The Dive Evangelist

Like Oil and Water

noreply@blogger.com (Roger Williams) — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 18:50:00 +0000

Why didn’t I take up jogging?

I don’t mean to denigrate the plight of the jogger and I’m sure they have a whole set of concerns around their sport: antagonistic road construction crews, new developments in lace technology, that sort of thing. But we divers are in a real bad way due to a particular constraint of our sport. Except for a happy few, we need to travel to where the water is, and with the cost of travel these days we can’t even make our way up a certain creek, paddle or not.

I live in New Jersey. Go ahead… laugh all you want; I’ll bet you anything my pizza is better than yours, though. From my house in North Jersey to a dive boat in the Atlantic is only an hour’s ride. Every once in a while that ride is a risk. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration will predict seas around 4-6 feet, which is really the outside of edge of most divers’ ability to get back onto a boat after a dive.

But 4-6 feet alone doesn’t tell you enough. Is it slow interval (where the waves come at you with long, rolling predictability) or is it fast (where you get hammered in every direction at once without any rhyme or reason and an ill-timed grab for the ladder will hurt… badly)? The only way to truly know what the sea is going to look like, is to go look at it.

More than many times I’ve gotten all my gear into the car at 4AM, driven the hour to the dock, loaded onto the boat, and stood around while the captain radios all his friends to find out whether Poseidon is in the mood for visitors that day. Sometimes the boat goes out and you get to enjoy the Atlantic at its most challenging. Sometimes you unload all your gear back into the car and get back into bed even before the sun comes up. Getting blown out right at the dock is just part of acceptable risk of diving around here.

Yesterday NOAA was making just such a prediction about conditions. A handful of friends and I were supposed to go out in the afternoon, but by noon we had to make the call one way or the other. It was different this time. No one wanted to drive to the dock so that we could call the dive or not having actually laid eyes on the ocean.

$4 per gallon for gas. Almost $5 for the boat’s diesel.

This is just local diving and we’re getting waylaid by travel cost. I’m lucky to be as close to some of the best diving in the world as I am, yet the price of a relatively short drive ensured my dryness yesterday as we agreed that the cost of everyone’s potentially wasted gas was prohibitive.

Even well beyond the borders of the Garden State (State Shell: The Knobbed Whelk) one of the reasons many dive shops are seeing a dramatic drop in business is that so few people are traveling to lovely, blue destinations and want to get certified beforehand. As jet-fuel prices rise airlines struggle to keep ticket costs down. They have tried to balance the books in contrarian to outright lunatic ways, such as charging for even the first piece of checked luggage, charging for the privilege of sitting in an exit-row seat, and, of course, putting thousands and thousands of people out of work.

We devoted divers will probably continue to sit on the over-booked flights and endure the missed connections due to outdated plane pieces breaking, but we certainly don’t do so happily.

We vow never again to fly this or that airline. We argue with the harried counter clerks, with whom we find it hard to empathize as people afraid to lose their jobs when we see them as an obstacle between us and a paid-for, thousand-dollar dive vacation. And so: a bitter, self-replicating cascade effect of rising costs and lowered service makes travel a misery.

I don’t know the precise answer to the problem of fuel costs. I’m a diver, not an energy expert. Ask a hippie and they'll say, “Why aren’t we exploring alternative energies as aggressively as we’re bombing countries?” Ask someone who doesn’t give a crap about the long-term effects to both the rising atmospheric CO2 levels and the short-term impacts on the ecosystem surrounding the vast, industrial footprint of an oil drilling plant and they’d say, “Tap ANWR.”

Either way, it just sucks.

If only there were some way to harness the energy of our own exhaust bubbles.

Goodbyes

noreply@blogger.com (Roger Williams) — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 15:25:00 +0000

A year ago the New York Aquarium was blessed to help bring Akituusaq into this world. On Sunday the joy of the bouncing baby walrus was counter-balanced by the loss of his father, Ayveq. Sunday, a week ago, he was suddenly struck down by some mystery illness and despite the best efforts of the Veterinary staff, so far, the cause has not been diagnosed.

It had been Ayveq who brumfed snot all over me during my initial orientation walk, demonstrating that working at the NYA was just about the coolest thing possible. My fondness for him grew with every visit. Each time I passed in front of his enclosure to get a bucket of food for the fishdudes or to get to the cylinder shed I couldn’t help but stop to vie for the attention of that hulk.

In the quiet of the park before all the school trips and families show up it was easy for a single person calling his name to rouse his curiosity. Often he would swim up to a spot in the tank where he could amble onto a bit of structure and lean close up to the fence to inspect this anomaly of a person. His behemoth face only a few feet away, inspecting this tiny thing before him. Now, for those of the three readers of this blog that don’t know me: I am not a small dude. Chances are very good that I am significantly taller than anyone you know. But reflected in Ayveq’s eyes was humility. At more than two tons the gravitas of his gaze made me feel very, very small.

One morning, as I was cooing to him and asking him who was a handsome walrus, as though he might answer… he did. Ayveq started to whistle. Sure, it would have been neat if he started whistling that part from Sitting on the Dock of the Bay, but the long, mellow tone he let out of those massive lungs stunned me just the same. Did you know a walrus can hold their breath for about ½ an hour to make better-than-200 foot dives? With pipes like that, it was a long, impressive whistle.

“The walrus can whistle!” I reported excitedly to the keepers, as though I had just made an extraordinary breakthrough in marine science. They laughed.
“Yeah,” explained one, with a wry smile, “It’s mating behavior. He likes you.”

While I was and am flattered I’m sure Ayveq knew that it just wouldn’t work out.

It’s hard to imagine that each and every one of the volunteers lacks some sort of story and similar affection for the big fella; and I don’t want to imagine the grief that the staff of the Aquarium are going through. The animals at the aquarium become very dear to you very quickly when you are among them so often. They aren’t displays, they aren’t even like pets, they are friends.

They don’t even have to be gigantic and furry to capture your heart as they do. For example, a few months ago a big, ancient green moray named Eli finally went off to the reef in the sky. Not knowing it wasn’t yet common knowledge I stupidly blurted this fact out, causing instant tears to be shed. Similarly in Glover’s Reef, the main reef display, there is a goatfish who, at some point, got an o-ring wrapped around his little head. As he’s grown, the o-ring has started cutting into him. I admit the goatfish, so far as I know, does not have a name, which makes the sight no less heartbreaking. Unfortunately, he has thus far proved impossible to catch and free of the ring, but the divers will keep trying.

I am going to miss Ayveq badly. I am sure he will be missed badly by very many. It is going to be hard for a good, long time to walk past his underwater windows and not get to smile at the denizens of excited, little kids marveling slack-jawed and wide-eyed at his truly awesome girth. I don’t even know what I’m going to do about walking past the front fence.

The ray of sunshine is still little Akituusaq. I say little, but that isn’t really so. He already outweighs me by more than double and is only going to keep turning mackerel and clams into more walrus. Ayveq’s tank may be a big one to fill, but one day it will be Aki’s immensity that the visitors marvel at. He’ll make kissy-faces at them with a head the size of an ottoman. Kids will reflexively step back from the window as two and a half tons of animal swims straight at them and presses his blubbery cuteness against the glass. The volunteers and the staff alike will have stories upon stories about him.

I am sure more than one will include, “You shoulda seen his dad.”

Splash

noreply@blogger.com (Roger Williams) — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 02:16:00 +0000

Tomorrow I'm going on my first local dive of the season to the wreck of the USS San Diego and I'm giddy as a bottle of bubbles. Oceanblue Divers chartered the trip which quickly filled with a as many old salts as there are folks who are tentatively giving local diving a chance to impress them. The weather reports are as groovy as the crowd with predictions for seas like glass and wind blowing just enough to keep you cool in your drysuit.

Just as I've never gotten to dive the San Diego before, so is the dive is from a boat I've never jumped off before, the R/V Garloo. This is the boat that once was the legendary R/V Wahoo, arguably one of two boats that defined Northeastern wreck diving over the course of the 80s and 90s.

This is the exact dive which I woke up at 3AM about a year ago to make. I packed my gear in the car and drove the 70 or so miles out to the dock.

I'd gotten there early, before the folks who had slept on the boat were up. So, instead of getting on board for the first time without the captain's permission I went back to the car to set up my rig. I opened up the crate I tote everything around in and stared. Rubbing the sleep from my eyes I slowly admitted to myself that what I was looking at was the sad truth... I'd forgotten my BC.

Well I'm not making the same mistake this time. I'm all packed up, checked, double-checked, and redouble-checked. Everything is where it belongs and I'm ready to rock and roll.

Now there's just the bit about having to wake up at 3AM.

Wish me luck.

The Crummy Thing About Diving

noreply@blogger.com (Roger Williams) — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 03:18:00 +0000

This weekend Oceanblue Divers had a fantastic barbeque and dive at Dutch Springs Quarry.

We met up and we laughed and we traded stories about the places that we had each been and where some of us were going or hoping to go. I met some folks I've heard about and I met some folks I've never heard of before and I met some folks I haven't seen in months and I was grateful to see them all. The grill was hot, the drinks were cold, and the company was rock'n'roll.

We went diving. Sure, it's not the Caribbean, but it was diving. The relaxing burble-and-swoosh of the regulator. The weightless drifting. Even a curious fish or two to stare down. The cool serenity of being underwater away from the heat of the dry world above. It was a perfect day for diving.

It was a perfect day.

But that was yesterday.

Today was spent thinking about diving, about how great yesterday was, about how it is going to be a week until I get back into the water, about how I'm not sure when my next trip will be. Preoccupation filled most of the day, as it fills most days. I hung around the Oceanblue website along with the other diving messageboards, magazines, and blogs that I read over and over, whether there are new postings or not.

More than once (OK, more than 100 onces) I closed my eyes and put myself back in the water. Just as many times I opened my eyes to disappointment. I can't imagine that such single-mindedness is at all healthy, but am I about to stop giving myself over to it? Are you kidding?

Each and every day is spent dedicated to diving, mind, body, and soul. The crummy thing is that, despite the permeation, far too many of the days are spent dry.

Diving isn't a hobby. It isn't a sport.

It is an obsession. It is a fixation. It is an addiction. And I love it... no matter how much the withdraw hurts.

You got skills?

noreply@blogger.com (Roger Williams) — Fri, 09 May 2008 18:26:00 +0000

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.

Your Call

noreply@blogger.com (Roger Williams) — Sun, 04 May 2008 13:41:00 +0000

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.

Endnotes

noreply@blogger.com (Roger Williams) — Thu, 01 May 2008 12:42:00 +0000

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.

The Pit

noreply@blogger.com (Roger Williams) — Thu, 01 May 2008 11:22:00 +0000

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.

I'm Walkin, Yes Indeed

noreply@blogger.com (Roger Williams) — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 12:30:00 +0000

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.

Hollywood and Some Vines

noreply@blogger.com (Roger Williams) — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 15:31:00 +0000

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!

In the Earth Day

noreply@blogger.com (Roger Williams) — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 14:46:00 +0000

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.”

Night and Day

noreply@blogger.com (Roger Williams) — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 02:35:00 +0000

Anna reminded me of something said the other day. Diving these caves is like exploring a fingerprint.

They are all so different. A single cave system can be night and day depending on which hole you decide to poke your head through. Today’s dives were a perfect example of the light/dark imagery there. The morning dive was like swimming under a clear, blue, spring sky. The afternoon dive was like exploring the secrets of night itself.

Mayan Blue. That’s what the American caving community calls this particular hole in the earth. The Maya have another name for it (they seem to have a different word for everything), but we figured we’d stick with what we can pronounce. I still don’t understand how a word with four Xs in it can be said without a sprained tongue.

The cenote is relatively small. The cave is big. Very, very, very big. Apparently, when the memo was sent out that caves are supposed to be little and claustrophobic, Mayan Blue was not accepting any mail. After dropping down through the somewhat crowded pool (Scott dropping the most, having launched a giant stride off of a ledge about 8 feet up from the water), yet again, we found ourselves in a cave through which we could have a four-contender dirigible race.

While there was not a great deal of decoration in the main portion of the cave, the mammoth-sized limestone rocks which have dropped from the ceiling into massive piles like the Devil’s dominoes make the swim as awe inspiring as any other cave so far. Through the blue water you can see piles and piles of them in all directions. That is only the main portion of the cave.

About ½ hour into the dive Paul showed Scott where to run a short line to a side tunnel which is, we later learned, called Death Arrow. I know, very spooky, right?

Calling that room Death Arrow is as appropriate as renaming Michelangelo’s David “Thrill Killer.” There’s some story involving an cave diving line marker that leads to the name, but Paul calls the room the Wedding Hall and I think that’s what I’m going to call it as well. Smaller than the main tunnel it is a rough, horizontal oval of a tunnel blanketed in a heavy lace of decoration. Not only is this beautiful place different from every cave we’ve seen so far, it’s completely different from the rest of the same cave.

And herein is the fingerprintiness.

Surely, when I get back, I’ll be asked better than a dozen times, “So what was the best dive?” And I will have to think of some reliable leger-de-man to avoid this question altogether.

There is no way to explain. I could type for a thousand hours. I could show you a thousand pictures. I could talk for a thousand days. There is no way to describe the way in which each of these caves stops your heart in your chest in its own way. You simply have to be there. I am sorry. I’ll keep writing and I’ll keep trying, but to really understand just how beautiful the insides of the Earth really are, you’re going to have to see it for yourself.

Not only does the hotel send us a little, Mayan tank of a dude to move all our tanks around and to pack the van (and what’s prettier than a van ready for a day’s cave diving?), they also pack us lunches on request. Today, instead, we decided to go to a little restaurant in Tulum for grub between dive sites. Dona Tina. Holy crow. Best Adobo Chicken ever, hands down. Served with this fresh, handmade, corn tortilla. I could go on for some length about the delights of true local cuisine. The short form: I would prefer a couple of tacos carnitas for a handful of pennies at a roadside shack of questionable building integrity any day of the week to any all-inclusive, all-you-can-eat buffet on the face of this Earth.

The second dive, in Naharon Cenote was the “night” portion of our day. Victor, who it now seems is with us for the whole week (and all the luckier we are for it. His knowledge and experience with these caves is interesting and makes the dives more fun. Also, Victor is the only one of us who speaks Spanish. That helped in getting my ATM card back from the bank this morning), explained that millions of years ago the decorations in the cave were as white as the limestone they filtered through. At some point the vegetal detritus created heavily tannic water which stained all the formations black.

These black formations were like something out of Giger. The darkness of the place sucked up the light from our HIDs. The other divers, who were so present in the other caves became little more than floating spotlights. The portions you could explore were only those that fit in a single circle of your light. But with portions so abundant and formations just as multitudinous and delicate or singularly immense, just as organic-seeming or obvious stone, with so much in all directions and barely enough mind-power to absorb it all… I felt like I was exploring the streets of New York on my hands and knees.

And so, popping back out to the topside world from the caves of night, another dive day is done and it is time to get back to a few of my favorite things. No, I haven’t gotten to spend near enough time at this, here beach bar. The nights have been early, but the days have been worth the sacrifice.

Just a dog

noreply@blogger.com (Roger Williams) — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 02:25:00 +0000

I was half asleep this afternoon on the ride "home" and only barely noticed the atrocity of a multi-million dollar façade of the resort golf course next door. In that dreamy notice an image popped into my head and I realized at once why I find the thing an atrocity and I hope that a hurricane knocks it down. Soon.

The other day as we were breaking down our dive gear a dog came wandering by. Dogs are all over the place, not just in Mexico, but in most developing areas. They’ve been with us since the stone ages, why should now be any different?

This semi-feral weimaraner mutt ambled up to us strangers with friendly eyes and a happily wagging tail. Below the pup-like glee was also a haggard, emaciated look. He held his right forepaw off the ground as he walked to avoid the pain the ugly, purple infection there was surely giving him.

Just a dog.

We have the luxury in much of the US to consider dogs beloved family pets. We can afford fancy-pants food for them and vets’ bills. But in developing nations where food for your family is the struggle, what is a dog but just a dog?

That dog’s happy look at just being petted a bit and being told what a good dog he is flashed into my head as if the stone façade was a movie screen. The money spent on that ugly neo-modernist piece of crap isn’t going to improve the quality of living for the local Mexicans and Mayans. The revenue generated by the hotels up and down this stretch of paradise mostly goes offshore to multinational corporations who could barely give a whit about the local help as other than The Help.

And as long as the tourism industry continues to stamp on the necks of local populations mercilessly, they will stay too poor to be able to consider the feral animal populations as anything other than just dogs.

As divers we have a special connection with the growing eco-tourism movement as the environment our sport is dependent upon is so ecologically sensitive. But among the talk of global warming, dying reefs, dwindling fresh water, and other such dramatic effects, we need also to remember our impact on the populations where we travel.

The locals who are a meal away from hunger, the forests beyond the resort gates, littered with broken down auto parts, the dogs who, each and every one, deserve a human who loves them and lets them sleep on the bed instead of dying of gangrene in the jungle… they are all part of the "eco," too.

Heaven is Down

noreply@blogger.com (Roger Williams) — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 11:57:00 +0000

I don't speak any Spanish. This is a marked disadvantage when trying to order tacos from a roadside stand where not one of the three women cooking speaks any English. I know it makes me the stupid American and no matter how many times I resolve to speak the language spoken where a great bulk of my diving takes place, I never do because I'm too busy playing on the internet. Sometimes a word jumps out at me, though, close enough to English's Romantic language roots as that I can translate.

Ponderossa was the name of the cenote in which we spent our morning. While it could just as well mean "Toaster Oven" I'm guessing that the word means "Ponderous." And Great Gary Cooper... how ponderous it is. One of the largest sinkholes in the Yucatan, it acts as a community swimming pool to the locals as well as being the premiere place for checkout dives for students from Open Water all the way to Full Cave. The cavern zone (defined as the area where one still has a direct eye-shot towards the door and sunlight) is simply cavernous, being a nearly 5 minute swim down, just to get into the proper cave zone.

We were planning to do what is called a circuit, which is to swim in one entrance to the cave and out another, making a huge, underground circle. For more than a half an hour we swam through tunnels made of sponge-like limestone tunnels so incredibly delicate that just the exhalation bubbles hitting the ceiling produced a tiny tumble of stone which was able to hold its weight in the reduced gravity of water, but not in an air pocket.

Since I first heard of the idea of a halocline in my open water class I had been obsessed with the idea of experiencing one and, as I wrote before, the experience is unique and exciting. Though, by the end of this dive, I decided that the blurry mix of the halocline was a nuisance and wished that the cave would commit to being either salt water or fresh and just knock it off with the trying to blind me. We all agreed that there were a few interesting effects that the haloclines produced during this dive, though. The first is that, when you’re swimming below it, it tends to produce a ceiling effect. Visibility is clear where you are and you know that should you move up another few inches it will be shot to hell, so you tend to keep your head down, even when the floor comes up to meet you.

One by one, we all broke ourselves of this habit and discovered the second effect. Remembering that the halocline is not, in fact a ceiling, we each popped through it to swim well above in those areas where the water column was more abundant above than below. At this point we looked down at our blurry teammates who seemed to be rooting around in a stream below us. The water under the water effect can scarcely be described fully. It’s damned weird.

Though interesting, as I said, it becomes annoying after having to make the transition about forty dozen times depending on the topography of the cave. Mostly, to me, due to the waste of gas. Remember, salt water and fresh have different buoyancies. So any time one is neutrally buoyant in fresh water, hitting that thermocline was like hitting a wall of positive buoyancy you have to dump a ton of air from your BC to sink into. Alternately, coming up from the salt layer one bobs up from the momentum a few feet, before sinking like a rock strait into the thermocline again from being so negative in the fresh water which requires the addition of a few breaths worth of tank air TO the BC.

We didn’t make it all the way to the other entrance, having to turn back the way we came because of gas restraints. So we marked how far we got and figured we’d go around the other way on a second dive. We were, Victor reported, only a few feet from that second door.

On the second dive nearly everyone had to turn back without getting to the marker of how far we’d reached on the first. Victor and Paul came back, finally, about ½ hour later.

“The marker was about ½ way along the circuit,” Victor admitted. So in almost an hour and a half… we’d swum ½ the cave.

Our third dive of the day was in a different cenote called Choc Mul. The name being that of the Mayan Rain God, this indicates another reason these holes in the jungle were so important to the Maya. There was a type of bird Victor pointed out earlier in the day called a Mok-mok. These non-aquatic birds love the cenotes and, when left relatively alone express their happiness for being where they like to be by producing a funny sort of a squawky song. The Maya would follow this song when they needed to find the nearest cenote. And why would they need to find one? The Caribbean is a lovely place made of water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink. The cenotes solve that problem. Naturally, their sole source of fresh water became synonymous with the Rain God.

Choc Mul is another of those Indiana Jones sets with a pain-in-the-calves staircase to climb after the dive. It is also another one of those places where the sheer enormity is brain-bending.

At one point during the dive I found myself hovering in this… this… room. The floor was 40 feet below. The ceiling was 20 feet above, an endless sprawl of decoration. While there were some heavily decorated bits of column and wall nearby, just beyond them my light could not penetrate through the 200+ foot visibility to the actual walls of the room in any direction. I could clearly see the rest of the dive team in as much wonderment as myself, hovering and whipping their heads about trying to take in every one of the limitless billions of beautiful details, the water so clear as to seem to fix them in mid-air.

It may be under the ground, but it is heaven.

Main Squeeze

noreply@blogger.com (Roger Williams) — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 02:23:00 +0000

It’s a hard life we divers lead sometimes. This morning was particularly a struggle for me.

At about 7:00 the sound of the lapping sea spilled from my dreams into my waking consciousness. Somehow, in the back of my sleep-addled mind I knew the alarm was going to go off soon, but that didn’t matter. I smiled as the sound I was hearing and the sweet, light smell blowing through the room refined themselves together to remind me where I was. It was the sound of clear blue water lighting on soft white sand and the smell of the islands blowing into Mexico.

The lot of us met for a breakfast of scrambled huevos rancheros, spiced black beans, fresh tortilla, watermelon, and fresh pineapple juice in the dining room of our main suite.

Yes, a hard life we divers lead.

Breakfast done, though, we had to hunker. There was a bit of work ahead of us. As I’ve mentioned before, for cave diving there is lots and lots of heavy gear and before we got to do any of the day's diving, we would have to move said heavy gear from the locker room into the van to the dive site. So we thought.

Roger already did it. The van was packed, all we had to do was pick a seat and get in.

Not me, Roger. Our driver, Roger. The man is the Scuba Fairy. Every time I turn around, my gear is not only already set up, but set up precisely where I would have put it. Coming up from our first dive of the day, we'd found that Roger had already humped fresh tanks for all of us down the longish flight of stairs to the entry site. I sort of wonder if I wish during mid-dive that I had more air, whether Roger wouldn't just show up around the next turn wearing only a snorkel and some loud swim-trunks with full tanks.

The drive to Taj Mahal Cenote was… bumpy. The land these sinkholes populate are owned by family collectives called ejidos and are not the most developed corners of the planet. Lizards skittered out of the van’s way as we made our slow progress over great, rocky swells in the dirt road through the jungle. Roger pulled the van so that the back doors faced a sketchy looking, steep set of stairs cut straight into the limestone.

Curious as to just what we had gotten ourselves into, I followed the stairs down and found myself on the set of an Indiana Jones movie. Or possibly a documentary about bats or geology or ecology or something. My efforts as a photographer are lamentable in capturing the karma of the place. Between the ancient formations, the mysteriously deep shadows, and the reflected light from the pristine water it is easy to see how the Maya found the cenotes to be holy places. Such mystical serenity.

Our first dive we swam towards the Juma River. The distance between the underground Juma River and the Taj Mahal Cenote was incredibly tight and not for the claustrophobic. When I say, “incredibly tight and not for the claustrophobic” I mean, “One could easily get a bunch of friends together and drive the entire Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade through these tunnels and not worry about even putting the slightest knick in Snoopy.” Without any exaggeration, the Holland Tunnel is a covered bridge in the middle of Vermont compared to the size of these caves.

The second dive was a little more tricksy.

Halo: Greek for “salt.” Cline: derivative of Kevin Kline. He, being terribly divisive on good acting, has become synonymous with “place where two things separate.” Salt water, since it is full of salt, is a little heavier than fresh water. The added weight settles itself to the bottom of this or that place while the fresh water sits on top. Where the two meet is called a Halocline. It’s like a parfait, but saltier.

Haloclines are tricky bastards. They barely look like anything at all. Only if you're paying attention and look at it from an angle does it look vaguely like a shimmer of water already underwater. But, as you pass through it the whole world goes scrambled. You can tell that the water is gin clear, but it seems you have a lahsa-apso in each of your contacts, so you can’t focus on anything.

“There is a little bit of a tight area that is all halocline before we get to the Chinese Garden,” warned Victor, a local cave instructor and friend of Paul's who is joining us for a few days.

It was an understatement.

It was a tunnel that I and my tanks just barely fit through together. As each diver in front of me swam straight into the halocline, it was as though they had swum into an alternate dimension. It was a sea of vaseline. Sometimes I could make out fins a few inches in front of me. Mostly I couldn't. More than once was the introduction made, "Rock, meet head. Head, meet rock."

Then it stopped.

Viz opened up. Instead of a tunnel that made you feel like toothpaste, there was another of those vast hangers full of so many cave decorations as to stun you into absolute reverence. A pillar from the ceiling to the floor, 40 feet below, must be 15 feet around. Drip and drop by drip and drop that great formation created itself over the course of millions of years. There is one stalactite (tight from the ceiling) hanging down at least twenty feet through the water. And among those singular formations there are countless thousands of “soda straws,” stalactites uniformly thin as straws and impossibly long.

It's a hard life we divers lead sometimes, and as I exchanged glances with the cats down here with me I could see that, just then, we were all comfortable bearing the strain.

Greetings from Mexico

noreply@blogger.com (Roger Williams) — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 12:20:00 +0000

I know, I know. I never finished the tale of the Floridian Cave Diving classes. Mea Culpa, I am sorry. I will finish the third and final installment of that story in short enough time. But, there are more urgent matters.

I am currently writing from the white-sanded, beach bar of the Villa DeRosa in Akumal, Mexico. The same crew from the Floridian trip (minus Larry, plus a certain ScottD) has congregated here to dive arguably the most spectacular caves on this planet. Or, in this planet, if you want to be literal about it. This is too good to not be reporting live.

The Villa DeRosa is an oasis of genuine comfort along the shore of gaudy, ostentatious hotel facades of the Riviera Maya. A family-owned collection of 28 suites the Villa DeRosa caters primarily directly to divers. Instead of being greeted with all the pomp and pedantry of a cavernous lobbied resort, we were instead greeted by Tony DeRosa himself, long blonde hair nearly forming dreadlocks and a smile that says, "You brought shoes? Why?" The main suite is large and airy with the breeze off the Caribbean blowing shotgun from the back balcony facing the lullabaic sea to the front balcony opened to the heavily bougainvilleaed courtyard and pool.

While “home” may be cozy, we got our fair share of cavernous.

Our first dives were into Carwash Cenote. So named for a weekend tradition among Mexicans to park just beside the water's edge, swimming in the cenote, and then washing their cars using the fresh water. A short ride from the hotel and the van pulls into what could be a state park, or possibly a rest area. What gives it away as one over the other is the great pool of crystalline water the van stops beside.

“Cenote,” is a Mayan word. Best I can figure it means, “Great, big, monster, giant hole in the middle of the damned jungle full of pretty, sweet-tasting water that you can clearly see all the pretty freshwater fishes in, even though said fishes are about 40 feet underwater.” The Mayans were a concise people. They did, after all, invent Zero.

Our eagerness overshadows our practice as it took the lot of us just shy of an hour to make it from the van into the water. But once in the water…

Our first dive took us deep, through most of our’s first halocline (more on that later) to a place called “Firepit.” Supposedly, this was a place where, during the last ice age, when all the water that is currently filling the cave was busy being locked up as an ice-cap and the cave was dry, some cavemen used this particular place to cook. I could kinda, almost, but not really buy it. There’s some cabonized something scattered around. But the last ice age was about a jillion years ago, and salt water eats everything quickly.

Whatever. Anthropology aside, it was a cool place. Stalctites and stagmites everywhere (“tites” hold tight to the roof, “mites” stand mighty from the floor. That’s the way I remember it. Scott has some method that involves the number of Ts in their name. Sounds contrived to me) and you’ve got to swim between them like a slalom course.

For the second dive we went with purpose to get to a place called the Room of Tears. It is so called as the first divers ever to see this cavern reportedly burst into tears at the sheer beauty of the place. Ever. Really think about that for a moment. They were very likely the first human eyes ever to see the place since it was created some millions of years ago.

We got to go there.

I am glad I didn’t discover it. If I had, it would have been called “The HOLY F@&#!*% S#!^!!!! Room.” That was my reaction anyway. This is not to say the place isn’t stunningly, breath-stealingly beautiful to the point of tears. It is. It has been agreed among the bunch of us that the Room of Tears is one of the most beautiful places any of us has ever been lucky enough to see. I just tend to react to such spectacular places first by cursing to myself, next by just floating in wordless awe, THEN and only then, by starting to tear up. Then I had to catch up with everyone.

After our first two dives of our first time down here Paul and Anna, the two who know the place only smirked at the rest of our excitement at what we’d seen.

“Yeah,” Paul said, “This was OK.”

OK?

Great Googly-Moogly, if this was OK, what’s great?

Guess we’ll find out.

Follow Gaelin Rosenwaks' expedition

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Strickland) — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 17:11:00 +0000

The guest speaker at our June Happy Hour will be explorer and marine scientist Gaelin Rosenwaks. Gaelin is currently on an expedition in the Bering Sea, studying the effects of climate change on the Bering Sea ecosystem. If you'd like to follow her adventures on the Bering Sea Ice Expedition, log onto her blog.

And be sure to come to the June happy hour to meet Gaelin and hear about her expedition!

Rays: The new shark?

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Strickland) — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 16:36:00 +0000

Ray leaps from water, kills woman on boat

If you're like me, you read that headline and asked yourself "Who is Ray, and why did he kill a woman?" If you read the article, you find out that Ray is not a person; rather, the headline refers to a spotted eagle ray that leaped out of the water and struck a woman who, startled, then fell backward, hit her head, and died.

How such a bizarre accident gets reported as the ray actually killing the woman (at least the way the headline is written) is beyond me. [Note: If you click through to the article, you'll see the headline is worded differently, but the headline repeated above is how the headline link is written on CNN's home page.] Not that I'm surprised that the media shows irresponsible and sensationalist writing skills when it comes to reporting on deaths related to marine animals.

So my question: after Steve Irwin's death and now this accident, are rays going to become the new shark?

Friends For Life

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Strickland) — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 23:35:00 +0000

You've got plenty of reasons to go on an Oceanblue Divers trip:

Great value: Just compare them to any comparable trip offered by a dive shop if you want proof of that.
Fantastic destinations: This past year, Oceanblue has traveled to Sulawesi, Bonaire, Cozumel, Roatan, the Bahamas, Key Largo and California's Channel Islands (not to mention exotic Dutch Springs).
No hassle: The trip organizer does all the planning and preparation for you.
Fun people: You'll hang out with a group of fun divers.

Most people probably book dive travel based on the first two items: price and destination. But in my mind, that last one—fun people—is the oft-overlooked but best reason to go on an Oceanblue Divers trip.

So far, I've traveled with the club on five of the trips (Bahamas, Cozumel, Bonaire, the Channel Islands and Roatan). On those trips, I haven't just met new divers—I've made friends for life. Now, Oceanblue happy hours are more than just fun and informative evenings for me: they're reunions with great friends.

If you're new to the club, or if you feel like you haven't gotten to know as many of our members as you'd like, I would tell you "Go on a trip." You'll greet strangers in the airport for the departure, and bid farewell to new friends on your return. Oh, and you'll do some diving too.

The Heartbeat of the Earth: Part II

noreply@blogger.com (Roger Williams) — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 12:37:00 +0000

Polina had already taken the Intro to Cave course with Paul some months before and the two had become friends. In truth, it's hard not to make fast friends with Paul. He's a modest, smiling dude with eyes that laugh and a voice that easily follows suit. Far from being the stern and severe drillmaster I'd expected of someone with his venerable history, he bounces rather than stomps and laughs with you at your mistakes rather than scolds. He’s unashamed to howl showtunes into the woods at all hours of the night and knows more about Star Trek than I do, which is saying something.

"I brought some leftovers for you, Paul," Polina twittered excitedly upon arrival.

She, Anna, and Larry checked into the sumptuous accommodations of the doublewide trailer right in the heart of fabulous, downtown Lauraville two days after I had already settled into a routine of groping around in the dark along with Jim (not like that you pervo… in the caves during lights-out drills), the final character addition to our tale. Jim is a tall fella with a Tennessee drawl and a logbook full of diving in the Keys that would make anyone envious. Predictably, not just Polina, but the whole crew were as excited as can be and ready to get wet.

Paul ate the leftovers of whatever meal her expert-chef friend had cooked up while the new check-ins unloaded, layed out, and assembled gear. Most of it, anyway. Anna's gear had been shipped by the airline to Limbo. We talked planning: the next day we would go to Peacock Springs to start our Apprentice Cave course.

Jim and I had already been to Peacock with Paul in the preceding days. It's a quiet, pretty place, a state park of old woods dripping with Spanish Moss and raw pecans. The pecans actually don’t “drip” so much as they “drop.” Loudly. I never knew raw pecans are so big. For all the possible danger of cave diving, I’m far more afraid of getting a concussion from a falling pecan.

Incidentally, my mom hates that picture.

As you drive the single, sandy lane that winds through the trees, you think of the thousands of feet of passage just below your tires and wonder whether there might be a diver 80 feet under your car that very moment. You park in a small lot with high-seated benches to make gear-up particularly easy and walk the blessed boardwalks to a sinkhole.

Beneath the creepy duckweed on the surface is the clearest water you can imagine. From the surface you can see every inch of the bottom, every fish regarding your shiny boltsnaps curiously, and every turtle you scared the crap out of by giant striding off those steps. Most importantly... you can see the hole. Just down there, behind the tangle of trees that have fallen into the sink, there's a hole in the wall.

The previous few days were primarily for me because both Jim and Polina were a bit further along the curriculum than I. Jim was along for practice and some refresher work before moving on. So we swam together into that hole and went over the basics of Cave Diving.

First off: the gear you trundle down the boardwalk and stairs is different from recreational dive gear. The first thing anyone notices is: it's heavier. Way heavier. One notices this again and with much more clarity after a relaxing dive when one must climb out of the water and walk up a bunch of stairs wearing it. One will often put this off as long as possible until one is in danger of rupturing one’s bladder in one’s drysuit. Other differences include: you're wearing two tanks instead of one. Your primary second stage is on a 7 foot hose wrapped around your body like a friendly anaconda while you wear your alternate like a necklace. And, you have flashlights strapped all over your body.

You kick differently in a cave, that's one of the biggies. Because the springs have had thousands and thousands of years to lay down the sediment they have worn away from the walls, there is silt covering the floors of all but the fastest flowing passages. You do NOT want to piss that silt off. If you kick it... no, if you even kick wrong anywhere near it there billows up a cloud that can fill the cave in seconds and drop the near limitless visibility to near total darkness. So when you kick, you kick like a frog with the appropriately named "frog kick," which directs the force of the water directly behind you instead of down at that latently angry silt. You leave it alone, it leaves you alone.

That said, the smooth curves of undisturbed clay slipping and rolling through the limestone formations seem to be made of melted velvet. I saw one place where, for geologic reasons beyond me, a section of floor had sloughed away, exposing a parfait of thousands of years worth of layered color. More than just to maintain viz, you want to leave it alone because it is beautiful.

Because of the threat of that viz-dropping silt, along with the fact that even the best map of a cave would be confounding to even the greatest of all possible cartographers, one always has, within immediate reach, a guideline which one can follow all the way back out to open water. Sometimes the line is already there, a permanent tour guide of the cave, sometimes you need to lay out your own, using a dive reel. Laying that line logically, safely, and with a path polite to other divers is as much an art as a skill. I hope to get better over time.

Another notable difference between recreational diving and cave diving is that instead of diving with a buddy, the arguably optimum squad for a cave dive is a three person team. With Polina having joined the class we were really getting our swerve on. We moved into working laying out more of our own line than Jim and I had been. We worked on planning what is called a circuit, which is when, over the course of two dives, you lay out a circular path instead of simply swimming in, then retracing your steps precisely back to your starting point. We made a dive where we popped in through one hole, came up mid-dive in another some 1000 feet away, before dropping back down to exit right where we'd come in.

It was a great day.

That night we all collapsed into bed with exhaustion from the day's exertion and the next morning awoke bright-eyed and excited-tailed. Anna's gear had even been returned from Bali or Camden or The Moon or Whereverthehell Continental had sent it. The morning was cool and sunny. It was going to be another great day.

"Hey Paul! What are we... what the hell is wrong with you?"

Paul staggered into the trailer looking as hang-dog as a hanged dog and slumped into a chair holding his stomach with a look of tired pain.

Dum, dum, DUUUUUMMMMM…

The Heartbeat of the Earth: Part I

noreply@blogger.com (Roger Williams) — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 20:54:00 +0000

Dark.

Darker than a black steer's tukis on a moonless, prairie night.

The only possible reference to where I was on the planet was the thin guideline in my hand which led back to the safety of open water and the atmosphere. The regulator in my mouth was not my own, but the alternate second stage of my buddy, with whom we were simulating “Out of Air.” We had blindly groped our way along perhaps 100 feet of cave that way and were now laying in a passage of unknown depth, size or contour, holding on to one another because, should we become detached without light, one foot of division might as well be a thousand miles.

Waiting there to feel our instructor’s hand reach out of the blackness to signal that we turn our lights back on, all I could think was, “Man, this is relaxing.”

This had not been the reaction I expected to those circumstances. “Sheer terror,” was what I had prepared for, so the impulse to lay my mask against the stone floor and ward off the urge to take a short nap was quite pleasant.

After only a few days of Cave Diver training, the message is driven firmly home that as long as you’re breathing, all is groovy in the world. Cave training focuses with radical intensity on comfort, skill, and safety. It dramatically and rapidly improves one’s diving and, with the right instructor, it’s more fun that a barrel of methed-up monkeys.

Some years ago I reluctantly joined a friend/instructor in North Florida for a Cavern course, Cavern being the first in a series of four courses to train a diver to safely execute a cave dive. I say I was reluctant because I tend towards claustrophobia. The image of cave diving being an extreme sport, up there with BASE jumping and bull-riding on any standard list of dare-devilry didn’t help my decision along either. I’m essentially a sissy and don’t enjoy things that might give me a boo-boo.

“C’mon,” My friend insisted, “So if you bug out of the dives, you bug out of the dives. Just come give it a chance.”

That bastard knew. He knew it would be irresistible. He knew that by giving me just the slightest taste of cave diving it would not only completely change how I dive, but the very direction that my career as a diver was to take. He knew that by sinking that hook of cavern diving I was doomed to start spending every free penny I was ever to come across over the following years on more and more, heavier and heavier dive gear. That jerk.

I was surprised to find that the caves were not the restrictive, tiny, mole-like passages I’d worried about. Instead, the spring systems of Northern Florida are ponderously big; vast scores of miles of labyrinthine, underground rivers. The limestone of the caves is nibbled at over millenniums by the water movement and by the slight acidity leached out of the ground. This results in rock formations so awesomely beautiful that all one can do is hover and stare.

(Note: It is important to here point out that I use the word “awesome” above not in that valley-girl way, but rather in the truest meaning of the word. The souls of the stones are so stunning that they saturate one with awe.)

Then there is the water itself. Warm, sweet-tasting, and as endlessly clear as crystal air.

Several times over the next few years I’d planned to go back for the next in the succession of courses towards being a certified cave diver. Several times events conspired against me, mostly hurricanes.

Cut to the Oceanblue Divers’ October Happy Hour this year.

“We’re going cave diving in December,” Said Pretty Polina, “You should come.”

Having been thwarted so many times in the past, I’d given up on seriously thinking about it, but in just a sentence my purpose was revitalized.

“OK,” I said. I mean, what else do you say to a cute girl who wants to go cave diving? Duh.

Unfortunately, the friend with whom I had done my cavern course could not do any training the week that the Oceanblue Crew had booked a trailer.

“I think my instructor has the room in the class for you too,” Polina relieved me, “I’ll email you both and ask him.”

“Paul, meet Roger,” Said the email, “Roger, meet Paul.” I was dumbstruck. The email address of this “Paul” character had the word “Heinerth” in it. It took me a few minutes to put it together in my head. Paul? Heinerth? Paul Heinerth? No.

Paul Heinerth is one of THOSE guys. He’s one of the divers you read about, not someone you meet. Even when you read about him, you’re reading about diving that is pushing the limits of underwater exploration and development. The pictures you ever see of him are in the company of cats like Sheck Exley and Bill Main. This is the guy who, I learned, certified legend-in-his-own-right Richie Kohler as an OPEN WATER diver.

This one of the dudes who invented cave diving.

What I said before about the right instructor? Paul is definitely the right instructor.

And Polina tried to kill him.

to be continued…

No More World Beyond

noreply@blogger.com (Roger Williams) — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 16:23:00 +0000

With the local dive season now good and over I've been fussing over my fish tank.

It's always hard for me to go into the long, dry winter months, but the little, aquatic dudes in my den make it easier. No matter how close I sit to the tank nor how hard I work my imagination it doesn't really feel like I'm underwater, but the little, fishy antics keep me plenty entertained.

For decoration originally I had the requisite drunken skeleton, the fake anemones, and the toy, plastic shipwreck (I mean, as a wreck diver, wouldn't it stand to reason that I'd have a shipwreck in my fishtank), but one by one I removed the pieces of camp. Even the shipwreck came out when my pleco started to strip the paint off the plastic. It was obvious the natural look was worlds better than the corny look.

In the coming few weeks I'm planning on starting the project of redecorating the tank to really nail the natural river habitat from which my fish originate. Rearrange the wood, add some indigenous plants, change out some of the gravel...

And that's when it occurred to me that if I'm going to play aquarium purist, I really should go all the way.

I'm going to add garbage.

Instead of having root and stone relief, I can give my fish a few shreds of car tire where they can sleep and attempt to spawn. Instead of floating surface plants to relax beneath, away from the threat of predators, I can drop a plastic Whole Foods bag in there. I bet an old sneaker would make a perfect cave for the pleco.

To emulate even the water quality of their natural habitat, every afternoon I'll pour into the tank a couple of tablespoons of Coke or motor oil.

I love my fish and am glad that I've thought of this way for them to feel just like they're in the wild.

Do What You Can

noreply@blogger.com (Michael Strickland) — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 23:42:00 +0000

Over the past year that I’ve been a member of Oceanblue Divers, I’ve sometimes found myself wondering if this is a dive club that also cares about the environment, or an environmental activism club that also happens to like diving. Certainly, the club has taken dive trips to destinations as exotic as Indonesia and as mundane as Dutch Springs. But the club’s focus has often been on environmental issues like shark finning and global warming, and events have raised funds and awareness for Sea Shepherd, the Shark Research Institute and Rob Stewart’s documentary "Sharkwater."

As founder Michael Feld will tell you, scuba diving and environmental activism go hand in hand. That, in fact, is what makes this club successful, he has said. And it’s true: as divers, we have a unique perspective and position to act as stewards of the undersea world that we love to explore, and of the creatures that live therein.

Environmental activism and conservationism can take many forms, however. You don’t have to be on the front lines with Paul Watson to save the oceans. You don’t have to join protests and circulate petitions to make a difference. You don’t even have to whip out your checkbook to save one shark. If you can and want to do all of those things, then of course, more power to you. The more you can do, the better. But every little bit helps.

If all you do is share your love of the ocean with someone else, that helps. If you convert a landlubber friend into a certified diver, that helps. If you take a child to the aquarium, that helps. These people will fall in love with the ocean and its creatures just as you did, and they too will want to help.

Someone suggested that I didn’t want to help save the oceans if I didn’t want to be an activist, a point of view that inspired me to write this piece. I believe every little bit helps. If I send a $10 check to Sea Shepherd, then obviously Paul Watson is doing much more than me to help save whales. But I’m still helping.

If you have time to send 100 emails a day to spread the word about shark finning, go for it. If you have the enthusiasm to hand out leaflets at street fairs, excellent. But if all you can do is take your family to see "Sharkwater," that’s fine too. Just do what you can.