My Cave Diving blog... On my way to the Abe Davis Award.

[The Chairman]

36: Blue Grotto System, 11/14/2015. I was at the SubGravity/Hammerhead Demo day and was invited by Cave Diver Harry Avril to become a Blue Grotto Guide. You have to be an instructor on any level and full cave in order to qualify... and then you have to pass Harry's muster. No silters need apply! We watched an orientation guide that you can find on youtube:

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Then we looked at a simple map of the cave. It's not that the cave system is extensive: it's not. It's about a hundred meters to the very back. The gold line is arranged in sort of a diamond shape around the debris field and there's a white line down the middle that goes quite shallow to follow the peak of the debris field. You can see it here: http://bluegrottocave.com/_pdf/CaveMap.pdf It's not that the cave is hard to dive either. Sidemount, backmount or rebreather, there is nothing that could not be used in this system. Harry side mounted two 50cf steels. Show off. I felt a bit over dressed with my twin LP120s. The third diver, Richard Black was in Back Mount and kept acting like it was the superior system. 2 phunni. Here's a pic of the three of us as we are about to descend...

The cool thing about this cave is that it's incredibly pristine and they are working hard to keep it that way. You can only dive it with a guide and they are responsible for you while you're in there. I was the third in line, and while it's impossible to not disturb some of the silt, and there are tons of silt, it was surprising to see all the precipitate rain down. At one point, I saw an entire sand dollar waft down. It was just a bit over an inch and contrasted nicely against the dark silt. If you like fossils, you'll love this dive. Mostly sand dollars, sea biscuits and sea buttons, but there are thousands upon thousands of them in the system. Some are positioned like a Picasso sculpture and most surreal in their juxtapositions. But you get the feeling very few have been down here. It's beautiful. It's silty. It's fun. We dove all the lines coming and going. That was cool. We got to see the bath tub... it's still holding water. We got to see Aquaman. He's loving it down there. I did see two blind crawdads, but they were tiny. There were also a number of fish lost back there. One followed me almost the entire time. He had an odd scale behind his left gill, so it was easy to ID him. He made it out of the cave alive. I never rescued a fish before. I figured we turned that 100 meter cave into 600 meters of pure diving fun. Lots of cracks and crevices to explore. I think I averaged about 20 ft and didn't use much air at all. Def a unique system, and I might even be a guide for it now. Maybe Harry will let me know some day!

 

[The Chairman]

Two caveats... First I had another leak on the left side first stage before the dive. I replaced both possible o-rings with those out of a Hog kit. The leak stopped for the dive, but we'll see if that holds in the next one. I'm tired of chasing this leak.

Second, this was the first time I encountered things falling on me. I already mentioned the small sand dollar and other detritus wafting from the ceiling. However, on the way out, just passing by the siphon tube for the hydroponics, I was hit in the left forearm with a falling timber. It hurt! It actually hit hard enough to leave a mark and scared the hell out of me. I'm certain there was a silt cloud when the timber hit bottom, but I didn't stick around to gander at the spectacle. I was expecting to feel a bit more worried about this incident as I comprehended the implications, but that doesn't seem to be happening. I can't wait to get back in a cave.

 

[Richard FDC]

Pete did a great job describing the cave and the dive. This is not a long dive or a big cave but it is a cool dive and an interesting cave. Harry said it best: "It looks like the caves did back when they were first explored." I highly recommend a visit but be on your game because one wrong move could make you look real bad and fast. This is a fairly low flow system and there is a lot of silt to go around. I wouldn't call it tight but in some places there isn't a lot of room. I had a great time on this dive but, as often is the case, your dive partners can make the dive. I had a couple of awesome buddies on this dive and, even though they can't figure out where their tanks go, they seem to know what they're doing ;-) Thanks guys!

---------- Post added November 17th, 2015 at 12:05 AM ----------

And Pete, please be careful when things begin to fall from the ceiling!
Indian Springs Cave Collapse Caused by Bubbles | Florida Dive Connection - Florida SCUBA Diving News and Information

 

[Capt Jim Wyatt]

Was Harry able to keep his fins out of the silt ??

 

[The Chairman]

He looked good to me.

 

[victorzamora]

He looked good to me.

It was awfully sweet of you two to keep your eyes on the new guy

Jokes aside, what regs are you using? Where are the bubbles coming from?

 

[The Chairman]

They are Hog regs, and the bubbles are coming out of the escape hole in the DIN fitting. The obvious is the DIN o-ring, which I have changed a number of times. There is a cap though, which houses this o-ring and it has it's own o-ring under it. I replaced that as well this time. Rather than use bulk o-rings, I used two out of a rebuild kit for the Hog. I did notice some weird stuff on the o-ring seat this time, and took time to thoroughly clean the mating surfaces. The proof will be in the next dive, but I'm not sure when that will be. Maybe mid to late December?

 

[The Chairman]

It will be another three or four weeks before I get back to the caves. If you've been following this, you know that I was having some charging issues with batteries. While part of that was the age of my lights, and part was ignorance and complacency on my part, it was obvious that my home brewed charging station had let me down. While not an Electrical Engineer, I probably understand electricity and electronics way better than the average Joe. Moreover, when it comes to custom automotive wiring, I am extremely competent and very detailed oriented. The concept of the switching panel was easy. The 120 V outlets are powered by an inverter while the car is underway and a 40 Amp relay interrupts the 12V inverter feed when a live extension cord is plugged into the side of the van and an HD relay switches off of the inverter output to house current. This way I eliminate any odd feedback that might cause my Sprinter's on board computers to wig out and lose their magic smoke.

Unfortunately, it appeared that only two of the nine sockets would always work on the Switching Panel. I could get the others to work intermittently by pulling or pushing and that's no good. I pulled the switching panel off the wall, got out an extension cord and a DVOM. In less than a half hour of diagnostics, while Fang tried to get me to throw her toys, I sussed I had missed a hard to get solder joint during the initial assembly. It took me less than 2 minutes after the iron got hot to repair the oversight. Ohm and voltage checks all came out good. No amount of flexing was causing any problems at all. I mounted the Switching Panel and all the outlets worked in situ. Unfortunately, everything went black when I interrupted house power and went on inverter power. 12V was getting to the inverter, but the inverter was not doing it's job. Checked all of it's fuses and still no joy. Damn. I had come across an issue with some batteries a while back that needed a 'pure sine' inverter. The one I put in 18 months ago was a modified sine and really an 'el cheapo' model. I also realized that I would never use that 1000 Watts which equates to almost 9 amps on the AC side. I had never seen more than 2 amps! So I got a 600W (1000W peak) pure sine unit that had some great feed back. It's easily twice the size of the old 1000W unit and was also twice the cost. You can see in the picture with the two big batteries charging, four 18650s on the tool box counter and with the fan on high, I'm only drawing 0.6 amps. I mounted it today and had to move everything around just to make it fit. Here's the final product:

There were a few things about my charging set-up I still didn't like. I have two Light Monkey 21W HIDs. OK, it's old school, but I like their brightness and they have a punch that LEDs can't come close to. I had already partitioned off two sections of the basket to hold them while charging. The charger sits in the back, with the AC cord fed up through the bottom, but things were still sloppy. I clip the light heads to the bottom of the basket to keep them from getting banged around, but I could never figure out something for the can lids. First, and you really can't see it, I used a bit of thin bungee to snug the two chargers to the back of the cage. That holds them in one place quite nicely and they are still easy to pull out if needed. Then I went to the hardware store and searched for something to hold the tops. I looked at PVC and hose clamp solutions, but they all looked so Mickey Mouse. Then I found these SS U-bolts that were perfect. I used another piece of steel to sandwich the cage and made these stick out to accept the lids. I had just had the cords replaced by Light Monkey when they replaced all the batteries in my HIDs, so I want to keep the strain off of them and this is perfect. They won't come out unless I flip the Sprinter. Finally, I used some velcro to stick the Watts Up meter on the wall between the basket and the Switching Panel. It can come down easily if I need it to, but it's easy to see while I'm charging so it's perfect. Here's a close up look of how that came out. I really like it.

My next project will be my helmet. I really like those Dive Rite clips, so I'm going to add three more to the helmet. I think I'm going to add a couple of small D-rings to it as well so I can double clip the lights. I might finish that before I hed to Curacao in about 10 days. Then I'll be in Cave Country after Christmas.

 

[shoredivr]

So, any recent cave dives?

 

[Capt Jim Wyatt]

So, any recent cave dives?

NO --- we have banned him from North Florida