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GUE Cave 2 Scuba Diving Report, Florida, 2005 Part 3 November 29, 2005

Posted by Andy Carroll in : CaveDiving , trackback

Wednesday

In the morning we headed off to Ginnie again for two dives. I did the reel and we went down the ear. The dive plan was to try and prove a circuit today, doing 4 jumps to end up back on the main line and then to do the second dive down the mainline to find our jump spool from the previous dive and then exit that way. I had a busy dive as some other team had already run a reel in an inventive way and I had to look for an alternative route, which turned out to be better anyway and Tyler even said �excellent� at the debrief which was quite surprising as he isn’t usually so loose with his compliments. We had already had ‘top notch’ which I was still recovering from . We dropped the deco bottles at the secondary tie off and I tied in to the mainline. Along the gallery, through the lips, keyhole and cornflakes to the tabletop jump, which I set and then signalled to my teammates to follow. Scott set the next jump followed by Don and then I set the final jump before thumbing the dive, according to the plan. Mission accomplished, we headed back, with only a few light failures along the way, Tyler testing how well we reordered the team according to the resources left.

The second dive and I was third with Don second and Scott first. We didn�t need to place a reel and so we made quick progress through the cave until finding my spool. The two guys just swam along it but I signalled a hold and confirmed that we were indeed OK to exit this way and pull our spools out as we were leaving the mainline. All fine and we headed out. Again we had failures on the way out in the form of light problems but nothing really major. We pulled all the spools, found the mainline and exited to do our deco.

Thursday

We headed out to Manatee for our first stage dive. Manatee has higher flow than Ginnie and also less rocks to pull and glide on which makes for an interesting dive. Don decided to run the reel and Scott second with me third. The plan was to head up the mainline, dropping the stages when we reached our drop pressure and then carry on with backgas until we reach our adjusted thirds, then head back out, switching to the stages when we reach them and then switching from the stage to O2 for the deco. This all went well. I was a bit quicker than the other guys as I had done a bit more practice with stage switching but we all did well and there were no real issues other than noticing that awareness suffers when clipping and unclipping bottles which we need to improve. No failures at all on the way out, not even lights. Puzzling. Tyler just said that this cave does everything he needs it too. It has heavy flow, plenty of silt, and the line isn’t the easiest to see at times so awareness is important.

The second dive we didn�t use the stages and just went in with backgas. The aim I think for this was to show just how much easier it is to not use stages and to also show that there isn�t much difference in distance, at least with us novices anyway! Still no failures but we had an additional task on this dive. On the previous dive we noticed that the mainline had been repaired in a not so great way and Tyler gave us the job in this dive to fix it, so on the exit, I went and pulled a wrap to give Scott some more slack and place the line in a better place, as on the exit, it was easy to lose the line if you weren’t very careful as it went high and swimming under the line is not really a good thing to do. That all went well and we headed back to Ginnie to do some more academics.

Friday

This last day was spent at Ginnie and we did two dives, one of which you read about at the beginning of this article.

The last dive was a lost line drill and we were told to close our eyes and then Tyler would �place� us somewhere in the cave and we were to attempt to find the line. To do this we use a spool and tieoff to a rock and then do a search, attempting to travel the circumference of the cave in order to find the line. I got a decent tieoff and started looking. After about 5 minutes or so the line suddenly went loose. I reeled in my spool and found that the line had been cut! After a few choice swearwords I retied the loop and found another tiein, before starting the search again and another 5 minutes or so later I found the line, pointed the way out and Tyler then flashed his light to tell me to move out of the way and wait for Don, as Scott had already found the line.

Once I�d tidied up and headed up to the ceiling to hang out Tyler came over and shook hands with Scott and I congratulating us on our Cave 2 pass Don found the line a few minutes later and we headed out of the cave all nice and relaxed happy with our pass, that is until Tyler told Scott he was out of gas at the restriction and to come at me with very little room to move. At 12 mtrs or so we picked up the O2 bottles and then I heard bubbles coming out of my manifold. I immediately went to turn my right post off but stopped myself as I was sharing gas! I quickly signalled Scott to move faster to get to 6 mtrs and switch to our deco bottles. We did the deco and finally surfaced Cave 2 divers.

Summary

I thoroughly enjoyed the trip and find now that my ocean dives are just something to do inbetween cave dives. Tyler is a great instructor and I would recommend him to anyone, and the facilities and conditions in Florida make it an ideal choice for cave courses. For DIR divers (well, any diver for that matter) I think that a cave course should be something you definitely consider as they really do put a lot of the equipment choices and protocols to the test and more importantly, make you a much better diver. Hope you enjoyed the report as much as I enjoyed the trip