Manatee Springs (Catfish) Dive 11/14

We visited Catfish on Sunday during the DUI Drysuit Days tryouts. We got off into the cave for a test dive. The dive was tough. We were wearing drysuits which we don't usually but it was quite an effort to make progress against the flow.

The DUI extravaganza was interesting in itself. Lots of single tank divers there for some reason but I met only one cave diver outside our group (of 3).

After heading through a series of stations to get us hooked up with a drysuit and underware to fit us right for our dive and then heading back to the car to replace a missing O-ring from my regulator we joined the other divers entering the water.

It seemed like there were more then a dozen divers headed in on the stairs when I had looked earlier but when we got to the water there were just 2 back on the surface discussing some problem or other. the 3 of us jumped in and descended through the chaos in the open water zone.

As bad as the vis was in the cavern it was hard to believe that the OW zone had actually been worse but it was. visibility was in the 15-20' range in the cavern and it took me a minute to find the upstream entrance (duh right above my head).

Entering the upstream passage was like trying to enter the headspring on a normal day. Its was like climbing up a water faucet. I'm sure the extra drag from the drysuit and the odd fins and boots didn't help any either.

We clipped off our O2 bottles where the main line started and started forcing our way upstream against the current. Vis was about 20-30 feet (hovering closer to 20' most of the time fighting the current it seemed). I had to pause a couple times to catch my breath and used the break to check on my buddies who were likewise making progress.

We tried several thing to get out of the way of the flow like getting over to the wall but it mostly just mattered to keep making progress until the passage opened wider and the flow dropped off. After that we were able to get up off the floor a little and swim a little against the flow.

It took us about 20 minutes to swim up to Sue where we hit thirds and went up to talk. We went up the downstream side crack to avoid the main passage restriction and the down flow actually sucked most of our bubbles down into the cave while we were ascending. We all surfaced in the pool and had a good laugh over the conditions and got ready to drop back down into the current and head back.

Drifting back took about 15 minutes (without swimming and while staying out of the main flow) and vis seemed slightly better (seemed closer to 30') because we had time to look while we drifted a little more.

When we got back to Catfish we took a little more time to check out the little room in the back of Catfish. It was relatively easy and calm. Vis was a little better there (and in one or two domes along the passage) and the flow was (as usual) nil there.

The headspring has been open again since Thursday but we didn't know so we exited at Catfish when we got done in the back room. The OW divers were all gone and the basin was probably approaching 40-50' of vis.

We had expected the cave would be bad this weekend though. A few weeks ago we went upstream Friedman's vis was better but didn't improve farther upstream as usual. Another group had just come back from 7000'+ and said it was horrible the whole way. It was Oct 14 then the vis was closer to 40' and the flow less. A week earlier then that conditions had been pretty good before the river level started dropping. I expect conditions will remain high flow and low vis until the next high water flood period.