Jackson Blue - 4/12/09

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Dive-aholic

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Scuba Instructor
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North Florida - Marianna area
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Jen & I got low censused from work Saturday night and decided to head over to JB for a night dive. Knowing that the flow has come up a bit since the rains, we pulled out the scooters, loaded them up, and headed over to the park. One of the nice things about diving JB at night is there usually isn't anyone else around. And that was the case Saturday night. After hauling tanks and scooters over to the basin, we suited up and walked into the water. The cool 69 degree water felt really good in the warm, humid night. Okay, we were both in dry suits, but it still felt good!!!

Jen has been in nursing school over the past year and a half and hasn't had as much of an opportunity to dive as I have. In fact, her last dive before this was about a month and a half earlier. So we planned on taking it easy...mainline dive till 1/3s or we decided to turn around. We clipped on our tanks, did our pre-dive, and motored into the flow. We decided to drop deco bottles at the gold line so as to not fight the flow at our usual drop point. We continued on through the cave. Flow was still up significantly making progress through the cave a little slower than usual, even with scooters. This was especially apparent at the 2nd breakdown through to the 1st T! We continued through until we came to the Rabbit Hole. Jen decided she really didn't want to fight the fire hose flow there and turned the dive. We headed back at almost twice the speed we had on penetration. I clocked us at 200 fpm over the 2nd breakdown!!! Our average exit speed was about 150 fpm! We did a nice, slow ascent up through the chimney, retrieved our deco cylinders from where we left them and popped up into the first room of the cavern and over to the right to do our short decompression obligation. I showed Jen the newly exposed remnant of the old grate at the entrance on our exit and we slowly made our way to the surface.

We had a great dive lasting 59 minutes with an extended 12 minute decompression stop (we were running low mixes due to a recent dive at Indian...I also had a tad bit of helium in my tanks...and I always pad my deco a little) for a total of 71 minutes. We exited the water to a spooky, almost full moon. It was a great dive that I hoped to repeat on Sunday, but alas, I didn't get low censused and had to go care for some patients.

Until Friday night...
 
Oh, heading out after dinner for a nice, relaxed cave dive sounds sooooo decadent :)
 
Good report, makes me wish I could get there more often! How was Indian?
 
Damn, I wish my cave diving sounded as smooth as your dives sound. So far, my dives tend to go something like this:

"After stumbling into the water (getting a foot caught in the sand and landing face first into about three feet of water), I managed to descend down to the cavern, and run a reel to the gold line, while pulling-and-gliding furiously, trying not to bounce off the floor too much or hit anything with my fins, and all the while hoping my buddies don't think it's a disco in here (due to my errant light flashing about) and start dancing or something. Then, it's more pulling-and-gliding all the way to the chimney, a descent down the chimney (more like falling down the chimney - is it possible? Oh yes!), and a view of the 300' arrow (again!). At this point, someone inevitably turns the dive...then it's an ascent up the chimney - where I feel like I'm a brand new OW student again, trying to manage my buoyancy while being carried upwards by the flow - then, one heck of a challenge to reel up the primary while trying not to let the flow spit me out of the cavern (I usually manage to go head-over-heels at some point!)."

Your dives sound a lot more relaxing! :)
 
LOL... Now Rita.. I am sure it was nowhere near that bad..
 
I thought that when I was there Friday LOL.. The flow seemed to be worse than on Monday.. Great post too Rob.
 
haha I think my dives on Saturday resembled Rita's also! Thanks for the report Rob.
 
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