My dive buddy Jeri and I dove Royal this morning for the first time. Our open water divers explored the basin while we poked around the cavern and into the cave.
The day's heavy rain kept away swimmers and partiers, but also washed enough silt into the basin to make it look foggy, rather than the beautiful clear blue. Water temp 70; clear coming out the vents.
We ran our line from open water, did secondary tie-off around the sad remains of an NACD stop sign. (At least it was an octagonal sign on a metal post sunk in a concrete filled 5 gallon bucket. Since it sat square in the opening's middle, I'm crediting NACD with deterring folks who shouldn't be in there.)
The tunnel is small enough that you wouldn't want more than a buddy team in there at once. At the Y, we turned left. We found the permanent line, but didn't use it. The existing line must have broken loose from its anchors, because it now runs in mid-water, mid-tunnel. It's also in bad shape. We didn't want to risk following it, becoming entangled, breaking it while getting unentangled, and silting out the cave with no continuous guideline. We continued to run our own line in.
As we made the first hard right, I noticed an inflow of colder water, but didn't see the source -- was avoiding getting entangled in existing line while running our line. We turned before the ceiling became too low, as we were both in backmount.
Our surprise was that the tunnel we dove wasn't the silt generator we've always heard. The only silt we had on the way out was what our bubbles and gentle kicks had dislodged from the ceiling and walls. But for that, nice clear water, viz was fine.
CAVEAT: There's potential for easily silting out the tunnel. A kick -- or any other motion -- near the floor would stir a cloud of fine, fine dark silt. The low-flow would assure you'd live with that dark cloud the rest of the dive. Based on what we'd always heard, we were mentally prepared to exit blind, engulfed in dark billows. Thankfully, we didn't have to.
Since we had OW friends in the basin, we didn't take time to explore the right branch of the Y. Couldn't tell visually if it even went far.
Max depth we hit was 48 feet, though that was in the basin. The cave was shallower.
I'd dive it again, though probably side mount, perhaps with lp50s.
NOTE: We are not encouraging folks to go cave dive Royal, merely reporting the conditions we found today. If you and your buddy haven't calmly dealt with a few total silt-outs not of your own making, and exited on the line with your buddy, you shouldn't yet consider Royal. If you and your buddy haven't dove small, silty, low/no-flow passages while handling a line without silting, you shouldn't yet consider Royal. Realistically, I wouldn't -- and couldn't -- have done that dive the first several years I was cave diving. Be safe!
- Sid
