I was lucky enough to meet katepnatl (Kate) in West Palm a year ago, and after we both went home, we stayed in touch through e-mails and Facebook messages and chatting. Kate, like everyone else within ear- or keyboard-shot, knew that I was morose because my spring Mexico cave diving trip had to be foregone, due to non-diving-related life issues. So she began to work on me . . . "Come down to Florida. You can stay with me, you can use my tanks." The arm twisting was gentle but relentless, and when I realized I could do the airfare on frequent flier miles, the deal was all but done. When my other friend James Garrett joined the choir, I put my head down and acknowledged I'd been vanquished -- I was going back to Florida again, and not only to Florida, but to High Springs.
You have to realize that my last trip to that area was in August of 2009, and the experience can be summed up in a statement I made at dinner: "I have no desire to dive caves in Florida again as long as I live." I had, of course, been seduced back to the Mill Pond, where I had to acknowledge that Hole in the Wall was gorgeous, but I was never going anywhere near Ginnie Springs again. Not me. Not ever.
But here I was, with the tickets booked, and an excited Kate sending daily FB messages, asking me if I had a preference in coffee, or in brands of sweetener, and whether I ate Granola bars. I had written to the lovely people I had met, and knew that my friend Ben Martinez might be in the area, and that Celia Evesque might come down to dive with us, and that PfcAJ might actually come dive with me, as he has been offering to do for years. And last but not at all least, my friend Mark Messersmith, who I learned to like enormously on our Red Sea trip together, thought he might be able to join us for dinner over the weekend. So I had many, many reasons to look forward to the trip, even if the cave diving was going to be at best boring and at worst, stressful and physically destructive. (Ginnie fingers.) Of course, I wasn't going to dive Ginnie, anyway.
I actually started to get excited about the trip. It was a rather deliciously naughty thing, to run off to Florida for three days; one just doesn't do that sort of thing very often. And it was the week of my birthday, so this was in a way my present to myself, which made it even tastier. I had wanted to get to know Kate better IRL. And in addition, another friend I had briefly met a couple of years earlier, Meredith, was going to be in the area and wanted to join us for diving as well. And we were going to dive Peacock, which I had never seen, and which was Lynne-friendly, being relatively shallow and low in flow. Of course, Peacock is training cave, so I didn't have a lot of expectations of being wowed by it, but as training cave, it should not be likely to clean my clock, either.
The day came, and I boarded the flight, having gotten up at 3 am after Peter packed most of my gear. The flight was spent alternately sleeping and fretting about what wasn't going to be there when I unpacked. (As it turned out, the only things I had forgotten were my wetnotes and my compass, and neither was a lethal error.) Kate met me at the Atlanta airport, and after swiftly loaded my stuff into her Escape (boy, is there a lot of room in the car when all the bulky stuff lives in Florida) we hit I-75 for the long trip south.
Except it wasn't. It is amazing how quickly five hours goes by, when you are trading stories. Kate turns out to have an endearing habit -- she can't finish a funny story, because she gets to giggling so hard she can't talk. We know many people in common, and there were lots of tales and gossip and reminiscences to share. Before we knew it, we were in North Central Florida, and lost.
We were staying at Jim Wyatt's rental house, and the directions were actually quite clear, once you had been there. But when you have two ladies of a certain age in a dark car, neither of whom can read anything without reading glasses, trying to peer at the display from a GPS unit that thinks North Central Florida (NCF) is as remote as the Maldives, you have a recipe for wrong turns, of which we made more than a few. But eventually, we were washboarding down a white limestone road to a dark house in the middle of what appeared to be nowhere in the middle of the night, but turned out to be a nice, rural housing development in the subsequent daylight. We let ourselves in, and were immediately completely floored by the size and the niceness of the lodging. The location is perfectly convenient neither to Peacock nor to Ginnie, but is workable for both, and the house is really very attractive and comfortable. There's a fireplace (which we of course did not need in May) with a stone wall above it. One bedroom has two queen beds, which came in handy one night (story to follow) and the other a king, and most importantly, the place had a washer and dryer. I have concluded, after way too many bad experiences, that no dive trip involving dry suits should ever be taken to somewhere that doesn't have a dryer. You think lights are the most unreliable dive gear in caves?
We repaired to our respective rooms and died, but only after planning the time for the morning. Kate's original plan involved getting up at o-dark-thirty so we could get fills and run to Peacock to get a dive in together before we met James for another dive, on the not unreasonable idea that I might not be comfortable diving with two people I hadn't dived with before at the same time. My idea was that if I tried to get up and go cave diving without making up the sleep deficit, that I was going to be the person they needed to worry about . . . so we ended up with a much more relaxed plan that involved going to the storage unit, picking up Kate's tanks, making sure they were filled, and meeting James at Peacock at the civilized hour of 11.
(Insert extremely humorous sequence involving two 5'4" women trying to figure out how to get two sets of 104s and two sets of 85s into the back of an Escape without any kind of ladder or step. Suffice it to say that we got it done, even if it wasn't pretty.)
Peacock was a very different Peacock from when we were there before. The last time, we went in February, and the day we flew in, they closed everything but Orange Grove. When we went to look at the main site, the river was pouring through the run into P3. We got one dive in at OG before they closed that, too. So I had never actually dived Peacock at all. James wanted to do P3, so we went down and looked at the entry, which appeared to present considerable challenges. I studied it and opined that I would do it if I had some help going in over the rocks, which had algae on them and looked slippery. (In fact, they weren't.) We decided that James would suit up but not gear up, help the two of us into the water, and go back for his gear, and that strategy worked beautifully.
P3 has a lot of decaying vegetation, and with the water level as low as it is, we were thrashing through it, so by the time we were doing gear checks, it smelled as though we were doing them in a sewer. And it was challenging to try to swim to the very small open water basin without getting one's fins completely wound in stems, and when I tried checking both regulators, I put one in my mouth FULL of duckweed. That stuff tastes vile!
When we finally reached the "pond", we dropped to do drills, in a space about the size of two mobile home bathtubs. We managed a round of S-drills, but I won't say we left the slope behind us undisturbed. But I think we all went into the cave confident, at least, that if somebody needed gas, so long as the cave wasn't filled with duckweed, things were going to go okay.
P3 reminded me of a slightly smaller Naharon, without decorations. The walls were dark and the floor was dark, and the water was somewhat hazy, and the dive was a bit spooky. I was VERY glad we had James with us, because I don't think I would have found the main line by myself at all. The passage, at the beginning, was large enough to meet my criteria for my "bull in a china shop" dive, which is my perception of my first cave dive on every trip, whether to Florida or Mexico. James had briefed us that, a fair way up the line, we would reach a "squeeze", where we WOULD scrape our bellies, but it would be okay because the bottom was sand. I kept waiting to reach that point, but we got about half an hour up the line, and James turned to me and made a signal I didn't understand . . . but the closest I could come was "turn the dive", so that was the signal I gave him back, and he acceded. Turned out he was saying "switch", with the idea being that he would put me and Kate in front, so we could go through the section where the viz would drop, and he would deal with the worst of it. I had never seen a "switch" signal in the context of team order, so I didn't understand (and this would be relevant the following day, too). At any rate, it resulted in us turning the dive early, which is kind of a shame, in light of what we figured out about time after we got out.
James had told us that there was a jump to the left (as you go in) into a beautiful passage called the Blue Water tunnel, but that he and buddies had searched for it, and ended up in all kinds of small, silty cave. I mentally raised my eyebrows at this, because it's plainly marked on the map, but once we got in the cave and I saw how dark and hazy it was, it made a lot more sense. On the other hand, he had indicated a side passage we might take as a bit of an additional swim on the way out, and when I thought we were there, I asked him; turned out it was a bit further on, but when we jumped over there, it got small and silty very quickly. I am very paranoid about Florida sediments, after Rob Neto took us through the "silt out" passage in Twin, so I wasn't at all unhappy when James turned it, and we headed on out.
Once in the "pond", we surfaced, and covered in duckweed, debriefed the dive -- at which time I discovered I had inadvertently cut our penetration short by misunderstanding signals. But other than that, the dive had gone smoothly, and with the use of some wild arm-waving and carefully timed dunking, we had gotten rid of most of the leafy stuff by the time we got to shore (except for what was adorning Kate's ponytail. I'm so sorry I didn't get a picture of it!) James climbed out to go drop gear and come back and help, but Kate and I managed to pick our way carefully out of the water and up to the end of the little cut, where we sat and awaited succor.
Once back at the benches, we prepared to swap tanks, but of course, more than a little chatting had to take place, and by the time we were getting ready to gear up again, Kate discovered it was almost four o'clock -- way too late to start a second dive at Peacock. So, to everyone's mild disappointment, we decided the better part of valor was repairing to the lodging, cleaning up, and preparing for dinner at the Great Outdoors. This was to be quite a party, because the three of us were being met by AJ and two friends, as well as my friend Celia and two friends of hers. As always, diving is quintessentially social, and I was looking forward to a happy meal of good food and good stories, which is precisely what we had.
(Part 2 to come)
You have to realize that my last trip to that area was in August of 2009, and the experience can be summed up in a statement I made at dinner: "I have no desire to dive caves in Florida again as long as I live." I had, of course, been seduced back to the Mill Pond, where I had to acknowledge that Hole in the Wall was gorgeous, but I was never going anywhere near Ginnie Springs again. Not me. Not ever.
But here I was, with the tickets booked, and an excited Kate sending daily FB messages, asking me if I had a preference in coffee, or in brands of sweetener, and whether I ate Granola bars. I had written to the lovely people I had met, and knew that my friend Ben Martinez might be in the area, and that Celia Evesque might come down to dive with us, and that PfcAJ might actually come dive with me, as he has been offering to do for years. And last but not at all least, my friend Mark Messersmith, who I learned to like enormously on our Red Sea trip together, thought he might be able to join us for dinner over the weekend. So I had many, many reasons to look forward to the trip, even if the cave diving was going to be at best boring and at worst, stressful and physically destructive. (Ginnie fingers.) Of course, I wasn't going to dive Ginnie, anyway.
I actually started to get excited about the trip. It was a rather deliciously naughty thing, to run off to Florida for three days; one just doesn't do that sort of thing very often. And it was the week of my birthday, so this was in a way my present to myself, which made it even tastier. I had wanted to get to know Kate better IRL. And in addition, another friend I had briefly met a couple of years earlier, Meredith, was going to be in the area and wanted to join us for diving as well. And we were going to dive Peacock, which I had never seen, and which was Lynne-friendly, being relatively shallow and low in flow. Of course, Peacock is training cave, so I didn't have a lot of expectations of being wowed by it, but as training cave, it should not be likely to clean my clock, either.
The day came, and I boarded the flight, having gotten up at 3 am after Peter packed most of my gear. The flight was spent alternately sleeping and fretting about what wasn't going to be there when I unpacked. (As it turned out, the only things I had forgotten were my wetnotes and my compass, and neither was a lethal error.) Kate met me at the Atlanta airport, and after swiftly loaded my stuff into her Escape (boy, is there a lot of room in the car when all the bulky stuff lives in Florida) we hit I-75 for the long trip south.
Except it wasn't. It is amazing how quickly five hours goes by, when you are trading stories. Kate turns out to have an endearing habit -- she can't finish a funny story, because she gets to giggling so hard she can't talk. We know many people in common, and there were lots of tales and gossip and reminiscences to share. Before we knew it, we were in North Central Florida, and lost.
We were staying at Jim Wyatt's rental house, and the directions were actually quite clear, once you had been there. But when you have two ladies of a certain age in a dark car, neither of whom can read anything without reading glasses, trying to peer at the display from a GPS unit that thinks North Central Florida (NCF) is as remote as the Maldives, you have a recipe for wrong turns, of which we made more than a few. But eventually, we were washboarding down a white limestone road to a dark house in the middle of what appeared to be nowhere in the middle of the night, but turned out to be a nice, rural housing development in the subsequent daylight. We let ourselves in, and were immediately completely floored by the size and the niceness of the lodging. The location is perfectly convenient neither to Peacock nor to Ginnie, but is workable for both, and the house is really very attractive and comfortable. There's a fireplace (which we of course did not need in May) with a stone wall above it. One bedroom has two queen beds, which came in handy one night (story to follow) and the other a king, and most importantly, the place had a washer and dryer. I have concluded, after way too many bad experiences, that no dive trip involving dry suits should ever be taken to somewhere that doesn't have a dryer. You think lights are the most unreliable dive gear in caves?
We repaired to our respective rooms and died, but only after planning the time for the morning. Kate's original plan involved getting up at o-dark-thirty so we could get fills and run to Peacock to get a dive in together before we met James for another dive, on the not unreasonable idea that I might not be comfortable diving with two people I hadn't dived with before at the same time. My idea was that if I tried to get up and go cave diving without making up the sleep deficit, that I was going to be the person they needed to worry about . . . so we ended up with a much more relaxed plan that involved going to the storage unit, picking up Kate's tanks, making sure they were filled, and meeting James at Peacock at the civilized hour of 11.
(Insert extremely humorous sequence involving two 5'4" women trying to figure out how to get two sets of 104s and two sets of 85s into the back of an Escape without any kind of ladder or step. Suffice it to say that we got it done, even if it wasn't pretty.)
Peacock was a very different Peacock from when we were there before. The last time, we went in February, and the day we flew in, they closed everything but Orange Grove. When we went to look at the main site, the river was pouring through the run into P3. We got one dive in at OG before they closed that, too. So I had never actually dived Peacock at all. James wanted to do P3, so we went down and looked at the entry, which appeared to present considerable challenges. I studied it and opined that I would do it if I had some help going in over the rocks, which had algae on them and looked slippery. (In fact, they weren't.) We decided that James would suit up but not gear up, help the two of us into the water, and go back for his gear, and that strategy worked beautifully.
P3 has a lot of decaying vegetation, and with the water level as low as it is, we were thrashing through it, so by the time we were doing gear checks, it smelled as though we were doing them in a sewer. And it was challenging to try to swim to the very small open water basin without getting one's fins completely wound in stems, and when I tried checking both regulators, I put one in my mouth FULL of duckweed. That stuff tastes vile!
When we finally reached the "pond", we dropped to do drills, in a space about the size of two mobile home bathtubs. We managed a round of S-drills, but I won't say we left the slope behind us undisturbed. But I think we all went into the cave confident, at least, that if somebody needed gas, so long as the cave wasn't filled with duckweed, things were going to go okay.
P3 reminded me of a slightly smaller Naharon, without decorations. The walls were dark and the floor was dark, and the water was somewhat hazy, and the dive was a bit spooky. I was VERY glad we had James with us, because I don't think I would have found the main line by myself at all. The passage, at the beginning, was large enough to meet my criteria for my "bull in a china shop" dive, which is my perception of my first cave dive on every trip, whether to Florida or Mexico. James had briefed us that, a fair way up the line, we would reach a "squeeze", where we WOULD scrape our bellies, but it would be okay because the bottom was sand. I kept waiting to reach that point, but we got about half an hour up the line, and James turned to me and made a signal I didn't understand . . . but the closest I could come was "turn the dive", so that was the signal I gave him back, and he acceded. Turned out he was saying "switch", with the idea being that he would put me and Kate in front, so we could go through the section where the viz would drop, and he would deal with the worst of it. I had never seen a "switch" signal in the context of team order, so I didn't understand (and this would be relevant the following day, too). At any rate, it resulted in us turning the dive early, which is kind of a shame, in light of what we figured out about time after we got out.
James had told us that there was a jump to the left (as you go in) into a beautiful passage called the Blue Water tunnel, but that he and buddies had searched for it, and ended up in all kinds of small, silty cave. I mentally raised my eyebrows at this, because it's plainly marked on the map, but once we got in the cave and I saw how dark and hazy it was, it made a lot more sense. On the other hand, he had indicated a side passage we might take as a bit of an additional swim on the way out, and when I thought we were there, I asked him; turned out it was a bit further on, but when we jumped over there, it got small and silty very quickly. I am very paranoid about Florida sediments, after Rob Neto took us through the "silt out" passage in Twin, so I wasn't at all unhappy when James turned it, and we headed on out.
Once in the "pond", we surfaced, and covered in duckweed, debriefed the dive -- at which time I discovered I had inadvertently cut our penetration short by misunderstanding signals. But other than that, the dive had gone smoothly, and with the use of some wild arm-waving and carefully timed dunking, we had gotten rid of most of the leafy stuff by the time we got to shore (except for what was adorning Kate's ponytail. I'm so sorry I didn't get a picture of it!) James climbed out to go drop gear and come back and help, but Kate and I managed to pick our way carefully out of the water and up to the end of the little cut, where we sat and awaited succor.
Once back at the benches, we prepared to swap tanks, but of course, more than a little chatting had to take place, and by the time we were getting ready to gear up again, Kate discovered it was almost four o'clock -- way too late to start a second dive at Peacock. So, to everyone's mild disappointment, we decided the better part of valor was repairing to the lodging, cleaning up, and preparing for dinner at the Great Outdoors. This was to be quite a party, because the three of us were being met by AJ and two friends, as well as my friend Celia and two friends of hers. As always, diving is quintessentially social, and I was looking forward to a happy meal of good food and good stories, which is precisely what we had.
(Part 2 to come)
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