I managed to squeeze in another cave diving trip this year, after several trips to Florida & France it felt only right to go back to Mexico!

 
We arranged a 9 day trip with a day off in the middle. We stayed at the Dreams Hotel in Tulum which is a 5 Star all inclusive hotel, a bit of a luxury but we’ve found it reduces the time you spend sorting food and makes the cost of the holiday very predictable.

Whilst we've done a fair few trips to Mexico now, we still arranged guided dives for the majority of the trip. The guys at DIR-Mexico know the caves so well you get to places you wouldn’t have even known existed. 

Places like this:




Carwash

Our first day started off with the traditional waste of time spent renting a car, I’ve tried booking online but it’s doesn’t seem to speed the process up whatever you do. Once sorted, we popped into Zero Gravity, said hello to everyone and grabbed some cylinders.



Our plan for today was a simple warm up dive in Carwash. We've used carwash as a warm up dive on the last few trips as it is so convenient being so close to the water and a well known cave. However, this simply does not do it justice - it is a beautiful cave and worth the trip each time for the dive - let alone the kit check it provides.

When we get to the site we run into some fellow DIR Explorers members and got chatting. It was great to meet the Nick and his buddy and put some faces to names but we were hot and rather keen to get in the water. We discussed the plan which was a 1/3’s dive jumping off to the room of tears.

Al has run the line into the cave a few times now but after the time he nearly ran out of line on the reel he worries a little that he'll open himslef up for teasing again! No dramas on this occasion and he tied in and we set off down the mainline, me taking the lead.

One of the big changes from last time was that the cave seemed darker and siltier. Some locals had been trying to dig out Luke’s hope (cenote) and in the process seem to have chucked a load of particulate into the cave. We pass the first cenote and somehow overshoot the jump to the room of tears. I realise this too late but check with Al and we decide to keep going. There is no agenda after all and the cave up ahead looks inviting

We pass through Adriana’s room which is section of the cave with beautiful formations and keep going. I tried to take a picture of this room - but not one did it justice so go see it for yourself!

The cave starts to get lower and lower and I find myself having to eye up the passage ahead and choose the widest sections just to get through. I'm skimming the floor and ceiling with my drysuit and tanks and eventually decide it’s just too tight and thumb the dive.

Exiting is un-eventful but we sit at 5m for a couple of minutes and watch a cave class doing various drills before surfacing. A great start to the trip and a really nice warm up dive.

Taj Mahal

Next day we were diving with Danny as a 3 person team at Taj Mahal. The plan was a 2 stage dive plus 50 bar of backgas. At the depths of a lot of the Mexican caves that would allow us a 3 hour dive. We headed into Taj Mahal and the initial part is now familiar cave having dived it several times.

I love the size of some of the rooms in this system and we headed straight up the mainline and through the vast chambers. The visibility extended as far as your light would travel.



We went right at the T in 2nd enormous room and dropped our first stage. We carried on before a jump to the left side and headed on to the end on towards Boxk cenote, where we dropped our 2nd stage bottle about 10m before the cenote. We surfaced into a breakdown area where the cave has collapsed preventing further passage by water. There are some gaps in the ceiling and shafts of daylight light up the cave.


We spend some time just enjoying the view before we exit the water for some hardcore bouldering (while wearing double AL80’s). The ground is very slippery and it’s hard going, Danny helps me out. After about 10 minutes of scrambling we re-enter at the furthest point and chilled out. Danny did relate the tale of someone spraining their ankle in the boulder section and then needing to struggle through the hour long exit dive – certainly made us cautious!

Once we were all across and relaxed we started our next dive. We went through some beautiful cave and Danny took us on a tour of some of the least visited places. This is supported by a conversation with a cave instructor locally who didn't know that there was another line after the cenote! In fact there was another hour long dive.

We head right at a T and run out of cave in a room with the most amazing white limestone and reluctantly begin the trip back to Boxk. Once there the process reverses and we get back into the first part of the cave and begin our exit. All told I think it was about 5 hours by the time we exit the cave, a truly stunning dive and an excellent second day.

Naharon



Next up was a dive in Naharon and we were diving in a slightly bigger group as we were diving with Dan Lloyd. Descending into Naharon it’s a big black cave reminiscent of some of the WKP caves. As you head down the line your light just gets sucked up by the walls and you don’t get a huge view of the cave – it’s more a case of seeing little parts of it. I hunched down which caused Al much amusement - he know's I don;t really enjoy the blackest caves and was bored.

We jumped left not long after reaching the mainline. The cave now narrowed bringing the walls into view. The cave was filled with lots of dark formations, which looked like wax dripping down the walls, and then stained black with soot. It’s actually tannic staining but it does give the place a different feel. We went up through two breakdown domes where a collapse had caused some narrow spots. We descend deeper below the halocline into some amazing cave. The salt water had bleached the limestone and the dark nature of the cave begins to change.

We reach the jump Danny had in mind and we then drop our 2nd stage as a marker and jump left. This section is about 3m tall but narrow maybe 1m wide. We’re now a bit deeper and in the salt layer so everything is white and blue coloured. We’re passing lots of limestone with intricate formations and finger walking through the narrow passage. We reached the end of the line and turned the dive.

It felt almost like 3 separate dives as the cave changes so much as you progress. As we reached the cavern zone we saw some snorkelers peering down at us. We did 5 minutes of deco and a slow ascent with the opportunity for a few more photo’s in the shallows.



Diving with Dan was a pleasure – once again we just turned up, ran through a basic plan and went diving. It’s still really nice when the DIR just works as it should and lets you go diving in a safe manner.

Grand Cenote



Next up was Grand Cenote, as Danny pulled the map out of the car he explained that he’d been one of the principal explorers in the system and sure enough he’s listed on the map as having found huge sections of the cave system. As such he knows the cave incredibly well. Our plan was for a complex navigation dive with 5 jumps and a T heading down into a section called La Boca.

We descended and found the cavern line but came across a class making a dive. We jumped off at the stop sign (English version) and onto the white mainline.

There were lots of pretty formations with white and green being the dominant colours. We identified the jump to Kalimba (we’d discussed it in the pre-dive plan) as it was right next to a change of direction marker.

Next jump was at the end of the line and it was a big one so Danny used a reel. The cave now started to narrow a bit, the formations got even prettier. We took a shorter route past a cenote and kept going.

Much to my amusement, Al actually ran out of cookies at the last jump – he only had 5 and has never needed more so he had to use a line arrow (has has since added a few more to his pigtail).

We eventually turn the dive on gas and exit. Despite a 3 hour plus dive we had no deco to do since we were on nitrox 32 and the average depth was 7m!

Jailhouse



Next up was jailhouse, one of Danny’s favourites and now one of mine.

Our plan for this one was a photo dive, with Danny bringing his new SLR camera. This site is part of the Mayan Blue system but is further up the road next to a ranch. As such it doesn’t suffer from the break-in problems that Mayan Blue itself struggles with. For those who don’t know Mayan Blue is in the jungle way out in the middle of nowhere and a lot of cars have been broken into while the divers are in the water. Fred has lost his shoes and his lunch in the past so it’s an indication of the poverty that some people are in.

The site is called jailhouse as it originally had a barbed wire fence around it so when the original explorers surfaced in it they were penned in. It’s now been well setup for divers with a path down to the Cenote. The cave starts off as a dark cave with lots of stained black rocks. We passed through that section with Danny only taking a couple of photos. We then reached a section where we descended below the halocline and found the big white Mayan blue style cave. The dive itself was absolutely stunning. Huge big cave passage, fantastic visibility, lots of big formations.

We passed a fossiled tree root where dripping water had deposited rock onto the root freeze framing it as a rock structure. All the time Danny was shooting pictures. A simple stunning cave – I can see why it’s one of Danny’s favourites.



Dos Pisos

Our last dive with Danny was Dos Pisos, a relatively newly explored cave and now my firm favourite in Mexico.

It’s a bit of a longer walk to the water and it doesn’t smell nice but the cave makes up for it. The first section was tight narrow cave which required careful progress. Our tanks were on ceiling, chest on the floor and with gentle finning as there wasn’t always anything to use your fingers on. It was a white green cave, a little like grand cenote.

After a short distance Danny flashed from position 3 and indicated that his stage was free flowing. We stopped and he tried to fix it. It worked for a little while but played up again so we dropped it and carried on with only back gas.

Lots more formations and again very striking. Dos Pisos means two floors and it really did feel like we were swimming through a building which had multiple floors - glimpses of which we could see through holes - with galleries surrounding the main tunnel. I tried to imagine this cave before the watrer level rose- it looked like scenery in which the matrix could have been filmed - with crowds chanting underground.

We turned it on gas and began our exit. Right back near the entrance we made a jump to a stretch Danny hadn’t done before. We found a circuit which looped back onto the mainline nearer the exit. Amazingly we went past a lot of roots which look almost spooky underwater. When we jumped onto the mainline we turned right and reached our first jump. We removed the first jump, returned down the mainline removed our second jump and carried on exiting. For some reason I had a completely different idea of the cave layout to the actual one and was left scratching my head as to what was going on for a while.



Grand Cenote - Kalimba line

On one of the days without DIR Mexico we went to Grand Cenote. Once again we started off on the cavern line with a jump onto mainline. This time though we took the jump off towards Kalimba into a section called Pasa Delagato. This was still big passage but very pretty. Along the way we stop to take some pictures and drop stages at 40mins in. At 60 mins we reach the jump to Bosh Chen and keep going to the T.

It also represents a change of direction so we cookie it and head right to Kalimba. The cave now becomes very tight and squirrelly. Often the line doesn’t seem to follow the cave and you end up heading up into the ceiling or down through a hole. We pass several very close-in jumps which I’m careful to study carefully on the way in and out along with some amazing formations. We hit turn pressure at 90 minutes and began our exit through the little heart shaped formation.



Al and I found this dive fascinating given the fatality that happened within this stretch of cave. A group coming from Kalimba swam in, turned left at the T and within 20m reached the jump to Bosh (which they took). Coming back from Bosh they then swam for close to 40 minutes down the wrong direction heading towards Grand Cenote rather than Kalimba. They should have expected a T almost immediately yet didn’t seem to notice. They should have marked the jump (it was a snap and gap but should be treated the same as any other jump) to Bosh.

But whilst it is easy to say that people should have dived to protocol and many don't, what we found hardest to understand when diving this cave was that they didn't recognise the fact they were seeing completely different cave. The two passages are totally different style and would have been impossible to confuse. It was a very sad situation but a reminder of how important it is to really pay attention to the cave itself rather than mere lines and markers.

Overall a totally superb trip. Being able to do a load of 3 hour cave dives where our longest deco was only 5 minutes is just amazing. Danny did us proud with some jaw dropping dives and of course the photos left us some fantastic pictures. Hope you liked them and the report.