Sundays cave dive (report)

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Wendy

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I went to cave country this past weekend and stayed at my home away from home, the Dive Outpost (www.diveoutpost.com). This is were I always stay when I'm diving up there. Sadly it rained all weekend.

For those of you that have never stayed at the Dive Outpost you are missing out. The accomodations are simply, but what else do you need when you are a cave diver? The great thing about this place, besides being just 2.2 miles from the Peacock Springs State Park (www.peacocksprings.com) is that Cathy, the owner, is the best cook ever! We usually have really nice dinners on the weekends when the place is booked up. Its nice to be able to sit aorund to dinner with others with a common interest. We also watched some nice Mexico cave diving videos.

I didn't end up diving until Sunday afternoon. I went to Little River Spring. It is located outside of Branford, Fl on the Suwanne River. I waited for my buddies to get their dry suits on (I'm too poor to dive dry :( ) and we headed down to the basin. We did our pre-dive check and s-drill. Ok, some more explaining for those reading this that don't cave dive. Pre-dive check = making sure we all have everything we need :slate, pencil, spool, 2 backup lights, primary light, line arrows, line markers, knife. Since me and my 2 buddies are DIR all of out gear is configured the same way, so I don't have to worry about where they are keeping each of these items, its in the same place that I have mine. S-drill (safety drill) is when we do OOA drills in the open water prior to the dive. Just to make sure that we can freely deploy our long hose and there are no other problems. Good thing we did this too. One of my buddies mouth pieces on his reg was too long and chocked me when we shared air (although it was fine for him). He was nice enough to trim it before the dive and then we re-did our s-drill. We calculated our turn pressure and started the dive.

I was the diver in the middle of out 3 man team. Buddy #1 ran the reel and tied off ontothe main line. This cave has got to be my favorite thus far! Shorlty after tieing off to the main line we get to the chimney. This is a pretty much vertical shaft that goes form 60' to 94'. I felt like I was sky diving! I had this nice horizontal, free-fall position going on . It was great. The rest of the passage is a series of left and right turns as the cave snakes around. There are alot of jumps to side passages in this system. I didn't notice them my first dive here (New Year's eve at midnight). We got to the first T where the line splits into two different directions. You can either take the left or the right. We took the right (they both end up at the same place). We palced a line marker on the line to show which line we came in on. That way if there happens to be any quesiton as to which way to go when we come back that way we will know. We got to the second T and placed another line marker. Our turn time was 20 mins in and I called the dive at 20 mins and I was probably about 100psi from my turn pressure. We had just gotten to the beginning of the Florida Room.

The "ride" out was fun. The flow wasn't strong like at Ginnie, but enough were I hardly did any kicking to move forward. I took this time to practice my frog kicks. I tend to mod flutter most of the time and need to get my frog kicks down good, they kinda suck right now.

This was such a good dive! One of my favorties so far. When we surfaced another diver was picking up his tanks and asked us if we were doing a class. We said no, seems he had heard us doing our pre-dive check and thoguht that we were. We told him we do that before every dive and he kinda just gave us this blank look like "you do?".

Hope you guys liked this report. Another one will be coming at the end of the month when I go to Ginnie again. :sun:
 
Excellent Report! Those of us that can't get out to those caves really like them. Keep them coming.


:wiz:

DIRLizard
 
interesting details. Now I'm gonna go back and click on the Dive Outpost link.

I'm going to Florida on April 23 with some buddies. Maybe we'll run into you
 
https://www.shearwater.com/products/perdix-ai/
http://cavediveflorida.com/Rum_House.htm

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