FL was not spectacularly decorated but it was fun anyway.
I just got back from a long weekend in FL with DIR-Atlanta and have a few pictures to share. We started off late, by at least 2 hours since it was hailing in Houston last Friday. Big honking hail, which really rattled the 50 seat cigar I was going to fly in. They grounded us on the tarmac for what seemed like eons. Finally we got a new runway designation, zipped along passing a whole ton of other waiting aircraft and poof we were airborn!
2 hours later (less than the wait time) I was in Jacksonville. Not exactly a cave hub, but it worked.
We drove another hour over to Lake City. At one time I had an office there, so I know how lovely it can be. Ehem well maybe some other century. This past weekend was motorcross season. Lots of those guys staying at the motel. Although they were a rather "mature" bunch.
Next AM, off we go to Peacock at 7am. We are the second car there and promptly spread our junk everywhere...
Peacock was obviously catering to divers
with nifty benches and steps leading down to... duckweed. Lots and lots of duckweed...
We did one long dive here, over 2 hours of bottom time. From Peacock1 we traversed to Olsen Sink basically on a AL80 stage plus a little bit of backgas. Then came back to Peacock1, recalculated gas and headed down the Peanut Tunnel on backgas. I guess this could have been 2 dives. We cleaned up for a few minutes on O2, although this was basically a no-deco dive.
min 0 to 38 is Peacock to Olsen.
min38 to 72 is the return
min75 to 95ish is the peanut tunnel
95+ is the peanut tunnel home and some time on O2
From Peacock we were originally going to hit Madison but it had rained and was projected to rain somemore. So we drove over to Mariana, where it was raining. Edd's Adventure's had no power so we were stuck getting fills :( We left the tanks and Edd was nice enough to stay up late and get them filled.
The next morning we packed up a pontoon boat with Atlanta's normal buddy Matt. Long hike down the hill, thank god Edd has a little ATV to carry the tanks.
Matt drove the boat to Hole in the Wall.
Where Atlanta proply seperated a wrist seal from his drysuit - intact. So we drove back to Edd's to get his spare neoprene suit.
We dove the upstream side first, although there's really no perceptible flow here. 1 stage plus <500psi of backgas. I put in the reel for this dive, not a shabby job thankfully. Ths is definately not a beginner cave, the floor is super fine silt and the mainline runs on the ceiling. We turned on time/max deco that we'd agreed to, and Atlanta was cold in his leaky neoprene suit.
The coolest spot was the "bridge" which is about 350ft along the mainline, min 12 on entry and min 45 or so on exit. Kinda a bit of a keyhole.
We had an hour SI although it was shaddy and none of us were really roasting. The next dive was downstream (left). Basically the same cave minus the ups and downs and no keyhole either. 1 stage plus a few hundred psi of backgas used. While for all practical purposes barely a deco dive (5mins over MDLs), we did 10mins on O2 for giggles and since we had the fairly short SI.
That was the end of Sunday.
Monday started off ambitious, we were going to do one long dive instead of 2 shorter ones. In Jackson Blue (JB) which flows about 190cfs according to some sources I've found. JB is open to divers 24hrs during the "off season", basically when people aren't jumping off this diving board into the cavern...
Kinda a pain having to check in at the sheriff's office across town, but on the other hand it was nice to have the place to ourselves. Well except for the black vultures...
There were ALOT of them, maybe an omen??
This was to be a double stage dive, oi that's alot of crapola to carry into the cave
Off we went with Atlanta leading. We swam in along the left hand side of the cavern, dropped down the middle "chute" and then dropped down the Fisher Crack to push into the flow at about 90-95ft at 8mins. We dropped stage 1 and switched to stage 2 at about 15mins, between the first and second breakdown areas. I think I still had 200psi to go in mine, although I was drafting behind Atlanta
We decided this was alot of work at min 28. And woosh we were halfway out in a heartbeat. We did some deep stops in the Fisher Crack although they were probably overkill. I found a nifty niche at 28ft to do a 30ft stop in without any work. And we did 10mins on O2 again. Zero backgas used, and very little of stage 2 got used as well, still a fun dive though. Coming back into the cavern with the sun streaming in behind was really cool.
We then went back to Edd's to pick up extra tank some of the Atlanta gang needed filled. That took a bit longer since Edd only got his Helium supply late that morning. Then it was back towards Jacksonville. Except for one minor delay with Officer Obe. Apparently cargo vans are required to stop for agricultural inspections. Since Atlanta normally drives an exempt passenger van we had no way of knowing. Thankfully just a warning, no ticket from the orange inspector.
4 hours later we were back at the airport where we parted ways. All in all a pretty good weekend of diving. Next time I really wanna see manatee(s) :cool2:
I know some exemplary instructors with a couple different agencies...