Cave 2 with David Rhea

Students Ricardo Constantino, Barry Mutch, and Owen Petchey

Monday – Friday, 13-17th November 2006

A week before the course David advised us to get lots of sleep ready for “a strong week”. It was a strong week in many ways. At least at first we used too much physical strength and too little mental strength, resulting in gas consumption of 30lpm even after the fifth consecutive dive in the same system (Devil´s Eye). It´s the beginning of Wednesday right now, and we´re planning on returning to Devil´s Eye on Friday, so we´ll see if we´ve become any more efficient. Perhaps less inefficient is a better perspective.

To review, the function of Cave 1 is to develop a foundation of cave diving skills. Barry and I completed ours in Mexico with Danny Riordan (though not as buddies), and Ricardo both with Danny in France and Jarrod Jablonski in Florida. Cave 2 is an “intense, penetration-oriented course, with excursions sometimes in excess of 1000 feet [~333m]” (Jablonski, 2001). We were all excited with the prospect of seeing more cave, the challenges of doing this, and I was particularly interested in experiencing the flow in some of the Florida caves.

Monday morning we met David at Extreme Exposure in High Springs and immediately planned a four jump circuit in Devil´s Eye. Florida caves have relatively few T-junctions; more common is an indication on the main line of a separate, unconnected line, leading down a side passage. Since one always maintains a continuous line to the open water, these jumps must be spanned by a temporary line. The ultimate goal is to install these jumps with maximum efficiency. Obviously efficiency allows greater penetration (always desirable). Perhaps more importantly, lack of efficiency might encourage one to make the jump without running a temporary line, especially if one is very familiar with the jump. So rather than skipping the task because it takes too much time and effort, we aim to become so efficient at the task that running the temporary line does not impact the dive.

We only got one jump in on the first dive. We forgot David´s advice and had our “assess handed to us” by the flow. To put it another way, “we only had to be smarter than rock”, and failed. Not a particularly good start, but after another short dive to use our remaining gas, we strapped on a fresh set of doubles, were way more efficient, and got the four jumps in with enough gas to continue on a ways.

By this point we´d descended to the mainline, risen back to the ceiling way above the mainline and out of the flow, pulled and glided through the lips, a horizontal slot, passed down through the keyhole, seen bulbous rock formations hanging from the ceiling, and noticed some imposing matt black stuff (goethite?) that seemed to suck light from our lights. Across the first jump was a tunnel-like passage, with a fissure in the floor, and after the third was the Expressway, the floor of which is mud. Unfortunately this is pockmarked with imprints of hands and fins and who knows what. At this point, at the end of the first day, we had our buoyancy and trim down relatively good, so we didn´t add our own marks. This was satisfying for all of us and represented payback for the time and effort each of us spent practicing and focusing on these fundamental skills. Needless to say, we had various failures on the return journey and handled them effectively, but again, efficiency was low and David continued to advise where finesse could be improved. We made mistakes, which is OK, since we’d all signed up to learn. Unacceptable, however, is not correcting mistakes, or even worse, digression – making a backwards step in our skills and finesse – which I at least I made on Wednesday. More of that later.

Tuesday began with us completing the circuit in Devil´s Eye, though we screwed up by not removing our jumps on the way out. Our failures were not sufficient to warrant us leaving the jumps in. Worse, since we left the jumps in, we should´ve also left our cookies (marking the way out). So we made another dive to remove the remaining equipment. Two days, five dives, and reasonable progress.

Little River was the system to be dived on Wednesday. The plan was to jump off the mainline onto a parallel side tunnel, then back onto the mainline, then to take a right at a T onto the Merry-go-round line. We did all this ok; again, improvements to efficiency could be made. And not all of us made it out of the cave without it (aka David) claiming its share of equipment. Anyone forgetful enough to leave something hanging off a chest d-ring, or to not check pocket contents were completely cleaned away invariably lost the dangling item to the cave. Or worse, the dangling item got clipped into the main line. This happened to Ricardo in a high flow area (of Devil’s), and apparently the line stretched as tight as a banjo string, with the corner of the pocket nearly coming loose. One of my pockets already had a peeling corner, and I really didn’t relish the thought of seeing my pocket hanging off the mainline by a boltsnap. Though it would’ve been pretty funny. I re-glued the pocket that night.

 

Fotos : (c) Diana

The real bad thing, however, was our digression. Or at least mine. My trim had been crap, my knees were hitting the floor regularly, and this meant my fin tips were pointing down, their wash was going down and the silt was coming up. OK, I was in the front, and my buddies could’ve told me to quit being retarded, but I’m not sure it would’ve been as effective as David’s words to me after the dive. David is happy when students and the team performs well, and gets unhappy when they don’t. David makes it clear when he’s unhappy. It is a very effective teaching method.

So we made a second dive into Little River, me positive I would improve. We did the same jump off and back onto the mainline, then took a left onto the Serpentine line, from which we were going to jump into Harper Tunnel. A very silty place according to David. So if we (I) screwed up my trim, buoyancy, and propulsion again, we would suffer very poor visibility. For various reasons, we didn’t complete the jump to the Harper tunnel, but rather turned the dive due to having used third of our gas. David wasn´t too impressed when Ricardo used his light reflector as a silt scoop, though it was quite amusing to see mud and silt being shaken from the reflector. On the way out I simultaneously had a main light failure and left post failure, followed soon after by a right post failure while Barry was winding a jump line in. The task loading didn’t kill us, but it did raise stress levels. The improvement over the first dive of the day, particularly in my trim and propulsion methods was encouraging.

We rose at 5am this morning (Thursday) and drove to Gainesville Health and Fitness for the swim test, then up to Madison Blue for our first dive with a stage. Up to this point, we’d taken a 6m bottle, dropped it there or nearabouts, and used it for decompression. So David explained and quizzed us on what gas planning one should use when taking a stage bottle into the cave. And made it clear that, again, efficiency would be required in order to get any additional penetration from the stage. Without efficiency, the drag and complexity associated with the stage might lead to no net advantage of taking it. The plan was a straight penetration down the mainline, dropping the stages at the appropriate time, and picking them up on the way back. Fortunately none of us forgot to turn the stages off when we dropped them, so the cave didn’t take our gas.

There were some pretty low passages, ups, downs, and a restriction called the half-hitch. I was very focused during this dive, particularly on not damaging the environment. This focus and David’s encouragement has resulted in my becoming aware of a higher level of precision and finesse than I knew existed. Or perhaps I’d just gotten sloppy and needed a kick up the ass.

We got about 1500ft / 500m into the cave on this dive. I got a touch of the heeby-jeebies, when I thought about how far we were and how tight it was in some places, but refocused on the dive, and the fact that we’d each got enough back gas to get two of us out even after a catastrophic loss of backgas and one stage, and continued on in. It is a beautiful cave, and remains almost untouched by our presence.

Second dive today in Madison Blue we jumped off the mainline and into a side tunnel that leads to Godzilla room and a one jump circuit. Some of the passages were very low, with perhaps only inches to spare above and below us. We each made sure our fins tips were pointed up, often touching the ceiling, and were very careful with what we did with our hands as the even reaching for our SPG too quickly or inappropriately would stir up silt. Yes, there was often only a fine layer of silt on the rock floor in these passages, but stirring this reduced visibility from perfect to less than that. This wouldn’t necessarily have killed us, but could be the first step down into the incident pit, represents lack of respect for the environment, and would’ve hidden some of the beauty in the cave.

I was leading this dive, and dropped through a hole in the floor into a larger room with a big hill of mud in the middle. Ricardo was behind me and clearly hadn’t yet dropped down through the hole, so I paused, covered my light, and floated weightless in near complete darkness. As Ricardo descended, ambient light increased and my shadow was cast on the floor in front of me. When he saw my light was covered, he shone his on the floor where I would clearly see it, I uncovered my light and we continued on. Both the stillness in the dark, the cave stretching away, and the ease and efficiency with which we communicated made this one of many special moments. Unfortunately we had limited gas, and wanted to press on.

On exit, the dive soon turned into a near-zero visibility (simulated by failing our main lights and removing our backups) exit with one of us out of gas. I tried to keep my last remaining backup light out of reach of the cave, but handed it over when it became clear I wouldn’t be keeping it. We had a few communication issues, but got out alive. Not good enough. We debriefed, resolved the communication issues, and will do better next time.

On the last day, we returned to Devil´s Eye. The plan for both dives was to make the jump off the mainline to Hill 400. The first dive we took a stage in, the second just backgas. For various very educational reasons, we actually got further without the stage than with it. There were various failures on the way out, and unfortunately we broke our clean record of no deaths and I broke my clean record of not losing any equipment to the cave (for real), as I misplaced a cookie somewhere. I tried to find it on the way out, but the cave swallowed it I guess. If anyone finds a cookie marked OP1, I wouldn´t mind having it back.

Despite a slightly less than satisfactory final day, we debriefed and David then handed us our Cave Diver 2 cards.

(with permission from Owen Petchey in DIRExplorers)