I ventured up to the caves again. Last day of my weekend splurge and I had to top the summer off with another cave dive. See, had to. There really isn't much of a choice. It's just to much fun. Besides, I think I look quite fetching in my helmet and Armadillo.
So today I was going to do a big push in Gervais. I wanted to get back into the deep recesses of the cave. I knew I needed to do some line work back there to get any further too. So I brought a few spools and my trusty reel. Knowing it was going to be a long dive, I elected to do my first stage into the cave. Already stupid shallow a simple AL80 would allow me at least another 1500 feet of penetration.
After chatting with the land owner for 15 minutes about cave politics.. well land ownership politics in general, cave diving, open water diving and everything else under the sun except the weather. I was ready to go. Tanks in the water, rig on, light fired (for now - more on this gem of brilliance later). I run over the dive plan quickly in my head once more, clip on all my bottles and run though a head to toe gear check. Yes, even my fantastic camera - which will never see this cave again, as I now have my new housing. I zoom passed the sign, taking a few more shots of it.
And right away, I stumble on this cute little guy.
A few gratuitous shots of the cave. These shots taken between sink #5
Just as I am getting close to sink #5 I come across this nugget. Even in a remote cave, you can't get away form ignorant people doing ignorant things.
I come up in pool #5. I have never been here, but it should link back up with where I want to go. One small problem. Pool number 5 is HUGE and... finding the way I want to go is not so easy. It took my primary reel and a jump spool to find it, but find it I did. About 5 minutes later I arrived at my first line repair of the day. It took at least 10 minutes to gap this one. Fighting the current in this large cave can be challenging. This bit of cave is about 50 feet across and has a ripping current that is hard to swim against. Pulling is difficult without damaging the cave so its fin, fin, fin. At least I get the two rope bits linked, clean up my lines and away.
I must have gone 15 whole feet and I hit this.
Another frayed end of the line. I repeat the above process and get about 60 feet. Another broken line. This is getting repetitive. Fortunately, this was the last break for a while. But I suspect another line has broken, because there is a missing T. Rather I was expecting to hit a T that never happened.
Instead I hit a T going left into a sexy little sidemount passage. As my luck would have it, this line was broken too. But I am getting much faster at fixing this stuff and I have the line sorted out in no time at all. Obviously I absolutely have to see whats in this new tunnel so I head in. Then my primary light flickers and goes purple. Just for a second, but in that second I remember that I did NOT charge it last night. A quick glance at my bottom timer tells me I have put 2 hours in the water and probably 10 minutes getting ready onto the thing. Now it SHOULD be OK. I figure I put an hour - an hour and a half on it in Lusk. So I SHOULD have somewhere between 30 minutes and an hour left on it. But see, these batteries are not new - they have a good 400 dives on them.
You shoulda seen my ass move.
I was out of that damn cave in under 40 minutes with the flow helping. Now I have 3 backup lights, no problem - I just didn't want to go there. I made it very familiar ground around sink #3. By this time my primary is flickering and going purple every few seconds and its quite dim so I shut it down and go to backup.
So, I'm brilliant. Big push, 1/2 charged light. Lesson earned, not that it was life threatening, just made things interesting.
A few parting shots of some stuff I found way back in there be fore my light decided to remind me who's boss.
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