So, onward we went. Please excuse the complete garbage quality of the pictures. My new camera will have a housing on Monday (evening) so my next weekend of cave diving will have significantly improved image quality.
Boat loaded. Note all the fuzzy sidemount tanks! Yes, I have corrupted all my cave buddies with talk of crappy vis cave. Lulled them into thinking its actually fun to dive in these things. Convinced them that DIR style backmount is not where its at for this stuff. Lo and behold, presto changeo there are 3 more sidemounters wearing helmets for out betters to mock.
Here is one now! Note the fashionable white helmet. Camera blurred to protect his identity. Yeah right, camera blurred because its on closeup mode and this stupid housing won't let me change it.
And his buddy, in equal blur.
Note the franken rig. I'm happy with my dillo, but these abominations seem to work, even if they look quite odd. Made out of a backplate, wing and some other assorted ideas stolen from just about everywhere. But whatever floats your... ass in the case of sidemount.
My pseudo buddy managed to extricate himself from any surface shots with his fancy-boy red helmet on, but little did he know, at least until the flash went off, that he was being stalked though the cave. Lurking above him, pressed against the roof I dropped out of the black tea water and *click*
Take note boys and girls. This helmet is CE certified for your safety. Don't try this at home.
So enough mocking my peers, as fun as it is. As King Helmet it was my solemn duty to go have a good dive. A good dive in new-to-me cave. So off I went, swoosh. After about 300 feet of rather plain power cave I came to my first T. Power cave being big cave you could drive a buss down. Now power cave is great in Florida - its fantastic in Florida. But you see, in Florida you can actually SEE the walls. Here you can ether see the line and silt or you can see the rock walls/roof.. but no line.
Humm.. usually that little black/brown beaten up #24 cave line goes into some tinny little rat hole, zero vis, sidemount, silt out cave in this system. So obviously, I immediately put a clothespin down (despite the arrow - this line should be T'ed into the arrow) and went off following that little line.
Which then with almost equal disregard for my enjoyment dove right into a huge pile of silt. So I gently pulled it out, my vis started going and as I coiled it up on my hand I realized it was broken.
I finished coiling it up, then went into the cave, laying it back down. When I got to the end of it, I tied it off, pulled out a spool and went looking for the other end. While I never found it, I did get some very niec pictures of this sidemount passage.
So I turned and took the left (straight) at the T. More power cave, but its more interesting. There is some stuff to look at as the line heads along side one of the walls. 300 more feet pass and the line takes a about a 120 degree turn to the right and down. My max depth to this point was around 25 feet. The line dropped my down to 35 feet and the flow picked up big time. pushing under the ledge toward a collapsed exit from the cave. But wow, for the next 1000 feet, running at 35 or so depth there are some spectacular breakdown piles and delicate flakes worn into the lime stone. I'll let the pictures speak for me.
Some nice silt/clay stratification.
Some flakes sandwiched between layers of limestone sticking out of the walls.
And another T! And another broken line!
This time, when I went in search of the other end, I found it. A promising going tunnel. I will be back to explore this one. Took me about 10 minutes to find, run and repair it.
I was almost at thirds when I finished the repair job, so I only got to see the first 30 or so feet of this one. But it looks like the perfect size tunnel for this system. Just big enough to make it easy to sidemount without stirring up silt, just small enough to be able to see both walls and the ceiling in detail.
Do I know anyone with a zodiac who cave dives? :)
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