Best dive you've ever done
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BabyDuck
Contributor
wow, 'best ever' is really hard. how about 'best in the last trip last week'?
i'm trying out sidemount & had had a horrible day with it on maybe tuesday - it's all blurring together. anyway, it was bad. you know how they say you can puke through a reg? well, i also found out you can cry in frustration. it was bad.
but thursday, same cave, it was all clicking & we had a great dive. up the peanut tunnel, through crossover, up the olson bypass & back down to crossover, up at olson for a few minutes, down the olson to pothole with a few minutes in darkwater (which lived up to its name but should be called 'dark&jeesusitscoldwater'), and out. all smooth as silk.
we saw catfish, see-through crawfish, lots & lots of amphipods, all kinds of waterbugs. there were wet rocks, clear water, mungy water, mud bottoms, sandy bottoms, big passage, teeny passage, canyons, tunnels, huge rooms with rocks the size of sofas. there were brown rocks, black rocks, peach rocks, grey rocks, white rocks. fossils fossils fossils. animal bones. there was a great buddy who was so so supportive when i had that horrible day.
it is a privilege to have such a wonderful place to sightsee. i'm so glad for all the classes, skills, & drills to let me go there safely.
i'm trying out sidemount & had had a horrible day with it on maybe tuesday - it's all blurring together. anyway, it was bad. you know how they say you can puke through a reg? well, i also found out you can cry in frustration. it was bad.
but thursday, same cave, it was all clicking & we had a great dive. up the peanut tunnel, through crossover, up the olson bypass & back down to crossover, up at olson for a few minutes, down the olson to pothole with a few minutes in darkwater (which lived up to its name but should be called 'dark&jeesusitscoldwater'), and out. all smooth as silk.
we saw catfish, see-through crawfish, lots & lots of amphipods, all kinds of waterbugs. there were wet rocks, clear water, mungy water, mud bottoms, sandy bottoms, big passage, teeny passage, canyons, tunnels, huge rooms with rocks the size of sofas. there were brown rocks, black rocks, peach rocks, grey rocks, white rocks. fossils fossils fossils. animal bones. there was a great buddy who was so so supportive when i had that horrible day.
it is a privilege to have such a wonderful place to sightsee. i'm so glad for all the classes, skills, & drills to let me go there safely.
One of my best was in Telford, another good one was one just putzing around in Ginnie with my buddy.... we scootered and swam for hours on the breathers.
There is not one best dive, there are a few bad ones that stand out against a great number of good ones.
There is not one best dive, there are a few bad ones that stand out against a great number of good ones.
I'm only at Intro level, but one of my favorite dives was just recently at Ginnie. Another (full) cave diver & I did a dive where we went as far on the main guideline as we could until I reached 1/6's to turn around. We made it almost to the Hill 400 jump. I was very impressed & pleased with myself. We just slowly made our way through the Gallery, Lips & Keyhole. By going slower, I did not get out of breath & was able to go much further than usual. Just proves the point that fast is slow & slow is fast. Later that day, my instrcutor took me on a relaxing (non class) dive to the White Room, on 1/3's since I was with him, to see the disco ball. That's the furtherest to date that I have gone into Ginnie.
Oh, there have been SO many good ones . . . but so far, the best was last Saturday. We went to Pet Cemetery, which is a place I hadn't been before. It was a lot of work to get the equipment down to the water (and even more, as always, to get it back UP) and the people we went with, who had dived there last year, got a bit confused about how to find the mainline, so we spent a lot of frustrating time swimming around and not getting anywhere. (It's an easy place to do that, because there is a tremendous amount of open water under a rock roof before you get to where even the cavern line runs. We spent over 20 minutes looking!)
But even the search was beautiful, with sunlit rooms and heavy decorations everywhere, and once we started into the cave, it just got better. This cave is very white in most places, with a lot of decorations, some of which are delicate and some of which are more massive. The character of the passage varies, opening into large rooms and closing into defined, phreatic tunnel. Once we got on the Diaz line, there were some fun technical challenges (the "King Pong" restriction being one of them) but they were isolated enough so that the dive was not fatiguing.
Not quite an hour into the dive, the passage suddenly gets shallow, and the decorations become heavily stained with tannin. Off to our right was an area of deep gloom, and the line turned that way. We followed it, and suddenly, the world fell away beneath us, and we sailed out into an almost inconceivably tremendous space. The line plunged beneath us, and as we descended, my light sometimes could not even pick up and define the walls around us. The water became the deep, royal blue of spaces below the halocline. One of my buddies shot a picture of me giving the "shaka" sign at this point, and I look stupidly intoxicated in the photo, because I was.
One of the essences of cave diving, to me, is "What's around the corner?" Sometimes, it's just more of the same (which is not a BAD thing), but sometimes, it's unexpected and amazing.
But even the search was beautiful, with sunlit rooms and heavy decorations everywhere, and once we started into the cave, it just got better. This cave is very white in most places, with a lot of decorations, some of which are delicate and some of which are more massive. The character of the passage varies, opening into large rooms and closing into defined, phreatic tunnel. Once we got on the Diaz line, there were some fun technical challenges (the "King Pong" restriction being one of them) but they were isolated enough so that the dive was not fatiguing.
Not quite an hour into the dive, the passage suddenly gets shallow, and the decorations become heavily stained with tannin. Off to our right was an area of deep gloom, and the line turned that way. We followed it, and suddenly, the world fell away beneath us, and we sailed out into an almost inconceivably tremendous space. The line plunged beneath us, and as we descended, my light sometimes could not even pick up and define the walls around us. The water became the deep, royal blue of spaces below the halocline. One of my buddies shot a picture of me giving the "shaka" sign at this point, and I look stupidly intoxicated in the photo, because I was.
One of the essences of cave diving, to me, is "What's around the corner?" Sometimes, it's just more of the same (which is not a BAD thing), but sometimes, it's unexpected and amazing.
Not sure yet, but I am doing my full cave with Bil Philips in November so I'll let you know
Nice, really nice......
Pet Cemetary and the Blue Abyss.
It's a long way back, 2 or 3 jumps if I remember correctly, with stage bottles... I think our total dive time was 2-1/2 hours. The passageways get smaller and smaller (all highly decorated) and then you pop out into a rather large cavern.
The upper 1/3 of this large room was heavily decorated in massive formations, stactites, columns, flowstone... It was awesome seeing my buddy's lights above and below, lighting up a room that was too large to be lit by one person's light. You're so far from "fresh air" that you might as well be on the moon.
The passageways leading to the Blue Abyss were pretty nice too. I remember seeing some nice rimstone dams and wishing that I had brought a camera. It's so difficult to describe the experience...
SuPrBuGmAn
Contributor
My answer would change on any given day to be honest... 
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