Abaco Island, Bahamas
I just returned from a fantastic trip to Abaco Island, Bahamas. Jim Clark and I dove with Brian Kakuk for a week in a late winter warm weather getaway. We arrive after a short hop over from West Palm Beach and grabbed a cab to our accommodations at the Pelican Beach Villas. Normally Brian would have met us at the airport, but he wasn't back from some his diving in the DR yet. Marsh Harbour isn't that large and we settle in and do some walking around town before retiring for the night.
The first dive day begins with Brian picking us up and taking us over to his shop. We get tanks and load up the van for the day of diving. His shop is well setup and what you might expect for a remote diving location. He has gear and repair parts. It is setup very well for a 2 person dive team to come through, but as Brian is a one man show he can't really accommodate large groups. We pickup some supplies (lunch and refreshments) and head out of town.
For the diving we will end up diving Dan's Cave, Lost Reel Blue Hole, and Ralph's Cave for the week. These are all inland caves. There are more caves and sea caves available to dive. My understanding is that the sea caves have better conditions in the warmer months as the winds aren't mucking things up but the inland caves are great year round. Brian serves up Nitrox and O2 with his capable mixing station. Helium could be made available but must be arranged in advance and is very expensive to get on the island. Anyways we will be diving 28 or 32% in sidemount tanks with O2 for deco gas and doing some stage dives later in the week.
Dan's Cave:
We dove Dan's Cave a lot, 7 dives to be exact. This cave has it all, big rooms, small passage, breakdowns, unimaginable decorations, whatever you can ask for, it has it. The shallow dives were averaging around 70 ft and the deep dives around 100 ft. Max depths were found in drain traps connecting different sections together and were on the order of 140 ft, but for very short lengths. Sidemount is the way to dive here. There are many places that a rebreather or BM can get too, but many more that are sidemount only. The restrictive parts aren't necessarily intense unless you want them to be and Brian can find some of those areas for you. The formations have to be the unique aspect of this cave. It is really neat. First there are the colors: whites, reds, browns, oranges, and blacks. There is no common theme other than the unexpected. The formations look like typical formations you can see in other places, but all types are represented here and they are made of crystal instead of rock. The crystal in and of itself is amazing and I've never seen this much of it in any single place, but what gets me was the geology in action. You can see fractures that have healed over and grew again, decorations that broke and fell over thousands of years ago that now have newer decorations that grew off of them. There are impressive large columns as well as the tallest skinny column bars you'll see. The ceilings are decorated with soda straws and helictites that are clear as glass. It is obvious that this cave has experienced many periods of growth and dormancy over the years.
The first couple of dives in Dan's Cave we stayed near the front getting to know the cave and see what Dan's was about. As all the other caves we dove there is a freshwater layer on top of saltwater which generally begins about 50' depth. Water temp was in the mid-70s which was nice and cozy especially considering I was diving in a drysuit. There's a short walk down a new wooden stair case and some natural steps to the entrance. There's not a ton of room to gear up so as we brought more gear later in the week we took turns getting geared up as we had as many as 6 AL 80s, 6 LP85s, and 3 AL 40s between us by the end of the week. The first dive was to a room called Crystal Palace. It is a short run up the gold line with a little double jump circuit you can do to swim around the room and meet back up with the goldline. As an aside the cave is very well marked. There are no issues with markers at all. In places there are whiteline T's and many reach gaps, but it would be very difficult to not be able to find your way out. For those that have seen the Wes Skiles National Geographic issue you will recognize the panorama fold out right in the front of the cave. It was only a few hundred feet into the cave where that was taken. You will also recognize many formations and passages from Marc Laukien's videos as well. For our second dive we jumped off the gold line right at the front of the cavern and did a dive to an area called the Goodlands. This dive had smaller passages which let you get a little more personal with individual formations as opposed to taking in the big picture view of the larger areas. Brian was quick to point out many of the unique features and points of interest from glowing crystals, red "Sahara dust" sediments, and various troglobites.
The second day we headed for some different caves. Our first dive was in a cave named Lost Reel Blue Hole. Brian describes this one as the Gothic cave as it is much darker looking compared to what we had seen the previous day. This cave as a sulpher layer which is produced by some of the bacteria which also are using up the oxygen in the water so it is a very anoxic environment. Here we swam into some deep pits and aside from admiring the natural beauty of the cave we also we able to look at some ancient crocodile skeleton still with the skull and a large tortoise shell and bones that were partially embedded in the rock.
The second dive of day 2 finds us at Ralph's cave. The sections of cave we saw on this dive were heavily decorated with crystals and formations. Our destination was a location called the glass factory which was amazing all on its own, but the trip there was just as fantastic. It's like someone took a liquid crystal dispenser and went to town. Every surface was coated with the stuff, usually about 3-4 inches thick on any flat surface. Brian showed us an area in this "coating" where a bat skeleton was partially encased. There were waterfalls from ledges down to the next level, crystal pool formations, and crystals hanging off of the stalactites and stalagmites., which looked like flowers. There were soda straw formations meters tall and completely transparent. At our turn point we were looking at a group of formations that Brian calls the Frozen Rain. As you can imagine there are tons of thin column and bar formations here. There are also lots of helictites on these formations and all around the area. It is pretty mind boggling to say the least. It was here that Brian stressed proper Bahamas cave diving trim. In FL trim feet are up to avoid silting the bottom. In these areas you actually get a little negative, drag your fin tips across the bottom to avoid the decorations above, and gently "walk" with your finger tips. It is a bit strange, but the decorations on the floor are pretty robust and the ones on the ceiling are very fragile so it works very well. This was definitely a very memorable dive.
Ralph's Cave was a sidemount only cave. The others have many BM passages, but sidemount will get you into more areas and proficient sidemount skills can get you through some tighter restrictions and tank off restrictions to allow access to even more areas of the cave.
After discussing various options with Brian we decided that the rest of our dives would be done in Dan's cave. We did one more day of 2 dive a day type dives and then for the rest of the week we brought stages and explored more areas of Dan's Cave. I'm not going to describe each individual dive but had a good mix of small, moderate, and huge passages. Some even more decorated than anything we had seen yet and others with massive breakdown rooms with little to no decorations, but so big that my 21w HID would not find the far walls. Jim's favorite was a 2 stage dive up the gold line into Fangorn Forest which was one of the coolest room/passages and beyond into the giant passage of Wrigley Field. Fangorn Forest is just that a dense forest of decorations, large columns, small bars, and about everything in between. It would be comparable to taking a walk through some sort of cartoon forest. I think what Jim liked about this dive was the mix of decorations and large passages beyond in Wrigley field. I have a harder time deciding on my favorite as they were all very different.
As you can tell I was very happy to dive there and would love to go back and dive them again. It is truly a unique dive location.
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Semper Fi, Cameron David Smith, my son, my hero. 11/9/1989 - 11/13/2010 
, we kidnapped him for a few days there are some pics in our drss gallery 
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