the living part - Bill is still doing dives which are beyond many and still loving every minute. An honour to dive with you Sir.

Nohoch Nah Chich

I had one dive in mind when we came this year and that was Nohoch. It is a famous and beautiful dive site but we haven’t been there for a number of years as we had done very long swim dives there and to go further would require scooters. 

Unfortunately getting the scooters to the water, plus all the stages required a little ingenuity.

And a little strength. 



A rope and a bit of determination saw all three scooters and six stages lowered down by the guys and caught by me (you sure stand back when you see a big scooter dropping) 



The cave makes it worth it though. 



Our plan was to head past Heaven’s gate which every cave 1 diver knows, then past other familiar territory until we jumped to xline and then would take a T towards the Blue Abyss. This is normally considered a two scooter dive so it was unlikely that we would get there on gas and burn time. 

Nohoch is very shallow so most new cave divers get good long dives there. I remember swimming to a formation known as Jaws after my cave 1 class and it taking around 45 minutes or so. Perhaps I misremember but it was a long way. On scooters it went past in the blink of an eye of course.

Danny had joked that we would jump to the left after a part of the cave that had a lot of catfish. We laughed, asking how he knew that the catfish would be there but he responded saying that they always were. Sure enough, turned 90 degrees to the right and just as he said, looking around, there were perhaps twenty of thirty catfish around as he pulled his spool and started to lay the jump.

We dropped the second stage bottle on minute 100 and carried on as planned. The cave was changing,getting smaller, a little more like the french caves than typical mexican caves (although what a typical mexican cave is I do wonder) We were back with the original cave markers, styrofoam cups on the line from the original exploration. So nice that they have been left there by those, admittedly small in number, who pass today.

It became clear that we may, just may, make the Abyss. Not sure how far it would be, seeing that from the amount of gas I had left it was likely that one of the team would be calling the dive any minute, it was exquisite agony swimming for the last bit, no knowing whether we would indeed get there. 

But we did. 10,000 feet into a shallow highly decorated cave we found a room where the floor dropped away, to 71.6 meters. Dropping down from the fresh water we dropped through a halocline at around 18 meters and saw a white cave get even whiter and even bigger. In Mexico depth like this is a rarity and there are many ideas as to how it can from. At the top of the room, cloud like formations hung, which you can see in Alberto’s Nava’s video of the end of the traverse that we did. 

Nohoch Nah Chich - Blue Abyss

The Blue Abyss is accessible from another cenote so is known to divers with slightly less stamina (or more sense!) 

I looked at Al and he grinned then thumbed the dive. He had hit turn pressure as we dropped below the halocline. Good planning!

I've read about Wakulla since first starting to find out about DIR and GUE and had hoped that one day I would be able to see for myself.

My first visit to Wakulla certainly didn’t go as planned – for me or for anyone else on the project. An incident within 5 minutes of the start of the day was very worrying indeed for a while – but happily, as has been written up elsewhere in detail, the outcome was eventually good. For that reason, whilst I initially was not going to post about the day, I thought it might be nice to post a few photos and my thoughts about the project on my first visit.

We arrived at 7:30 am after a very long journey – not really knowing what to expect of the park or the team itself. I didn’t expect Wakulla to be fronted by a large country house with a café, with manicured lawns and pontoons for the glass bottomed boats. I didn’t expect it to be so pretty, or so big – although on reflection there a lot of water coming out of that cave. I certainly didn’t expect the very, very large alligator which was cruising around the basin – just yards from the small beach that the team use to enter the water. 

The team assembled was much smaller than I expected, with more kit than I have ever seen (bearing in mind that a great deal of it was underwater at this time). I have never seen a group of divers with less ego and more purpose than these guys. It brought home to me just how they have accomplished so much – they truly are a team. The reception we got was friendly and welcoming from the first moment and any nerves that I had felt as we drove in started to disappear.

We were to dive early on, and took a minute to analyse and label the stages which Anthony had kindly brought for us from High Springs, marking correctly with stickers we had brought from home. We had been told to get 190 foot gas – not really knowing what this meant we just asked for exactly that from EE and it turned out to be around 18 per cent O2 and more helium than you could shake a stick at – nice! The stages were taken on trollies down to the water whilst we set about building our gear and Anthony briefed us on what we were expected to do. 

It was around this point that the plans for the day were turned upside down and instead of witnessing a project dive kicking off, we instead saw how efficiently the team dealt with a serious incident – which could have had a much less favourable outcome if support had not been so immediate and impressive. 

The surface manager held the team together, issued new instructions as to what now had to be done and everyone set to work again. Three divers entered the water and brought out the shallow stages and scooters which had to be taken up in shifts. After 24 hours on the road and the associated tension which had built up it was a relief to be able to do something and we ran up and down the beach lifting kit, helping break it down and pack it away for those who had left the site.

Some really weird stuff came out of that cave, camel backs, heating tubes, tubes which on closer inspection were full of jellybeans. I spotted a neat little RB80 – turned out it was Jarrod’s deco rebreather which was rigged with Ali 40s rather than the massive 120s that the primary one bears. He invited me to try it on as I have been pondering a RB for a while for sub 70 metre ocean diving. It was good to see that the unit was light and neat but I have since decided that I’ll stick to OC for a long while yet.

More helpers arrived after a while and insisted that we take a break. So we took the opportunity to chat to others on the team for a bit. I’d met Dean and Kell before and Dean’s UK background meant that some heavy duty teasing kicked off quite quickly. 

The gear was pulled quite quickly and it was soon time to leave. Some were to head to the hospital to wait, others including ourselves headed back to High Springs and went diving. I used the gas that I had for Wakulla in Ginnie – guess I had an EAD of about minus 6 for most of it.

I returned to Wakulla a few years later and managed a dive to the restriction.   Memories indeed.

Photo - JP Bresser 2008

France 2009 was for me always going to be a different trip. We've done Mexico Florida and Shetland this year already plus a few DIR UK trips so I owed the kids a holiday. What better than a villa in a beautiful French village, with a pool. Ah - and a cave about a mile away. Well - I'm allowed the odd day off aren't I? :D

We planned only two diving days. Diving the deep caves in France is quite gruelling. Hot out of the water and cold in it makes for quite uncomfortable gear lugging and the amount of gear we need is quite a lot - so that makes for a large number of journeys up and down small goat tracks. 

We did three dives in Ressel last year on the RBs. It was the first time we had taken them into a cave and, at that stage, Al's first dive deep in the cave, so we took it slowly and limited the penetration accordingly. 

Our plan this year was to dive along the mainline on day one, seeing if we could find the deep rejoin which is around 1300 metres in on the left and, if we could, dropping a marker which would allow us to attempt a circuit on the next dive a few days later. 

Those of you who have dived Mexico and Florida which mostly superb lines need to understand that the lines at the back of Ressel (and other French caves) can be dreadful. Double lines are common, with lots of slack line, coils of abandoned line, and looped wire in places. Fishing line is often all you have to follow which is interesting to spot when you are scootering - you simply have to read the cave instead. 

I first did the deep circuit of Ressel about two years ago on open circuit and have done half a dozen dives beyond the deep T so knew what we would come across. Alastair has dived the right hand tunnel on the deep section last year which is lined better than the left hand one and had proclaimed the lines to be 'better than I had led him to expect'. I wondered if the lines on the left tunnel had been improved - only going there would tell us and it would be fun finding out.

Dive 1. 230 minutes max depth 62 metres

We awoke to thunder storm and heavy rain. We debated changing our plans and not diving as slithering down the tracks in the mud did not seem a good plan. With two RB80s, 10 stages and 2 scooters to get down the track which is almost 1:1 in parts it would get messy but scheduling during the week meant that we really had to go today if at all possible. We set off for the cave to see what it would be like.

Bumping into Chris from Mexico at the bakery was a nice bonus and we arranged to meet up later in the week. Getting the gear down the hill in the rain was not as bad as we feared and eventually the rain stopped. It was around 10:30, we had been working for two hours, and we had got all the gear built, down the hill and into the water. All was there and ready to go. We suited up and that is when it started going wrong.



First one of the stage regs was hissing continually. A quick investigation should that it would be fine for about 30 seconds then creep to the point that it bubbled continuously. We dragged it out of the water and the reg required completely taking apart if it were to be of any use on the dive. I walked back up the hill to the car to get the tool kit and down again - starting to feel a little hot now. Took the reg to bits, wound it back and hey presto fixed. Excellent.

I dropped the tools by the side of the river and Al took the stage back to the leashes in the water. When clipping it off he noticed that an HP hose was leaking - straight out of the side of the hose. Grrrrrr..... OK - back to the car. This had taken perhaps 30 minutes or so and we were hot - so a quick soak in the river and then kit up.

Kneeling in shallow river water wearing an RB80 which is a cumbersome beast at best, clipping on two bottom stages and three deco gases plus a standard body scooter is a wee bit uncomfortable - especially when you add undersuits and drygloves for the 10 degree water we would be in for 3 or so hours. It takes a bit of time if you are sensible as, after all there is no rush, and being slow and methodical makes it less likely that you will get stressy or make a mistake. There were a few comments like - clip this one off will you I just can't reach it - but soon we were ready. 

Unpin scooter and set off down the river to the cave entrance. Ahhhh that's better. Cool in the river water, all the weight off, at last it is time to go diving. Come off trigger to check that we are on the right course - hit it again and... nothing.

Uh oh. Try again - nothing.... *expletive deleted*

My trigger seems to have jumped off, which is technically possible but unlikely with the way I have my scooter set up. There is no disputing it though. My scooter which was working beautifully up until now is dead. We headed back to the entrance point - swimming with that number of stages and a dead scooter we were thankful that we were at least swimming with the river flow. I take everything off - scooter, stages, leash, RB80 and drag scooter out of the water. Thanking the lord that I left the tools down by the river I get a multi tool and open the handle to find that the trigger wire is still in place and the trigger lever itself has snapped. 

Humph. 

Leaving Al sitting on a rock with his RB80 on and holding the scooter upright I go back to the car. Superglue and a tiny bit of tape may fix it - I may as well try. It actually fixes it well and we manage not to fumble any of the screws into the river water whilst doing it too - which was a bonus. We start clipping things on again. It's now nearly two hours since we thought we were ready to go diving. We are hot and fed up. We agree to try again but equally agree that both of us are likely to thumb the dive earlier than planned if we don't settle down. We wind the scooters back a lot so that we can carefully assess how mine is working now - but I'm quite happy about the mend.



The cool cave water as we descend is bliss. We both know that later on in the dive it will feel cold but right now it is welcome. I'm leading in at roughly half our normal speed - assessing the scooter, chilling out, checking the RB. Viz is excellent - about 15 metres or so and Ressel is like meeting an old friend again. Small changes but essentially the same as always.

We are travelling in on 50 per cent and stop at the 21 meter shelf at the top of the shaft to switch gas. Having dropped O2 near the entrance, then the 50 per cent and then finally our 35/25 we can get going with only our bottom stages to carry now. It feels good. I stay slow to the deep T, enjoying the dive rather than seeking to make distance. It takes a fair amount of time, around 47 minutes from the start of the dive which feels wrong, but it's fine. 

The line marker at the deep T has been turned around by a stage bottle which has been left by a diver setting up for a bigger dive resting on slack line so that it points in to the cave - always a nice surprise  I move the stage bottle very slightly and reposition the line so that the marker is correct again and Al drops a marker too. All has been working well so I turn and tell Al that I'm upping the pace slightly from here. He agrees and I wind up the scooter to around three quarters of it's full speed. 

We branch off down the left hand tunnel and Al almost immediately signals the three lines on the floor and shrugs his shoulders. I snigger and know that he now understands the situation here. He is happy to continue and we press on, periodically passing stages which have been dropped clearly by the same diver who left one at the deep T. All my internal timings have gone to cock due to our speed on the way in and I wonder whether we have gone too far for the deep rejoin. I've not spotted a line or the tunnel off to the right and I'm pretty sure we haven't missed it but the tunnel is not familiar to me. We are either right on top of the rejoin or we've missed it. I can't decide which and it's sort of immaterial as we are clearly going to exit the way we came in. Al drops a marker for the circuit and we exit. 

We get back to the deep T, pick up markers and carry on heading out. We're going at proper speed now and I realise that we must have overshot the rejoin due to the time it takes us to travel back. Al comes off the trigger to check something and I do the same so as not to cannon into him - and my scooter sticks on. Fantastic. 

I deal with it and then it sticks on again. Well - to be honest we are exiting, I just ride it out for a while stuck and then sort it out when we get back to the shaft. Can't see how a snapped trigger which is clearly holding is making the damn thing stick - especially after all this time but hey ho. We are approaching the shaft when my light fails. Jeeeeese - it's really not my day. We carry a spare light head and I switch it out. It fires OK which is nice and we start deco.

It's no surprise when my deco reg at 21 fails - it's just been one of those dives. It's not a big issue and quickly fixable but I must admit I'm beginning to wonder what else will go wrong today. My scooter sticks on three more times on the ride out during deco but so near to the exit I don't really care. We finally get back to 6 and strip everything off, hanging it all on the line. Chilling out in the ceiling I look at my bottom timer and find it shows a dive time of 6 minutes. Funny - it felt a lot longer  OK so the new BT I have times out at 199 minutes. Oh well I know how long we've been in and how much time I need here so it matters not. 

We surface eventually and chat about the dive. It was OK. Nothing that had occurred had raised stress levels or in any way been an issue which affected the safety of the dive. It was just irritating and not sure it was worth the work or the grief and not sure we want to repeat the experience tomorrow. This feeling was made more intense by the walk up the hill with the RB followed by 10 runs with stages and four more with scooters. It was 8pm - we had been on the go for 12 hours.

This is a hobby?

Dive 2 - 175 minutes max depth 68 metres



Photo JP Bresser 2008

We did question whether to go back to Ressel. It was hard work which took us a day to get over lying in the sun by the pool and we really did wonder whether to stay poolside and relax for once. Instead, we agreed that we knew that diving in France could be far more enjoyable than our first dive of the trip and ventured to go back again with a few changes. 

First - we would set off for the cave at 7am when it was nice and cool. We had stripped all the gear down and fixed it - my scooter's relay had got slightly too sensitive and it took us a while to replicate the failure in the cave (it seemed fine on first inspection) and we can only presume that fixing the trigger shortened the cable by an infinitesimal amount which was on occasion 
then too short to power off. It was failing one in every twenty or so uses - but clearly that was too many so it needed attention and fine tuning.

Second - we would take the right hand fork at the T which is very familiar to both of us and treat it as a thirds dive (well the RB80 equivalent). This means that we would simply press on until we hit gas - or hit the deep rejoin from the other direction. We were content that we could comfortably ID the route we had taken the day before should we reach that section - it was clear that Al's marker was much further down the line and we would not be seeing it again this trip. 

Finally, we would limit bottom time. The almost four hour dive had been very punishing on us after a difficult set up and we were not up for that again in 10 degree water - not on this trip anyway. It needed to be fun.

And fun it was. No issues, everything working fine, we zipped round the deep circuit in around 45 minutes - about 20 minutes quicker than when I did it OC a couple of years ago. 

I was interested to see that the rejoin line was a piece of monofillament fishing line which was running up the side of the main tunnel on the opposite side of the tunnel to the two parallel mainlines (at that point in the cave). I was unsurprised that we had missed from the other way but both of us recognised exactly where we were - and were happy to press on. I did pause for a second to querry whether we should head urther in and retrieve Al's cookie. But I figured that people can think he intentionally left a glory marker in the cave (sorry Al!)

All the dropped stage bottles had gone. Clearly the diver who left them there had returned and done his dive the day before leaving a load of lime by the side of the road  There really is no need for this - take a bag and get rid of your rubbish that way the caves stay open as we are not seen as people who damage the environment or abuse the hospitality of the region.

With no stage switches to do deep the time taken was such that deco was a non issue and the overall dive was over an hour shorter than before. We were up, out and back home by 3pm - and back by the pool.

We can’t dive Ginnie tonight – it will be worse than last night with the Memorial weekend partygoers marinated even more than yesterday. We sit at dinner with Kevin and Cris who we have arranged to meet up and dive with and discuss our options….. "Well", said Kevin, "You could come and dive my cave."

That’s a conversation stopper.

"It’s not that bad" he said. "You have to descend in the flow through an almost vertical restriction, through a load of roots and branches which can get stuck in your regulator so you have to be a bit careful. Viz is quite bad as it is tannic river water and the silt is very fine particulate which floats up as you pass over it. It’s a neat cave though, it’s only tried to kill me twice."

Any sensible person would have said thanks for the offer but I have to wash my hair tonight.

I, on the other hand, am not known for spending too much time at the hairdressers and recognising that opportunities like this are few and far between found myself acceptingKevin’s offer to dive the Wilson spring. Al and Frase immediately nominated themselves as support crew (aka stage bitches) and an hour later I found myself kitting up in the dark and wondering what I had let myself in for.

Descending into the cave was as Kevin described although it wasn’t as bad as I’d imagined it would be. Immediately it was apparent that viz was quite good – perhaps 5 metres, but the cave walls were very, very dark and were hard to make out.

The bottom of the cave was deeply covered with silt which was granular and very floaty. The mere vortex caused as we passed over the bottom brought swirls of it up and into the water. Viz started to deteriorate behind us – I found myself wondering how long it would take to clear again. My biggest concern was that, finding it difficult to differentiate between the water and the bottom due to the colour of both, an impact would bring about immediate silt out.

The cave dropped to about 30 metres and widened out. For large parts of the dive all that could be seen was the line which was attached to plastic pipes which had been buried deep in the silt as attachment points – the walls were out of sight. For all of that though it is a pretty cave, and a pleasant if somewhat challenging dive.

Kevin made alterations to the line as we went, tidying up, repositioning markers, tightening ties. He has laid 4,000 feet of mainline in this cave, taking scooters and multiple stages through these conditions. He brought a 400 foot reel tonight in case he found anything of note – but that was not to be.

We came to a restriction formed by the deep silt banks nearing the ceiling and the viz deteriorated sharply as Kevin went through - there was simply not enough room to avoid it. We were 800 or so feet in at this stage and it was my 4th hour in the water that day so the combination of each of those meant that my comfort level was reached and I thumbed the dive.

For the first 20 or so metres out I feared that my concern about the visibility on exit was to be realised, I had to go into touch contact with the line to navigate out. Soon though the viz improved enough to leave the line and swim out. Navigating was hard – again the way that the water, the walls and the floor all blended together made differentiating each from the other challenging and the distinct lack of tie off possibilities meant that on several occasions the line had been laid in the ceiling and was difficult to follow.

I got to the restriction at the entrance and exited the cave intending to stop at 6 metres when I saw the stages, but had missed the fact that the 6 metre ledge was tucked out of sight behind and above me as I came through. I checked my gauge and found myself at 3 metres and outside the cave, but turning round saw that Kevin had swung himself up and on the ledge. I returned to him and sat on the ledge on deco where Kevin amused himself by picking up a femur bone and pretending to hit me on the head with it. Clear caveman tendancies there!

When deco was cleared we made a slow ascent to find Al, Frase and Cris a little worried as they had seen one diver exit then return into the cave and had presumed that the second diver may have been stuck. Al and Frase had been made the best coffee in North Florida by Cris whilst Kevin and I had been diving.

Many, many thanks to Kevin for letting me have sight of this cave. He thought I was the 8th person to go in there ever – which is a sobering thought. The distance that he has travelled in here is awesome in what are incredibly challenging conditions and despite the cave collapsing on him on the last dive he did before this one, he’s intent on pushing further to find out where it goes. Here is some information from Kevin about how he found the cave and how he first dived there.

Wilson is a small community built out in the middle of no where around the spring and along the Santa Fe river. Very quite and country. The community owns the property around the spring. I moved into the community at the beginning of the year. I started asking around the cave diving circles if anyone knew anything about the system. I only found one guy that said he had been in the entrance with a stage bottle in one hand and a flash light in the other. All he told me was the entrance was side mount and shared some rumors that he had heard.

In February I final worked up the nerve to check out the hole. I was not diving side mount yet, so I went with a single 80 and a wet suit. Geared up at my house and walked down the water. The water looked clear but once in it you could see that it was very dark. Like diving in a cup of tea. Finding the entrance was not hard. Just had to follow the water pumping out of the ground. The weird thing was making the way through all the sticks, branches and logs. It was like diving on a brush pile. Dropping down I entered the "side mount restriction" and thought to myself "I could get in here with doubles". Once through I leveled out and was looking at pure black. Everything was black, especially the smooth, explosively silty floor. After making another good tie-off I was off swimming into the cave. Swimming in I spotted some garbage and other debris that had entered from the other karst windows next to the spring. I was looking for old line or other tell tale signs of divers. Like broken rocks or marks on the walls and floor. Everything was pointing to this place being virgin. 

I found the first chamber amazing. The floor sloped off the side and back. The ceiling is low, but not bad. Then at the back it drops off more. Down one step then another until I am on the edge of a large fissure crack. Wide, long, deep and BLACK! I dropped over the edge in wonder. Just slowly falling and watching for the bottom. I had dropped about 10 meter when I got to the bottom. Followed the flow into a new section of conduit. It was here that I spotted this weird black stuff on the ceiling. Jet black. Knobby looking and prefect for a tie-off. Except it disintegrated when I touch it. Like wet compressed card board. There was not much too it. Also when I understood that all the silt on the floor used to be this stuff on the ceiling. Swimming along I am just panning my light from one side of the passage to the other. Just barely able to make out the sides. The conduit about roughly 10 meters wide and 2 in height. It is dropping in depth from 24 meters to about 30 meter. Also about this time I am nearing the end of my 400 foot Salvo reel. I spotted a big horn of rock projecting from the ceiling. I secured the line and left myself a loop at the end to tie in the next reel. It was also the end of my willingness to enter this system on this dive. I needed more gear and more line.

After this I purchased a couple of 1200 reels from my friends at Salvo. Spent about hours of quality time at the back of my house knotting line. After I had knotted 2800 feet of #24 line. I was gearing back up for another push into Wilson. This time with double and a stage. Quickly at the end of the line I was off and running. Peering into the darkness. Trying to decide where to go. Swimming slowly and looking for the lead. Found myself dropping down to 33 meter and rounding a corner. Then I came face to face with massive dunes of silt. With less then a meter clearance between them and the ceiling I had to hold my stage up by the valve when swimming. For some reason I started thinking about marshmallows, so I named my first bit of cave, marshmallow land. With slit exploding up everywhere, I was really starting to enjoy the dive. 

I finally emptied out that 1200 Salvo reel. I could have tied in a second reel, but that was enough for the second dive. The tunnel was still there. Running big and strong. Would wait for another day. I have since made another 6 dives. Some really fun ones with great friends and family and one not so fun one. Starting with me, Clare was the 8th person and Cris the 9th to go cave diving in Wilson. Lamar Hires of Dive Rite had checked it out 20 years ago with a mask and a snorkel. Lee Gibson had made a quick trip in with a small bottle. I have been asking around and can not even find stories of other people diving this spring. I keep asking, cause I think it would be awesome to find some old timer that went diving in the spring.

We like to try to get to Mexico once a year and this year we got lucky with a last minute trip booked at great rates. We flew from Gatwick with Thompson who had a pretty good approach to dive gear and flew home with them to Manchester - yes the snow got us diverted 100s of miles from our car! Anyway, enough of that - the diving.

This was my fifth trip to Mexico and Al's fourth so we've done a fair amount of diving there. This made for some interesting discussions about where to dive.  Our preference is one dive per day with enough gas for three or so hours in water. We ran through some options we settle on  Taj Mahal.

Taj Mahal  - We've done a fair few dives here as it is next door to Zero Gravity and I thought we had done pretty much all of the cave we could - including getting out underground and crossing to another line on a mega 5 hour dive last trip. Danny grinned and said 'There's a lot more to do yet - come and see'

A large part of this dive would be through the halocline. A halocline is when less dense fresh water from the land forms a layer over salt water from the ocean. In caves you can get to dive where the two layers meet - which stirs them up. The first diver gets beautiful visibility. The guy at the back gets to see the dive as if through vaseline!  Started with just one stage. Headed off following cavern line. This was the opposite of what we'd done before. Once again the Mexican caves offer lots of possibilities - even at sites you think you've exhausted. A fair way in after a couple of Ts, Danny set a jump off to the left into some big chambers called the Chinese gardens - very pretty! Beautiful piece of flow stone that must have been 2 metres tall caught my eye. We went as far as we could go before sidemount territory turning the dive.

Back to the mainline and we picked up our stages using them for another 25 bar into the cave. We had to then drop them in a halocline section. We carried on in some very blue passage with very gnarly rock formations. We reached the end of the line seeing the waterfall. The hydrostatic pressure of fresh water entering is so strong it creates a rippling halocline at the ceiling which looks like a horizontal waterfall. We stayed for a couple of minutes before exiting.

Dos Pisos - my favourtie cave in Mexico.

Chris and Fred haven't dived in Dos Pisos yet only Danny - so as it was our last day with Danny, if we wanted to go it had to be today.   These are Danny's beautiful photographs on the site.  You enter Dos Pisos through a low series of low restrictions - real belly crawls which were fun with stages - and even more fun for Danny with a large camera, three strobes plus all the usual dive gear. The photos speak for this cave - but the dive was long and hard work. Danny is an exacting master underwater when taking photos. Al and I had strobes on our backs plus a huge strobe which could be hand held to light other bits of cave. This used to go off in our eyes when at the back and it gave us both headaches. results are worth it though!   It is worth remembering that when you are doing a photo dive you are still doing a complex cave dive with stages, navigation and gas issues. It takes everyone being on the ball to make sure it is as safe as it is fun.

Mayan Blue is part of Sistema Naranjal. Our dive down B tunnel was complicated in the planning and got even more complicated in the execution when we again reached the end of navigable cave with gas still to burn. It was funny seeing Fred scratching his head as to where to go at a T that he was not expecting - turned out he hadn't got that far before.  He chose left and we ran out of cave after a few minutes. Thumbing the dive we returned to the T where we recalculated and headed off the other way. The cave soon headed up shallow again and markers switched direction - w e were heading somewhere else quite unexpectedly. Examining a map we were well on the way to a traverse from B tunnel to A tunnel - via tunnels E and F.

We had a small incident on the way out. My primary reg started to free flow. First a little creep then, when I removed it from my mouth at the stage switch it really exploded. I shut the first post down, wound the second stage right back and very gingerly opened it up again. We were at the stage drop so no need to attraction the attention of the team - the bubbles and noise were enough to have them close by. It held OK but was clearly not right - staring to creep again a few minutes later. Al and Fred understood that the reg was open again but iffy so when we returned to the deco bottles I did a straight stage to stage switch rather than a return to back gas which I would normally chose to do to clear things away. Beyond this it didn't even make it into the post dive discussions which remained on the 'what a great dive' basis - so that was nice. The 1st stage turned out to be shagged so that went back in the box and we broke down one of our 6 stage regs to use for back gas the next day.

Chan Hol is the furthest cave to the south that Zero Gravity dive, on the edge of Ox Bel Ha. We arrived at a patch of mud with a small puddle in the pouring rain with mosquitos coming out to munch. I was not best pleased with my 'holiday' at this point. Fred igeniously produced tarps and a brolly. Our first task was drysuits and after we were changed we prepped gear.

We kitted up and got into the tiny entrance pool, the line runs right to the surface which is needed as it's practically a zero vis restriction we had to pass to get in. Once through that the cave opens up and we see lots of dark cave but with limestone tunnels leading away and immediately a T.  As we head left we seem to swim through a heart shaped opening and into some crisp clear limestone. Vis is stunning and the cave goes through several different sections, we have narrow small passage which opens up into big cave. We pass through hugely decorated cave with thousands of formations, we move through lunar landscapes with craters of rimstone, popcorn style deposits cover the floor in some sections. In places the cave reminds me of nohoch. We drop the stages quite early next to a jump - our plan involves using them to explore the jump later. Imagine being an explorer, how many small puddles (cenotes) do you jump in to hoping that you will find something. You wriggle into countless holes meeting dead ends. Then one day you are asked by a landowner to check out his puddle and you find a low restriction by a mud bank and head in. To find 1,000s and 1,000s of feet of beautiful white cave. Unseen for 1,000s of years.

For they have been seen before - in part at least. We came across human remains a long way back which have been dated to around 15,000 years ago. Mayan pots are still there which are around 500 years old, pristine and still lying as if they were left yesterday. Imagine being the water carrier, guided by burning torches thousands of feet in away for daylight. Imagine being injured, or dying there, or carrying the body of a loved on in to the cave away from scavengers. For we do not know how or why they were there. The cave is still under survey by a small team but the lines appear to have been laid exceptionally well, with good skill on the part of the explorers and those who have surveyed since. It is so nice to dive a cave which still appears pristine, it help you feel as if you are seeing it as history made it appear.

Jailhouse is a far extension to Mayan Blue. This was a complex navigation dive which we discussed carefully beforehand but would never have found ourselves. Multiple jumps and Ts, which were sometimes unmarked and hidden in cracks, had to be taken to reach our destination where we ended the dive based again on navigable cave.

Jailhouse has essentially two different parts - a fresh water layer of dark cave with lots of brown and green, then below the halocline there is the salt layer which is very white and blue. It's part of the Mayan Blue system and in the salt water layer you can see the resembalance. The dive was a never ending changing story. Green tannic water changing to white highly decorated cave. Small areas with fine formations branching into huge passages with halocline down the middle. Swim high in the room in wide dark cave, swim low in the room for bright white walls - bleached by the salt water. For those of you who fuss about ultra fine tuning your weighting in salt/fresh - learn a little. It's not that big a deal

We enter through the restricted opening which is silty with organic matter and as the cave opens out we almost immediately hit a T. We turn left and head off into some darker cave. After a short distance we jump off the line heading deeper passing through the halocline into some very white and blue cave. Lots of formations line the tunnel and we swim along in some tall passages. We reach the fire pits where the cave drops down to 45m and where there is lots of charcoal. Before the dive Chris had told us about seeing a 12,000 year old skeleton in this area which had since been excavated by the Mexican institute of archaeology. The passage continues but after 10 minutes the line ends. Chris pools out a spool and sets a jump up through a crack in the ceiling, we head up back into the darker cave. We head right before again reaching the end of the line and jumping now back onto the mainline. We are now swimming through very big sections of cave with the halocline mid passage. This creates quite a strange view with blue and white cave below green and brown and the mixing layer creates a very distorted view of one or the other dependent on where you are. We spread out across the passage which gives us lots of light.

Having travelled a distance Chris then sets the final jump and we descend down into a lower passage - this one is all low bedding plains and rimstone. We carry on to the end of the Line where we thumb the dive and begin exiting. On the way out we take put time particularly at the fire pits. After a little deco we surface to the cold weather. The cenote feels distinctly warmer than the air temperature and we chat in the water for some time.

Another series of fantastic dives in Mexico. We did around 18 hours in water over the 6 days and saw some amazing sites. Sites which had we gone alone we would simply not have seen.

For those of you who cave dive in Florida or France, Mexico is very different. Lines are often well hidden, caves very complex and jumps unmarked and very easy to miss. When you have a destination which involves five or six jumps or Ts it is easy to spend more time searching for the route than on the dive itself - and thus you see less cave.

Add to this the fact that many sites are unmapped (publicly at least) ate subject to negotiation with the owner who speaks little or no english and may live away from the site necessitating a key pick up in back street Tulum, may be far into the on a road which is unmarked and where there is no indication as to where to park, where to enter the water or where the line is. You can dive Mexico without a guide - I have. But if vacation time is limited and you want to see the best that they offer - then a guide means you do. With Zero Gravity, the guys dive as members of the team (if you want instruction pay for it - don't book a guide and expect to be trained) and treat divers with respect and good humour.

I can't wait to go back.

Ox Bel Ha

Refreshed from our day off we arrived at Zero Gravity and Danny asked us whether we would like to dive in Ox Bel Ha. The dive he had in mind would enter at the cenote that they are using for the current exploration. He checked the decision carefully with us as the cave itself is, early on, large dark and rather featureless – a cave diver’s cave. We were both well up for it. 

We arrived in what was a hippy type holiday destination, no electricity, candles and sandals everywhere. Nice guys who run the site allow Zero Gravity to park there and run gear to cenote Yax Chen at the back of their facility. It is a long way and a craftily adapted wheelbarrow is used to get the scooters and stages to the water.  The cenote was very large. From where we jumped in it is as a five minute scooter to the entrance of the cave which we agreed we would not count towards burntime, accepting that the cave was big enough to tow should there be a small shortfall on exit.

We would travel from cenote to cenote, underground, through dark caves which were featureless like the florida power caves I’ve seen, into beautiful smaller areas where the cave being so close to the surface had shards of sunlight coming through small holes in the walls.

Google Map Maker

The map above shows the chain of cenotes we visited, ending at Cenote Eden which is the small one after the almost perfectly round one I think, some 10,000 feet in (interestingly the markers in the cave are inaccurate). The Cenotes have all been named by the team, I can’t remember all of them but Cenote of the Sun is one, and running out of ideas, the L Shaped Cenote is another. I’m guessing you can work out which is which.