The Dive Evangelist

The trip from which I am just returned is very different from the trip I depart for tomorrow. The difference was most apparent last night as I finished packing.

The first dive trip I packed for was overwhelming. There was simply so very much stuff I had to bring that I could hardly zipper my bags. There were straps and bits of rubber and hoses everywhere. It was all terribly unwieldy, unfamiliar, and heavy. I managed, but just barely.

As the years have passed in a blur of flights and soggy luggage that changed and my familiarity with my gear grew. I've fallen into a habit of how and when to pack. The fins always go in first. The flashlights go in my boots. I always expect to be the one pulled aside by the TSA to have the regulator bag in my carry-on opened and inspected.

It has been a long while since I packed for a Caribbean vacation and doing so over the last few days has confused me. The gear which I've become totally accustomed to is abundant: cave diving gear, wreck diving gear, a set of five regulators, drysuit, stage bottle rigging... I didn't need any of that stuff.

I set aside the relatively small amount of stuff that I will need to float on the reef and watch neurotic, little gobies go about their neurotic, little goby day and thought, "That's all?" With that thought I smiled at the memory that years ago I had planned to be in this very situation. When I first started visiting the quarry on weekends it was to make sure I kept in practice, so that on the occasions I'd be headed to warm water I would be calm and cool. And here I am.

Now, I'm not claiming to be the greatest diver that ever was just because I usually travel with a trunkload of gear. I was just struck, looking at my somewhat empty-seeming bag, by how lucky I am to dive as often as I do and in such varied circumstances that my mind and my skills stay reasonably honed and fresh.

So often we hear stories of divers who haven't been in the water for a year or more, their buoyancy a mess, their skills non-existent. Sometimes these people are kicking the crap out of reef, killing off whole colonies of coral with their careless fins. Sometimes their equipment is an obvious hazard not only to themselves, but to anyone who may be within 20 feet of them. I, myself, have been assigned a good share of on-the-boat buddies who look like they have their act perfectly together on the surface, but once underwater are about as comfortable as a squirrel at a dog show.

Diving, when done properly, is just about the most relaxing of all possible pastimes. One floats weightlessly and effortlessly in a peaceful alien environment. You don't need to log 100 dives a year or make sure you are dutifully at the quarry once a week all season; but we all might consider staying in practice as much as we each can.

Visit the quarry once or twice before taking a trip to refamiliarize yourself with the gear. When you can, collect up a set of your own gear, with which you can be completely familiar. If you have been out of the water for more than a year, don't be embarrassed to head to your local dive shop to ask about taking a refresher course; perhaps something about the diving world has changed for the better about which you might learn. Sign up at the closest aquarium as a volunteer diver and you can get in the water a couple of times a month all year! Sign up for a club (an Oceanblue Divers' club, to be precise) or shop vacation. However you can, for the reef as much as for yourself, stay in practice.

The best way to stay in practice is to keep diving. A lot.

70% of the Earth's surface is covered with water... how much of it have you seen so far?

How much?

That's all?

Well, better get practicing, then.

What has two thumbs and no brain?

THIS GUY!!!

I said no to a free dive trip and will need some time to recover.

"Fly to Hawaii tomorrow," barked my buddy Chris without any preamble whatsoever. I had just answered the phone with a more conventional, "Hello?" and that was his response.

"No," this seemed an unreasonable request.

"Free!!"

"What the hell are you talking about?"

Chris is a little nuts, so I'm used to peculiar phone calls, but this one was a special sort of awesome. The shop in DC, where he works, still had one paid spot open on the Kona Aggressor. If I could get my gear to Hawaii, I'd be liveabord diving hard corals and lava tubes for a week in 82 degree, South Pacific water. Boat left this morning, getting back in next Saturday... the day I'm to be flying to Bonaire with the NY Aquarium.

If only it had been any other week. If I hadn't just come back from a week and a half in Mexico. Or if I wasn't already committed to go to Bonaire for a week. If only I could walk properly. If only I'd had more than a day's notice. If only the folks at my day job didn't expect me to "work" sometimes.

The diving community is a such a tightly knit little world unto itself and I so adore the ways in which that manifests itself. I suppose the same tight knit can be found in any hobby community, but one is hard pressed to imagine philatelists or ice sculptors or jigsaw puzzle fanciers calling one another at odd hours and making 15 hour flight demands to exotic locations.

While still surprising, this call still makes plenty of sense in a scuba diver's head. It is the sort of call we all wish two or three times a day to receive as we walk through the dry portion of our lives. Luckily enough, in some form or another each avid scuba diver gets this call at some point, often at many points.

That's what happens in the relatively small community of the dive club (such as Oceanblue Divers, for example) or the local dive shops; divers get close and start looking out for opportunities they can share with their friends. And diving opportunities are different from ordinary opportunities. Diving opportunities are usually extraordinary.

I had to let this one go, sadly. The responsibilities of a grown-up life trumped spectacular luck this time.

I am sure, after Chris told the folks at the shop that he couldn't fill the spot some other diver got that call and was able to say yes. I hope they're hovering over the reef right now thinking about how lucky they are to be a diver and to be part of the diving community. We are all very, very lucky that way; I hope we can each appreciate that even before it's our turn to be called. We each have so many stories we're eager to share of far-away places and rare creatures and the eccentricities of other divers. We're lucky to have our own stories and luckier to have plenty of other divers who would love to hear them.

It's the community that promises us each our turn for the free liveaboard. Keep the community alive.

If you're interested:
A last-second flight from New York to Kona then from Kona to Bonaire is about $2,200.

Of course I looked.

After the dive at The Pit Jim, Scott, Polina, and Paul went to see the ruins of the ancient Mayan city of Tulum. I elected to stay behind instead of acting as a hobbling sea-anchor to everyone’s sight-seeing. “Hell,” I figured, though I had been excited from the first inception of the trip to visit them, “They’re ancient ruins. Pretty good chance they’ll be here when I come back.”

I will be going back. In November, in point of fact. Paul will be running another trip down there just after hurricane season and I am all in.

After the first dive, no… after the first five minutes of the first dive I knew that I was going to be spending huge portions of my vacation time over the years of my life visiting this little point on the globe.

The caves of the Yucatan are like none other anywhere in the world. There are places where underwater caves do have decorations from having been dry at some point, but no where else in the world can you find a cenote every ½ mile or so. No where else is there such diversity in landscape to the caves, sometimes within a single cave system.

What’s more, the jungle is vast. Somewhere in there are countless cenotes into which no diver has ever splashed. Jim, over the course of the week, speculated often on how marvelous it must be to discover something new, to see something no human has ever seen before in its perfect, completely undisturbed even by exhalation bubbles, absolutely natural condition. Mustn’t it?

I asked Paul during some ride, percentage-wise, how many of the cenotes he thinks he’s dived in the Yucatan since his first of a zillion trips down in the mid-80s.

“Oh,” he thought for a second, “Maybe around 1%.”

I know cave diving isn’t for everyone. It’s very gear intensive. It’s very skills intensive. One must be perfectly comfortable in situations that may make another hyperventilate just to think about. There are no pretty fish nor vibrant reef colors.

On the other hand, every year thousands and thousands of non-divers go snorkeling in places like Grand Cenote or in Hilario’s Well. The delicate beauty of the ancient rock formations is captivating on such a deep, primal level to people. I would speculate that it is humbling and comforting to be in the presence of such earthy antiquity. Just as the Mayans worshiped these places, so too are we moderners drawn to their serene beauty as though the planet herself is embracing us to our very caveman roots.

Should you find yourself in the Riviera Maya sometime in the near future ask the dive program at your hotel or nearby shop about a cavern tour. If the mood should take you to enjoy a peek at such things with even more intensity contact the National Association for Cave Diving or the National Speleological Society's Cave Diving Section, or visit your local dive shop and just ask. I swear, I was positive I would claustrophobically be unable to get any further than the door until I took a cavern class.

Also, if you should find yourself anywhere near Playa del Carmen anytime soon, you absolutely must… MUST visit my new favorite restaurant on planet Earth.

An alux (ah-LOOCH) is a sort of Mayan leprechaun, a spirit of the forest, cenote, farm, field or… cave. The restaurant Alux is built into a dry cave in the middle of the town of Playa. From the street it is just an unassuming gate, behind which is a staircase carved into limestone. The cave in which the restaurant is arranged is still forming in parts, with roped off areas of mineral pools or still-dripping stalactites. Other than the main dining room and the main lounge area there are a dozen little dining and lounge tables built into very private grottos throughout the cave system. The extraordinary ambiance is matched by the deliciousness of the menu.

Nancy, the owner of the Villa DeRosa drove us there Saturday night, before it was time to go home.

“What better place for dinner with a bunch of cave divers?”

She could have just left the question mark right after “dinner.”

Though, be prepared: if you order an after-dinner coffee it will take 15 minutes to make and involve several liquors being poured from condiment boat to condiment boat as streams of gentle blue flames like a genie’s light.

And so after diving and after dinner and after a final night’s sleep hearing the Caribbean lapping at the beach only yards from my pillow it was time to fly home.

Drat.

Good think I’m going to Bonaire in a few weeks, or I just might’ve been depressed.

Sometimes I make wise decisions. It’s rare, but it happens. Sometimes I make unwise decisions. Most of the time I pace and weigh pros and cons and think that I’m really rationally deciding on a crux in the road, but I'm pretending to myself. The truth is that I am a downy feather on the flight of fancy and the majority of my decisions are made as snap judgments based on what I’m in the mood to do despite all but the most extenuating external circumstances.

I could not decide this morning whether I would risk further injuring my again-aching foot (which I have come to view as my arch-nemesis) by going on this morning’s dive. I hemmed, I hawed. I told people I wasn’t going. I told them I’d just come along for the ride and see how I felt there. I brought a book just in case I decided not to dive.

But I knew I was going to. Both the little angel and the little demon standing on my shoulders were wearing dive gear and screaming in my ears, “Screw the foot, it’s time to get wet, Dummy!”

Scott is a lying jerk. That white road to the Dos Ojos entrance is just as rough and tumble as any other road we’ve been on. Sure, it LOOKS a little cleaner and there are spots where one car can stop and let another pass, but I felt tossed around plenty. Passing the parking area of the main Ojo we continued on an even less-used road that made the white one look as cosmopolitan as Lexington Ave.

“Wow,” remarked Paul, “This road is way better than it used to be.”

As I fought the very real possibility of whiplash over every bump I could only assume that this road used to be booby trapped and guarded by club-wielding jungle trolls.

“OK,” said Louis, the driver of the 4x4 we’d hired to get our gear out there, “Leave the van here.” This statement seemed pretty obvious, since the only continuing route possible was across terrain beamed down from Mars. Riding in the back of the truck along that 100 yard stretch of what I generously call “road,” I felt like I was on some sort of screwed up roller coaster where you just might wind up bleeding in a jagged ditch. “We’ve had a couple of flat tires,” Louis off-handedly remarked. I didn’t think to ask how many broken axles.

The Pit was discovered some years ago by Dan Lyns and Kay Walton who were swimming in a remote tunnel of the Dos Ojos system. Seeing daylight ahead they were delighted to have found another entrance to the cave system. When they swam out of the cave into the cavern zone they also found there is seemingly no floor.

The name could not be more appropriate. The opening is about the size of a studio apartment in square footage. However, the water is about 30 feet down. Straight down. No stairs, no ladder. Just a hole in the jungle with water at the bottom. There is a small platform to one side of the pool at the bottom, but no clear way of getting there jumps out at you.

“The path runs behind that tree,” Louis pointed out.

I couldn’t figure out what the hell he was talking about. I had to wait until I saw one from the small party of other divers who were there walk down a path about 15 feet long, then grab a rope tied around a tree trunk and rappel down about 8 feet, before turning into some unseen course of cave, popping out again on the little platform at the water. I watched as a set of tanks were lowered using a pulley attached to a tree that hung out over the hole, for people to gear up while floating.

No problem, right? Well, some of the other team decided to take a more straightforward approach to entry. They just giant strided. From 30 feet up. Sure, I would’ve liked to have done the same, but was concurrently glad to have an excuse not to. Scott and Paul both did, albeit a little reluctantly when push came to jump.

SPLASH!

The Pit is the biggest room you can think of. It may not actually be Madison Square Garden big in cubic footage, but it damn well feels it. From the surface you can clearly see the mammoth decorations on the walls as far as 150 feet away from you on the other side of the room, but you can not see the bottom. The water is 200+ foot visibility. You can not see the bottom.

After dropping down about 80 feet you discover why you can not see the bottom. A halocline with a wispy veil of hydrogen sulfide obscures the enormous debris cone at about 120 feet.

Our dive plan was to go deep. Very deep. Most of us had figured out a dive plan to our new greatest depth with next to no limitation but physics below us.

In 1998 Paul accompanied a student to this site to make just such a deep dive. After the student was done, on a whim Paul decided to drop down into the cenote in a different spot than the original discoverers had explored. The original floor was found to be at about 240 feet. The side where Paul swam out of sheer curiosity turned out to be about 300 feet deep. What’s more, at that depth there is the gaping maw of an enormous cave which he was the first person to lay eyes on, if not ever, in tens of thousands of years.

Slowly we dropped for what seemed forever. Slowly slipped beneath the cloud, then through the squidgy vision of the halocline. Still we dropped, following a thick yellow line straight down. And dropped. And dropped.

Oddly, my right ear decided to stop equalizing at about 160 feet, so I stopped there reading it as a sign from the gods that my injured feet were DCS magnets and I should knock off the depth. Paul and Victor went deepest, to around 230 or so. Scott and Polina came in second with just shy of 200. Jim had planned for 180. After about five minutes of enjoying the elegance of such enormity under the delightful effects of high-pressure nitrogen, we started back up.

Sure, I could’ve gone right back up the line, but I decided that's for wreck diving in the nauseating Atlantic and that I should swim freely around the huge room. I kept an eye on my depth to make sure I was following my decompression obligations and explored. There are so very many decorations equal to the size of the goliath hole dangling from every edge.

At about 40 feet, toward the back of the cavern I found two cave entrances, one of which had been the spot where Lyns and Walton had likely frozen all those years ago to say, “Holy crap!” Right about the same time I bumped into Paul, who was also swimming around and who made a couple of motions toward another vertical, yellow line which I read to mean (and later confirmed to mean), “THIS is the line I meant to follow. The one that goes deep.”

A dive of better than 200 feet, and we were on the shallow side.

Somewhere in that cave there is an ancient human skull, possibly one of the oldest in North America; researchers are looking into it. Just under the rickety wooden platform there is a little nook some diver has covered with a free piece of limestone. Inside are shards of ancient pottery. The cenotes, after all, were holy places. Still are.

"Bottom time" on this dive may not have been long, but between swimming around the cavern, decompression, and just struggling to take it all in this turned out to be a pretty long dive. A perfect last dive of a phenomenal trip.

The climb out of the hole was a bit of a challenge. Something of an obstacle for someone with four usable limbs, it took me a solid 20 minutes to shimmy my way out of that hole, trusting sketchy hand holds and taking frequent breaks. Finding myself leaning against a sapling on one such break, more or less supported over a 20 foot fall back into the water, I looked up at the remainder of the climb and thought, “Sane people don’t do this.”

Without really caring what part I meant, I got back to climbing.

Back on my feets, horray! Sorta. It hurts, but I’m ambulatory and the way I see it, if I can walk, I can dive. After two days of tearing through the too-many books I’d brought down here and moving back and forth from the couch and the balcony I was all too eager to get the hell on out of this suite.

What a day it was. When I can be easily amused by making it all the way down a flight of stairs and riding in a van, just imagine what wonders the cenotes held for me.

Our first dive today was actually an open water dive, albeit one of the most peculiar I’ve ever enjoyed. After stopping in the town of Tulum at some dude’s house to get him to escort us to Cenote Angelita (his ejido owns it and he is, evidently, in charge of the diving) and finding him not home we decided to risk a trip down to the cenote in the hopes that, perhaps, he was there already.

Angelita has had a bad name over the last few years, Victor explained, because of banditos. He used the word “banditos.” I really like Victor. Seems people were waiting for divers to jump in the water and then cleaning out their vans.

“Just don’t bring any credit cards or anything expensive,” Victor advised. Of course, being a ditz, I promptly forgot that advice and brought my wallet. I trusted that to get to it, banditos would have to get through Roger first, so I wasn’t worried.

The guy with the keys was there, as were a few other teams of divers. After a long, limping walk through the jungle trail for me and a trip involving a tree badly scraping the crap out of her leg, but saving her from a 15 foot fall into the water for Polina we only had one little obstacle left… entry.

There are no stairs or a ladder or anything of the sort. There is a nearly bare limestone face with a four-foot long rope tied to a root you climb down (and up, that was fun) in full gear.

The reason to hazard these obstacles is that Angelita is home to an unusual phenomenon. There is a halocline at about 100’ and on top of that halocline sits a layer of hydrogen sulfide, a product of vegetative decomposition. Essentially just a very deep hole in the jungle full of water, this is Angelita’s main selling point, but if you’re willing to brave banditos (I love that word) and the sketchy entrance/exit, I highly recommend buying what Angelita is selling.

We dropped together through the not-perfect visibility of the fresh water and at about 30 feet we could see the top of the debris cone from the sink hole’s fall-in about 70 feet beneath us. Peculiar thing, though. Instead of being the top of a mound of rocks, trees, and dirt at the bottom of the cenote, it appeared as a small island in the middle of what looked like a cloud.

An eerie, impenetrable mist lay still in the water surrounding the boggy island; it seemed like something out of an old horror movie featuring werewolves or vampires or, at the very least, villagers with pitchforks and torches.

Paul hovered for few moments waist deep in the fog before seemingly getting sucked down by it feet first, beckoning with obvious spooky drama. Then Victor headfirst. They both vanished.

“What the hell?” and I swam in. Sure enough, it was like swimming through a cloud. A foul tasting cloud (hydrogen sulfide tastes like rotten eggs in your reg). Part of me was convinced I was going to faceplant into mud, so like bog-mist did it look. But I didn’t. The cloud cleared and beneath it was crystal clear salt-water, through which I could see to the 200 foot bottom of the cenote.

Looking up from around 160’, there was an eerie green glow to the daylight through the chemistry above us. A curve of sheer limestone wall embracing us. Whole trees littering the steep banks of the debris cone. It was stunningly beautiful.

The second dive was a proper cave dive. It was also a very lucky cave dive.

Hidden Worlds Cenotes Park offers jungle zip-line tours, even cooler tours involving this groovy sky-bicycle gizmo where you pedal around above the jungle, and cavern diving and snorkeling tours. There is a cave system, but it isn’t open to divers. Unless you know people who know people. Paul is old friends with the owner who offered us the opportunity to dive this remarkable cave.

Entering in the relatively shallow Orchid Cenote (into which the park owner has a staircase from his home’s front door) we first went swimming into a mild current a little ways to see a huge cavern zone where some of the more dramatic scenes of the movie “The Cave” were filmed. Turning to put the current at our backs, we weaved through a forest of those flowing jungle roots of which Scott is so fond before continuing into the cave section.

Because this cave is so very rarely dived, the feel of the place is pristine. The limestone that lay directly under the guideline is not totally bare, but instead houses tiny pockets of silt, utterly undisturbed by a parade of divers. This means you have to watch your fins much more carefully, to avoid disturbing said silt and messing up the visibility, but it’s worth the extra care to appreciate what a cave should really look like.

The ceiling, too, shows how infrequently the cave is dived. There are plenty of broken stalactites on the floor from careless divers and from natural erosion, but never did I see a path worn totally free of decoration across the ceiling. Several times our buoyancy was absolutely critical as we swam through passages impossibly dense with stalactites over-head and stalagmites under-fin, with precious little wiggle room for both a diver and their tanks.

I can’t say honestly that I didn’t have some juvenile worry that if I sank onto the stalagmites they would impale me, and my fellow divers would have to tow me, full of holes, back to the exit. Silly, I know, but what do you want? The rational part of me knew I had to maintain my place in the water so I didn’t damage so much as a single, tiny structure that took more years to form than the Roman Empire stood.

After riding the current (which was nice, what with my bum foot being barely useful even as a rudder) for about an hour we found ourselves under what looked like a massive air pocket. Following Paul’s lead, we surfaced into this pocket, Hilario’s Well.

The room we were in is perhaps 200 square feet, the floor made almost entirely of water, with passages leading off in several directions. This is where snorkelers can see what spectacular formations form in the Yucatan’s caves.

I really wish I was only wearing snorkel gear. Because to get in and out of Hilario’s Well you crawl through the only place where the floor is made of stone, a short tunnel about four feet tall that leads to a perfectly vertical ladder through a narrow well about 15 feet tall. That ladder with doubles and limp… was totally worth it after a dive like that.

Only one dive left tomorrow morning before it’s time to start off-gassing for the flight home. Sigh.

That dive will be to a site called The Pit. If you’re going to wrap up a vacation, might as well wrap it up in style.

Evangelist's Note: Well, my bum foot got me. While most of the gang went cave diving, I've been sitting here eating ibuprofen like Pringles and staring hopelessly off the balcony at the reef only a few dozen yards into the clear, blue Caribbean, which is currently calm as a bottle of vicodin. So, instead of my just making a whole bunch of ridiculous stuff up about cave monsters and probably some sort of dramatic scene involving bad guys with underwater scooters and spear guns, Scott volunteered to be guest commentator for the day's dive. Enjoy.


Casualties of Leisure

Paul lied. Well, I guess it was a white lie. “You can skip tomorrow if you want,” he had said. But he hadn’t mentioned that skipping tomorrow would be a damned shame, too. OK, let’s face it. Every day can’t top the last, ad-infinitum, but the fact is that no dive among these cenotes is quite what I’d call “optional.”

We’ll try to keep that detail quiet around Roger (who, having sold his foot to the devil to see Grand Cenote, didn’t make it into the water today) and Anna (who stayed behind as well, a little under the weather, a lot behind on her work, and maybe a tad sympathetic for Roger).

So, today we had a cozy group: three divers (Polina, Jim, and myself) with two guides (Paul and Victor) between us! The van ride on the way to Dos Ojos was noticeably more sedate, owing to our missing comrades, the absence of their wit, the lighter load of tanks and equipment, and perhaps a touch of sixth-day late-awakening. After a quick trip down the main highway we cut off onto a side road, expecting the usual one- or two-minute washing-machine ride over ruts and boulders to the dive site. Instead, we were greeted by a freaking dirt road to heaven – a brilliant white trail, wide enough for two vans (oh, my!) and stretching off as far as the eye could see. I half expected to find a Long Island wildlife sanctuary at the other end.

Oh, well, at least this wasn’t quite as bumpy. Taking advantage of the void left by Anna and Roger, I made a bunk out of one of the seats and got in a little quality relaxation time. The gentle rocking of our chariot, not unlike mild Atlantic swells, combined with the clink-clink of the now-fewer tanks like riggings rapping mast, briefly took me back to my former life on the open water.

Very briefly.

“We’re here. Let’s go!”
“Where’s the entrance?”
“Are there facilities here?”
“What did they pack for us for lunch, anyway?”


Eye, Captain

Back in the swing of things, we all go into automatic. Within twenty minutes we’ve checked out the site while our driver hauled the heavy stuff out of the van; donned exposure protection and gear; and hit the drink in the first ojo of the Dos Ojos cenote.

Dos Ojos is named for its dual presentation. Composed of two oval openings in the earth revealing twin blue caverns just a few hundred yards apart, it is undoubtedly more obvious from the air (and just goes to prove that the ancient Mayans – or their alien accomplices – clearly had advanced aerospace technology long before NASA and the ESA).

Our journey through the cavern takes us past the second ojo, so we enjoy (more like endure, since we’re anxious to see the cave) a double-length cavern swim. This extended lighted zone will be more enticing in the relaxed finale of the dive. On the way in, I notice the first unique feature of this system: what I call the construction wreckage. Piled on the floor below and near each cavern opening are huge pieces of broken earth, layered haphazardly atop each other. It looks like somebody wrecked a concrete causeway and scattered the pieces around in piles. No, it looks like the gods built these holes on the cheap and instead of renting a dumpster, just busted the cut-out remains over their knees and tossed them under the sub-cellar, thinking nobody would notice. Or maybe they just needed a latrine. I can see Thor yelling, “Clancy, we need a hole here. You can use my hammer…”

The walls here can be odd as well. Rounding a corner and looking up from the rubble field, I spot a perfectly flat wall to the right, set in a perfectly rectangular frame below a flat ceiling. Looks like a movie screen, I think to myself. At that instant, the massive silhouette of a cave creature, haloed in blue-green light, floats across and fills the screen. Wicked cool! The bulky, prehistoric, awkward and finned mega-fish is, of course, yours truly, projected by a team member’s HID light.

Eventually I stop thinking like a five-year-old, and we all pop our heads up at Ojo #2 to recalculate our turn-around pressure (since this second cavern is a nearer potential escape hatch), then make a beeline for the cave we crave. The first hint of the end of the road for cavern divers is encouraging and only a teensy bit disturbing.

Don’t ask. I really don’t know.


Clear the Set

Finally reaching the end of the cavern line, I run a jump to what’s known as the IMAX line.

IMAX, eh? Hmmm. Subtle clue. Oooh. Oooh. I know, I know. It’s a site of the filming of the IMAX blockbuster, “Amazing Caves.” We’re officially cave tourists now! I remember not seeing this movie and therefore not appreciating it, but I’ll bet it was absolutely breathtaking, because here we are in the middle of it and I am passing through a scenic sampling of some of the best features we’ve encountered throughout the week – moderate-sized rooms, wide passages, ornate ceilings, and walls dripping with frozen calcite sludge. In our path, in the walls, and above and below us we see architecture reminiscent of Gaudi, or maybe Tim Burton, or both, forming altars, huts – heck, entire miniature cities at times.

A couple of jumps and a dozen or so minutes from IMAX land, a surface appears in the water above us, illuminated by – oddly enough – large, fixed halogen lights. As Paul leads us toward this new source of fresh air I feel like I’m approaching a movie set. Poking our heads out, we discover a cute little dry grotto called Tak Be Lun, complete with cute little openings in the ceiling with cute little ladders hanging from them and people hanging from the ladders. And more halogens. Turns out it isn’t a movie set; it’s a tourist attraction. Now we’re part of the attraction – cavemen (and woman) from the deep. Actually, Paul explains, it was the support site for a movie set. For several weeks this dry cave, with a moon pool to the wet cave, was the field office and staging area for the filming of “The Cave.” Ah, this one I’ve seen!

Naw, the dry cave itself wasn’t in the picture, but the cave I just swam through was. And what a blast this is from my past. “The Cave” was the beginning of the personal journey that led to this very dive. I remember watching this sport-adventure-action-thriller because I was a diver turned on by anything involving SCUBA gear, but being totally in awe of what was going on: people actually swimming miles horizontally into tunnels, through twisty, scary passages and picturesque landscapes from another world, using tons of special equipment, and hanging out in cool grottos lit by HIDs. I dreamed of doing this kind of stuff. Yeah, right. Me. Like where and with whom? One of the guys who made the movie, like Paul Heinerth, I suppose? Sure, in your dreams.

Side note: Get involved, guys. If you’re reading this, take my advice: Come to club events. Meet other divers. Hook up with folks with similar interests. You may find one thing will lead to another, and that thing will lead you in unexpected directions.

Back to the mainline… having taken in all we could of Tak Be Lun without getting out of our gear, we do a quick gas check and decide that each of our double-tank rigs holds enough to push on further. But after ten minutes or so, we reach the end of the particular line we’ve been following, which converges with the end of another line, both bearing arrows pointing back the way we came. A sure sign that if there’s anything at all interesting beyond this point, you’re going to have to drag out another reel and look for it. Since we’ve had a satisfying dive up to this point, Paul throws a question to us in the form of a thumbs-up illuminated by his HID: Wanna go back up?

Up. Funny thing about up. It’s a universal diver’s signal to end a dive, so we use it in a cave, too. But it’s an odd (or maybe sadistic) concept in the context of a cave dive. In an open-water environment, “up” literally means, “let’s go up.” You know, as in, “I’d like to move toward that big atmosphere of free breathing gas at a rate of one foot per second.”

In a cave, “Up” means, “You’d better hope we planned this dive right, because we’ve got a 30-minute haul from here to the first place where there’s something other than rock over our heads.” And then we can go up. Maybe. If we don’t have a decompression obligation.

Fortunately, today we’ve accumulated no deco time, and there actually are several holes in the grass along the way to which we could escape if necessary. Not that they are needed. We meander routinely back to the cavern zone, where Polina lingers well past our lunch break capturing images of stalactites, rocks, snorkelers, and me.

As we surfaced, we got officially chewed-out by another diver. A cavern instructor (note rolling of the eyes as I type) stops us while we’re removing our fins and says, “uh, you might want to read that sign up there.”

“Really,” we ask, “What does it say?”

It says, “No touching the formations,” he says with a sincere, though protractedly weighty, tone. “I call those “expensive pictures.”

He is, of course, referring to my touching of a large and sturdy stalactite at one point in our photo shoot, as I hovered extremely close to it, in order to steady myself and ensure that I would not bump it with something hard, like a tank. But he is right. Were a few thousand people to do the same, it would be irrevocably changed. Better to add a few inches of clearance and make do with a photo your conscience can live with.


Trust and Traversal

One of the lessons from my first cave course that will always stand out in my mind is the lecture on “trust-me dives”. The lesson is pretty simple, actually:

Know what you’re doing. Know where you are. Know the landscape. Know the way out. Don’t just follow someone else. And, if someone suggests that you abandon some or all of that and just follow them, run for the hills.

But what if that someone happens to be the instructor who gave you that lecture? Sort of reminds me of my driving road test, when the tester turned to me and said, “See that stop sign? Just go straight through.” Could be a test. But we’re not in a class, so I’m thinking he’s serious. Here’s the offer: to follow a traversal route downstream from Dos Ojos to a remote cenote. We’ll cover over a mile of cave; all we have to do is trust that there’s light at the end of this particular tunnel instead of turning back after we’ve used a third of our gas. Of course, Paul says, there are several cenotes along the way, just in case we don’t have enough air. At least, says Paul. As far as he remembers.

Well, I guess you’re always trusting someone – trusting your instructor’s training, trusting the guy who planted that arrow, trusting the other jokers in the cave not to silt it up or cut your guideline to the surface.

Hell, we’re trusting Paul Heinerth. And, of course, we’ll be noting the distance from the last cenote every kick of the way.

And, man, are we glad we decided to make the journey! Mile River Traverse is a wonderland. During our trip we pass a kick-butt variety of terrain, from wide tunnels to tall and narrow and winding passages. At one point, we cruise through a series of cathedral-ceilinged passages with dramatic, craggy ravines below. A few minutes later, we’re cruising through a horizontal crack with a ten-foot ceiling, with stalactites and stalagmites forming an obstacle course of bars and turnstiles. There were moments we wished we all were diving sidemount.

It was in this passage that we discovered some enterprising users of the water supply. Tree roots, growing in fine-stranded veils, emerged from cracks in the rock like the mops of long-haired divers waving in the water column. At times these feathery growths took on the character and color of dense furs. We also discovered the roots of human infiltration into the aquifer.

Most of the time, the floor has been flat and sand-covered, giving the impression of a thick, solid bottom. But, as we discover, it’s a flimsy façade. At many points the “floor” is just an inch-thick crust; we can see through holes punched by falling debris that there’s a whole other cave layer below.

That’s the thing about these caves. They’re fragile. Look up at any time and you’ll see tons of rocks and formations over your head, cemented together by what amounts to soft, wet chalk. Any disturbance, like bubbles, or an earthquake, or – say – a construction crew overhead, and….

Brrrrrrrrr-rup-bup-dididididididididdididum-dum-dum.

Paul stops and points to his ears. Do we all hear that? Sounds like a helicopter or a jackhammer nearby.

Brrrrrrrrr-rup-bup-dididididididididdididum-dumdumdumdumdum.

It’s getting louder as we progress.

BRRRRRRRRR-RUP-BUP-DIDIDIDIDIDIDIDIDDIDIDUM-DUMDUMDUMDUMDUM.

As we round a corner, we no longer just hear it; we feel it reverberating in our chests, our ribs rattling with every rap-a-tap, our brains quivering as the shock waves run through the water-water boundary between river and our bodies like a bullet through queso fresco.

BADABADABADABADABADABADA-BRRRRRRRRRRP-BADABAP-BAP-BAP!!!

Polina pauses to snap a photo of another tree root. The rest of us are thinking, um… do you really need that shot?

We give her a few seconds and then press on in a gesture that says, “enjoy the rest of your dive; don’t get buried alive!” She gets the message and pries herself from her subject, and within a minute or so we’ve cleared the cave-in zone.

3,800 feet into the dive, we pass the Dos Palmas Cenote and pop up to visit some local bathers, check our gas supply and continue. More enticing scenery later, we finally arrive at our destination. Having left the watery eyes of Dos Ojos upstream, we emerge over a mile away through the humble opening of Motz-Sayha cenote.

And, of course, the smiling face of our driver, [the other] Roger, is waiting there to greet us. What a day!

OK, kiddies. Polina has had a chance to take some bang-up pictures of what these decorations I’ve been going on about look like so the lesson plan is complete. Please open your books to Geology, the page about cave formation. This was our Earth Day dive, so what better way to celebrate than to learn a bit, then go swimming into the heart of the Earth?

Caves form underwater. Having never thought about cave formation beyond the movie version of Journey to the Center of the Earth with James Mason it never occurred to me that this was so absolute. Caves are formed when ground water finds the water table and starts dissolving the minerals in the substrate. Rain saturates the soil and seeps down. As the water seeks a downhill path underground it starts to join and flow as any other trickle builds, eventually, into a river. These subterranean rivers find their way either to the ocean or to topside rivers (which find the ocean) and the water cycle keeps on spinning.

“But Rog,” you say, “When I was a kid my folks brought me to Carlsbad Caverns, and that’s not full of water.”

“Please raise your hand before speaking and give your answer in the form of a question,” I’d say sharply. But you make a good point. What’s more, you’ve hit on the crux of how these caves in the Yucatan are so gorgeous and intriguing. The stalactites and stalagmites I’ve been talking about as thought they’re made out of solid gold chocolate… they need to be not-underwater to form. So at some point the earth managed to keep all the water out of these Mexican caves for the millions of years required. An ice age seems to be a particularly effective solution for keeping lots of water locked up out of the way.

So during the last few ice ages, instead of rainwater seeping through to the substrate and getting flushed away to the sea, it would drip from the ceiling, leaving a little trace of minerals, typically calcite (this will be important later). Those few molecules of mineral left on the ceiling are the start of a stalactite. The few molecules that reach the floor in the corresponding spot become an inchoate stalagmite. With a few exceptions, the tites and the mites form as a pair, eventually joining in the middle to form a column which, once it gets big enough, starts dripping off stalactites of its very own.

The Mexican caves, being so close to sea level, refilled with water after these formations were created and are now diveable. Dry caves happen to be above the ancient water level and are obviously still walkable. Please stay with your tour guide, though. Getting lost in these places is not a joke.

There is a small army of other types of formations and for descriptions on that I’d refer you to the experts. Or to Wikipedia. In any case, I won’t bore you with the details. The most important thing to be learned here is about the calcite. When you come across a largish, rounded topped stalagmite made of this bright, smooth substance and you hold your flashlight lens right up against it… it glows like one of those rocks from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

And that’s cool. End lesson.

I now refer you to some pretty pictures:
Some stalactites fossilize the shape of a prehistoric waterfall.

A stalactite and its stalagmite just started kissing into a pillar when the water returned.

Go ahead, swim through, there’s more pretty stuff on the other side.

Each level of these stairs was filled with a little, mineral-rich pool of water somehow. I don’t remember how. It’s just real pretty.

Decoration overload.

I am very, very glad I didn’t skip today’s dives. Every once in a while one or the other of my feet will swell up and it hurts like a bastard to walk. As luck would have it, this morning was one of those very mornings it happened. I figured perhaps it would be best to take it easy and heal up so I’d be good to dive the rest of the week without worry.

“Hm,” said Paul.
“What?” I asked.
“Don’t skip today.”
“Oh?”
“No. You can skip tomorrow if you want. But you can’t skip today. Maybe Jim and I can just pull you around the cave so you won’t have to kick.”

Plenty of ibuprofen later I realized why skipping today was not an option. There have been sections of cave in the past few days that have been stunning… today’s dives were stunning from the moment we emptied our BCs to sink to the moment we took our fins off to climb the ladder out. There were more “WOW!” times in just today for me than there were in most of the 1990s combined.

All of the pictures taken above were taken in Grand Cenote today. Those of you who have seen one of Polina’s slide shows know what a talented photographer she is and those pictures are as splendid a demonstration of her skill as any. But as I mentioned before, no picture could ever really do the place proper justice.

Jim and I asked Paul, as we packed our gear, whether in the decades he has spent as a professional underwater cave photographer, videographer, and cinematographer he feels he has ever captured the real feeling of one of these places.

His answer came without pause.

“No. Never.”