A little confused about overhead environment

[Louma]

I do a lot of dives in the Florida springs. As an experienced diver Ginnie gets my attention and respect. When you are down at the grate and look back, the exit hole looks like it’s about an inch in diameter. It makes you really trust your equipment. I wouldn’t recommend this dive until you get more dive experience. You had mentioned Blue Springs, 2 things about this dive. It can be challenging - it can be dark, heavy flow of water, some trees to get around, but, you mentioned you’ll be down in March. Typically, the manatees stay in there until about mid March and they won’t let divers in with them. A great place for you to dive would be Alexander Springs in the Ocala National Forrest. About 28’ deep, nice and clear, pretty park. I agree that Devil’s Den would be another good one.
Oh, by the way, the springs are 72 degrees year round. 3mm wet suit is OK.

 

[Dive-aholic]

Here's my standard response to this question:

OW divers have died in the Ginnie Ballroom. Going into an overhead environment without the proper training is foolish. Just because the landowners have deemed this site "OW friendly" doesn't mean it's without risk. This goes for all the other "OW friendly" caverns in N. Florida and Mexico. Most, if not all, have had divers die in them. If you're interested in diving the caverns, spend the first couple of days in Florida in a Cavern course. Even if you find cavern diving is not for you, the class is well worth it. And most of it is in OW anyway.

While you're at it, check out these videos on my website.

 

[Dive-aholic]

Oh, by the way, the springs are 72 degrees year round. 3mm wet suit is OK.

Until you get out of the water into 40 degree air!!!

 

[Reg Braithwaite]

One more thing:

Let's try to remember two things: First, the subject of the thread is a person with ten dives and OW certification asking about this dive. It doesn't matter whether you or I would do this dive, we are responding to this person's excellent question asking for advice.

Second, this thread is in the Basic Scuba Discussions forum. I am not a mod, but to be quite honest I am surprised we are debating it here. If someone with 1,000 dives asked the question here, I would hope people would respond, "You should ask your question in the technical forums, there's a cave sub-forum there." Or even direct them to the advanced forum. But not discuss it as if it's an every-day, normal activity one would expect from a basic scuba diver.

In other words, discussing diving a cavern feels to me like discussing whether one leashes a stage bottle to the butt ring or side mounts it. A fine, informative discussion, but does it serve its purpose here?

 

[DA Aquamaster]

The big thing really is not getting lost or silting out.

If you hover in there, even at night with no light of your own and let your eyes adjust you can see light from anywhere - except maybe if you have your head stuck way up in one of the holes in the ceiling, so none of it really strikes me as a cave dive, at least in terms of being out of the light zone, as someone posted earlier.

The big thing is how will you be prepared to handle other things like flooded masks, a freeflowing reg, running out of gas or something similar where your immediate open water shallow dive response may be to go, or want to go, to the surface, when the surface may be 50 vertical AND 100 horizontal feet away, with some of the exit through a space some OW divers may consider to be restrictive - especially if their buoyancy control is bad on ascent and they find themselves plastered to the ceiling.

I think some divers are able to meet those potential challenges 5, 10 or 20 dives post OW cert while other still are not up to it 100 dives post OW cert.

Marci is right about the lights at Ginnie, they do well as the "primary" at night, it would just require a diver to have a light along to ensure they had a "backup", and to be honest not many OW divers are going to tread very far in ginnie at night without a light as it does look really dark back in there swimming in from the well lighted basin.

So in effect, fearing the light going out at ginnie will cause a problem is assuming a double light failure as I just don't see OW divers going in very far without a light.

 

[Dive-aholic]

...except maybe if you have your head stuck way up in one of the holes in the ceiling, so none of it really strikes me as a cave dive, at least in terms of being out of the light zone, as someone posted earlier.

There is another part of the Ballroom that is cave zone and not in the ceiling or behind the grate.

 

[DA Aquamaster]

And that would be...

 

[BabyDuck]

reg, the thing that makes the discussion basic is that a new diver asked it.

i'm not suggesting every new diver go or prohibiting any from going, but brand new people dive ginnie ballroom every day and it's great that he's finding out all that is involved in this decision.

 

[SparticleBrane]

And that would be...

Off to the left there's a small restriction that you can swim through. If you're curious you can see the area I'm talking about in some of these maps.

Starting about 5:00 into the video, you can see a few of us going through the space I'm talking about.

 

[ScubaSteve]

Is it me or are most of the divers in that video diving a single tank? I think I saw one set of doubles. And how is the location in the video NOT a cave? I have heard a number of people arguing that this is not a cave???? In a tunnel about 6 or 8 feet high.....describes a cave to me. My previous post stands.....I do not think ANY OW diver should be in there.....not what is in the video anyways. Just ridiculous to be arguing that it is actually OK IMNSHO.