TR: Where high tech meets low life...

[camerone]

It's been a crazy week back at the office, so I'm a little tardy in posting this. I took a little time off last week to head down to one of my favorite destinations: north Florida. It's been a while since I had a good run of cave diving, and I had an itch to go into some caves that I'd never managed to get into before.

The plan for the week was to head down and do some sidemount diving, squeezing into some sidemount and no-mount caves, as well as visiting some old favorites. All my cave time to date had been on a rebreather, so this was going to be a new experience for me...both blowing bubbles in an overhead environment (other than deco, of course), and in the overall equipment management of a completely new config. Even though I'm already "full cave," I thought it prudent to hook up with an experienced guide / instructor down there for a few reasons; first - to make sure I knew the nuances of the gear, and second - to get some bottom time in new caves with someone who already knows the layout and tips for those sites.

Last week, I burned some of the half-million Alaska Air miles I earned last year and caught up with Rich Courtney (http://www.divecaves.com) and the crew of great folks at the Cave Country Dive Shop in High Springs... Great folks, awesome dive shop, and they all were super helpful in recommendations, gear, fills, and just about anything else I could need. Given that it's just across the street from the High Springs Country Inn, it can't be beat for convenience. I've been partial to Wayne and Amigos before, but the drive is a little out of the way in comparison.

A few photos attached, but unfortunately nothing underwater. Most (not all) of what we were diving wasn't conducive to my cave skill level plus a camera, so everything is topside...

Day 1:
Monday, caught the 9 AM Alaska flight to Orlando, home of the most saccharine sweet Rodent of Unusual Size. Tried to avoid running over all the unruly, obnoxious, small humans that seem to plague that place, and made it to the rental car area. Much to my surprise, they not only had the small SUV I'd reserved waiting, it wasn't even a domestic brand... Happy Cameron headed off to cave country and dragged in around 9:30 to the Country Inn.

Tip to future travelers: the Winn-Dixie closes early Grab provisions before checking in, or in Gainesville on the way up.

[camerone]

Day 2:
Catch up with Rich bright and early at CCDS. We chat and head over to the diner for chow. I'd forgotten how good greasy grits are in the morning. I made it a point to eat them daily while down there. It's good to see the gruff service and greasy food never changes, no matter how long you're gone...

Syphon!

We finish and then spend the morning configuring a Nomad for me, filling tanks, reconfiguring regulators, sorting gear, discussing things, meeting Syphon (Marissa's dog), etc. Head off to Ginnie for a shake down dive in the afternoon. Seeing as I've never dove with Rich before, he wanted a "check out" dive. We park at the Turkey Roost amongst the pavilion construction, hop into the water, load up a couple of 4000psi-filled LP85 steels onto the Nomad, and I try to submerge. No weight, 100 gram undies, no gloves...and I sink easily and in perfect trim. After popping up for a quick S-drill, Rich looks at me, says, "DANG! If that's your starting trim with new gear, this is going to be a good week!" We head into the Devil's Ear, and I'm remembering why I started diving. Rich runs the reel to the gold line, and we trudge off. The Lips seem smaller than ever as I roll slightly and glide right through in the sidemount config. We continue up the gold line, poke around in the side passages a bit, and eventually hit thirds around 1100 feet in.

Heading back to the Ear, we discover that there's another team in the cave and they suck at running lines. I mean, this should be ticket-able offense bad... they tie in the primary on the log, cross our line, use the _same_ secondary tie off over to top of our line, and then cross it again before tying into the gold. It was inexcusable... So after fumbling with the cleanup in the cluster-F*** the other team created, we get the reel cleaned up and hang out on the log for deco.

Rich was diving an ancient Nitek He, which is known to be overly conservative...I was on my Predator. After a while in the Ear, he clears his deco. He looks at me when he clears and signs "how much time you have?" I flash back "7 minutes". He asks again, so I show him the display, while sitting on the log, sucking down the O2. We get out and he's scratching his head, but the numbers don't lie on the computer.

We head back to CCDS for some fills and to plan the next day...and it comes out that I thought we were diving air, and the stock fill mix was EAN30. Not a big deal for Ginnie (in fact, it's why it's EAN30 and not EAN32), but funny nonetheless...

[camerone]

Day 3:
After yesterday's checkout dive, Rich's confidence in me is high enough that we're ready to head off to the side mount systems I came down here to really see. Stop one - Cow Springs. We head up to the Dive Outpost to grab the key, and along the way we bump into some old friends of Rich's and have to chat for a bit. Nothing happens at high speed in High Springs

We get over to Cow and find one other team of guys going in - a set of three Russians from St. Petersburg wearing backmount and carrying stages. They're further along in kitting up than us, and we ask them politely if we can just cookie their primary, to which they agree. We get in the water just as they're about to descend, and we see their bubbles. And we see their bubbles. And more bubbles...

Cow basin

Turns out one of them had trouble finding the entrance, and then got stuck in it for about 20 minutes, burning a lot of his gas. The entrance for upstream Cow is a tight corkscrew before the cave opens up. It's doable in backmount, but it is tight. With the stages, they didn't bother to unclip and push them into the cave, which wedged them for a bit.

They get through eventually, so we drop about 10 minutes later and enter the cave. In sidemount, it's easy. Really easy. We had upstream and eventually encounter their dropped stages ahead of us. We get all the way, some of which required the "poor man's DPV" rope pull to pass, and make it back almost 900' to Not My Fault, a tight hole in the floor of the cave where it drops down to the deeper section. I'm about 400 psi from thirds, and it's a tight hole that goes a little further than I can see. I'm not sure how far it goes, and whether it gets to a good turnaround place fairly soon, as the depth drops off and the gas goes faster. So, I thumb the dive and we head back for the basin. We get out the corkscrew, do a quick underwater recalc of thirds, and enter the sidemount-only downstream Cow. I tie in the primary and run to the gold line. Flow is low and the cave is tight... and it's beautiful, if short. We hit the end of the gold line (and the cave), which is exciting for me, and I manage to turn around, pass Rich, and lead out.

We take off the kit topside, drop off the key, and head back towards Luraville... We make a detour to see the other cave I'd been looking forward to: Jug Hole (one of the Ichetucknee Springs). We pull in, pay our tab, and unload gear. Turns out that it's a 1/3 mile walk down a path to get there, but there's a great gear cart, and a friendly ranger who helps us out.

Jug Parking Lot

We get to the basin and spend time chatting with a group of elderly tourists who are from Nebraska (and looking for a retirement location.) They're touring a bunch of the springs in the area today with friends... They're amazed at the quantity of gear we have on, and that we're crazy enough to go diving in the holes in the rock. We try to use the experience to explain a little of how important the aquifer is to the area and how it needs to be protected.

We drop in and the cave is blowing. Serious flow - turning this into a first magnitude spring, and it's not a pretty entrance. We pull our way in, barely, and shimmy through the bedding plane restriction on entrance which runs quite a bit. Jug Hole is an amazing cave, but not very big. In short order, we hit the Diamond Sands (a cool, fairly tight restriction where the sand on the floor glitters like a million diamonds when you hit it with the lights), and hit the end of the line. The cave just peters out into a solid clay bank. We turn the dive, far from thirds, and head back out. Along the way, not far from the Diamond Sands, we see a line off to the side, so we take the jump. It's a fairly new line. The passage goes for 50 feet or so and then becomes a no-mount bedding plane, and the line disappears into the void. All the flow's coming out of this crack. I turn my head sideways, unclip a bottle and try to shimmy in. I can make it, but it's not going to be pretty on my gear. Rich...um...maybe not so much.

Pro tip for cave diving: always make the fat guy go first

[camerone]

Day 4:
After knocking off the two sites I wanted the day before, and a few too many beers the night before with Rich and some others, we get a late start at CCDS. Today's My Favorite Cave - Madison Blue.

We head up to MB, which is a good dive, and the plan is to do the Crossunder tunnel, drop into the Aqueduct, and go until we hit thirds. We're taking LP108s (filled to 4000+) for the dive, no stages. For the second dive up there, we plan on LP85s in the main part of the cave.

We get to the park, set up gear, and drop in through the rabbit hole and into the Crossunder. It's tight, it's silty, and my light cord has come un-tucked, so it's dragging for a good bit. I don't notice until it snags a rock and I'm stuck in a tight section. Rich notices it, as he's following me in close to zero viz, and finally manages to communicate with me at a place where I can actually do something about it.

We make it through the silty entryway, and we get under the river and drop down into the Aqueduct. I take the wrong turn and start heading downstream. I've got plenty of gas. I marked the navigation T right...I just misunderstood which way we were going to go. Because it's downstream, Rich thumbs it a couple hundred PSI over thirds so that we can fight the current back up to the T.

I'm inspired to return and try that backmount with the rebreather. I hear it can be done, and it's possible to do a grand traverse at MB going in the crossunder, up the aqueduct, through Rocky Horror, and out the main entrance. That sounds like a hell of a lot of swimming, but a seriously cool dive.

Rich leads out, and he takes no mercy on me through the silty tunnel, deliberately giving me a taste of what I gave him on the way in... I grab the line and get great practice in a reduced viz blind-exit. I needed the practice, anyway. On the way, we find a misplaced survey team arrow, facing the wrong way. It's obvious, but it's a bit annoying. I notice it but don't move it, not knowing that part of the cave and thinking there's a side entrance or jump or something. The followup post on CDF and the Deco Stop apparently stir up a lot of controversy over whether we should have taken it, flipped it, or left it alone. I crack a beer and watch from the sideline this week

Meanwhile, as we're in the basin undoing the tanks and getting out, we bump into a team who came out of the main cave, backmount. We make polite conversation with them as they're cleaning up. Rich says, "Did you see the ranger today? She's kind of cute!" One of the other team says, "You mean, 'nobody else around cute,' or 'really cute?'" Best line of the trip...

We swap bottles in the parking lot and go back. Dive #2 was a simple push up the mainline until Martz, a recal of thirds, a return towards our original entry with a jump through the Godzilla circuit, a clean up, and out... a dive I (and most who dive N. FL) have done. For some reason, it never gets old...beautiful...

Martz sink.

We head back to CCDS, then out to supper/beer/more beer/shots/hangovers.

[thefeve]

Awesome post! I'm not a caver, but it's awesome to read the recaps:)

[camerone]

Day 5: Last Day

My last day was supposed to be a little different...the plan was to meet up at 10 at CCDS, grab a couple of Silent Submersion scooters, and head back to Ginnie to scooter. (Yeah, I know I'm a DiveX fan and own one, but I didn't bring it, and SS was all they had!) Dive one was supposed to scooter to the Hinkel with a couple of stages, then play around in the back section. I had some hope of maybe jumping off to Sweet Surprise on the way, depending on how things went. Dive two was supposed to play around the parallel lines up in that area.

Long story short, Rich had a few personal things come up on Friday and had to bail out on me. I spend most of the day hanging around CCDS, where I met fellow Northwest diver Marc Pyle -- someone I'd seen online, but never met in person. Marc was/is down there right now, doing full cave with Rich this week. He had done Basic and also NAUI 1 earlier.

Marc and I hit it off, and he and I headed over for a late afternoon Ginnie dive. It'd been about a year since he'd been in the system and had tagged along earlier in the day with another team that made it only to the Lips as they were Intro only and had to flip on 1/6th (or so the story goes.)

So, given that neither Marc nor I didn't realize you were allowed jumps on NAUI 1, we decided just to head up the gold line as far as we could until we had to turn. I just wanted to be in the cave, and so did he

We entered at the Eye this time, which was his first time through there, and the flow was definitely a challenge. He did a great job of line placement on the primary and we tied in to the gold line. From there, we pushed another 1100 back in the cave, which was his farthest back as of that point, and we turned on my thirds, since I had the smaller tanks on. We cleaned up, did the deco in the basin, and headed out to supper at the Great Outdoors.

Pro Tip: The prime rib is good stuff when it's Friday night

Day 6: headed home on Saturday. Great trip... Rich and I struck a deal for a cave DPV class later this year, since despite having had a scooter for years in open water, you need the cave dpv card to get into Ginnie. So...I'll have to head back this fall.

I'm also super happy to be acquainted with Marc, now - looking forward to many more cave (and local) dives with him!

[Tom Nic]

Great report - fun read - thanks for sharing!

[LCF]

It is indeed a small world we cave divers inhabit!

I'm interested that you made the switch to sidemount that easily. Did you guys do any out of air drills or anything? I've been playing with the idea for a while, myself, just for gear schlepping reasons.

[camerone]

I'm interested that you made the switch to sidemount that easily. Did you guys do any out of air drills or anything? I've been playing with the idea for a while, myself, just for gear schlepping reasons.

I really didn't have much of an issue, surprisingly...a lot less than I was thinking. A few hose swaps, a little gear tweaking, and it was good to go. On the other hand, I've been sidemounting bailout on the rebreather for years, which involves tanks on both sides, so it felt pretty similar, with a lot of weight off my back

We did all the drills for me to grab a TDI Sidemount card during the week. I did not go down with the intention of taking a class by any means...these were supposed to be guided dives and some tweaking from an expert. On the other hand, we nailed the skills anyway so I ended up with the card. It's got to be a up there with stuff like PADI's "peak performance buoyancy" in the "why the hell would anyone ever use this" cards.

The gear schlepping thing is interesting. You do all the same work...you just walk more as you do it through multiple trips, with a lot less load on each of the trips. It can be great for the treacherous entries as it feels safer to have less weight to struggle up slick rocks or down sandy hills with... but you lather, rinse, repeat the action a few times to get everything to the water.

I really liked it... most things were easier to squeeze through, of course, and the profile can be slick. Helicopter turns and back kicking felt a lot more difficult with the wide profile, particularly when diving LP108s (amazing what only an extra inch or two of diameter will do to you). Bottle management of stages was a lot harder for me - found myself struggling to clip things off sometimes. I think it's just practice and muscle memory.

Since coming back, I picked up another full reg set at at steal ($500 for a pair of DSTs, ATX50s, complete appropriate LP hoses, 90 degree elbows, two SPGs with 6" hoses, plus sidemount bungees and rigging. No harness/wing though I have one soft harness at home that should work left over from the original rebreather.) I needed a couple more regs for stage bottles, anyway, and it'll be nice to just keep a spare set around setup for side mount, along with the set I keep for back mount. Since everything else I have takes Apeks parts kits, it was a no-brainer to grab them. I can see myself doing a lot more sidemount diving in the future... I really liked it, and I felt like the sidemount caves I got into were less "worn out" without having to go really far back into the system.

One interesting note - it felt like very few people in cave country were diving backmount any more. They're either on rebreathers or sidemount, and most of those were on 'breathers.

Still - good tool to have in the toolbox, and it's a lot of easy fun stuff.

[renoun]

We did all the drills for me to grab a TDI Sidemount card during the week. I did not go down with the intention of taking a class by any means...these were supposed to be guided dives and some tweaking from an expert. On the other hand, we nailed the skills anyway so I ended up with the card. It's got to be a up there with stuff like PADI's "peak performance buoyancy" in the "why the hell would anyone ever use this" cards.

I know I read about somebody getting hassled somewhere tropical, possible Roatan, for being an "uncertified" sidemount diver. I think it ranks right up there with Bob having to get 32/0 trimix since he didn't bring a nitrox card on a trip but as stupid as it seems your card might be useful some day if you travel without your rebreather.

[LCF]

Yeah, I've gone back and forth and back and forth on whether sidemount will make my life overall easier -- but the big thing is the ability to take everything off in the water and bring it up piecemeal. I have a lot of trouble in doubles with some of climbs out of the cenotes. I'd rather do multiple trips with less each time. I think . . .

[Scubie Doo]

I have been itching to begin cave training. I love reading posts like this. Thanks for the time and effort you put into this.

[camerone]

I know I read about somebody getting hassled somewhere tropical, possible Roatan, for being an "uncertified" sidemount diver. I think it ranks right up there with Bob having to get 32/0 trimix since he didn't bring a nitrox card on a trip but as stupid as it seems your card might be useful some day if you travel without your rebreather.

Rich - who spent time as a "hotshot Caribbean instructor" - had a very similar story about showing up somewhere in the tropics with only a trimix card on him. When he got there, the shop monkey categorically was refusing to pump Nitrox for him. He finally found the shop owner of wherever it was who suitably beat some sense into the guy. Unfortunately, in areas that cater to the once-a-year, vacation type of divers, these kind of stories of almost unbelievable stupidity are way, way too common.

I actually think one of the best things about cave country is the fact you fill your own cylinders most places. I -so- wish it were like that up here.