Dive Trip to Florida
We made it to River Rendezvous just after dark, where we signed in and set up camp. Saturday we dove Peacock. The plan was to check out the Grand Traverse we'd been reading about on this forum. I led us in, Mike and me, tied the line off on the mainline, and we swam on. It was nice to be back in Peacock again. The Peanut route is one of my favorite dives. The tunnel narrows and becomes little more than a rocky hole worming through rock. I just love to glide through the twisting parts, my light shining off the white limestone in a close glare. I turn with the cave, wrapping my shoulders into the curve, sliding my hips the opposite way, and timing the kick to fishtail me around the bend. Like a kid at a waterpark shooting down the waterslide, I twist and turn and kick and roll with the tubular circuit.
And then we dropped down. I exhaled to hasten the fall, holding the inflator in my left hand at the ready and filled the BC just in time to slow and hover a second before giving a quick, but small, kick forward and out of the way of Mike, descending down behind me. I ok'd my light around the spot of his beam and he returned it. I smiled and kicked on. It became a mission now. It was time to concentrate on where we were going and getting there efficiently. I really don't like diving with the obsession of getting further and deeper. I like to sight-see along the way. When there's a side road with the promise of the world's largest ball of string, I take it. Reptile house, freaks in jars on shelves, scenic overlook, a nice sunset, or maybe just the wholeness of the moment and I'll pull over, stop, and see what's up. But not this time, this time we were on a mission. We made 1600 feet and I placed a cookie on the main line.
The next dive we started at Orange Grove towards Challenge. We didn't get far, maybe 500 feet, or 600 feet, not anywhere close. We spent too much time playing around. The light under the duck weed was hypnotic. I lay on my back looking up, and around at the bottom of the duckweed and how the tiny beams of light poked through tiny little spaces only to diffuse into larger softer beamier movements of light below the surface. We did our drills, calculated our thirds, and took our time. The flat rock of Orange Grove as we lay line toward the mainline showed scraps and scratches, mostly old and worn, but a few were white with recentness. As we descended ever so slowly, often rising up over mounds where rock had given way to clay, only to descend back down again, as if we were swimming two kicks forward and one back, I thought we must surely be covering more ground across the bottom than we were through the water. It was as if 50 feet of penetration was 100 feet of swimming. Or maybe we were tired.
Well, the Grand Traverse will be there tomorrow and beyond, so what the heck, now we know. We know we can't do it, yet. But we had two good dives and that night around the grill and campfire we chatted about the dives and planned the next day too.
We were off to Little River the next morning. Now I don't know much about these places and I hear people talk of this and that room, this and that circuit, and all these place names and I look on maps and charts and try to pay attention, but honestly it's mostly greek to me. I just like to dive and see what's there and I like to return to the same places often. Little River is a great dive. We went right on in like we'd been there a million times, dropped down the chimney, and followed the mainline to the T where we hung a left. Like Peanut, Little River's small rocky tunnels are my favorite. I come up on turns hiding behind the inside wall and try to slither around the corner keeping tight inside. It's very easy to get lost in the body movements, to narrow your perception to this zen-like moment of time and space. But you shake free, check your pressure gauge, check your buddy, and look all around.
That afternoon we returned to Peacock and made a nice short run up to Olsen, surfaced for a chat, then returned. I like the big black passages here. I like the fingers of rock that stick down from the ceiling forcing you to zig-zag your course among the arches between them. I like the muddy silty bottom and the catfish dust trails that appear suddenly out of nowhere. I swam along behind Mike and daydreamed of life in a submerged cave; of setting up a glass dome, or using a glass blockade across the wide end of one dead-end room, pumping the water out and setting up house. Like a dome on the bottom of the sea, but in a submerged cave. I daydreamed of watching the catfish and crayfish and freshwater shrimp swim and crawl by each day; of waking up, making coffee and donning dive gear to swim out to the surface and go to work. Driving home and parking at the edge of the spring pool, gearing up, and swimming home for dinner.
Then Mike flashed a round ok and I lost the dream, ok'd back. We retrieved the reel, stopped and did valve drills, then surfaced. The small gator lay before us, his unblinking right eye staring at everything in our half of the world. I smiled remembering him, wondering if he was indeed the same as three years ago, or was it just two?, and if he was a her. I have no idea how to tell a male alligator from a female, and probably wouldn't get close enough to find out, if I knew how.
We made it back to camp just after dark for another night at the campfire and grill and planning table for the next day's dives, this time at Ginnie Springs, the Devil's Ear. This is one of the nicest dives in all of Florida. The tall passages and white limestone are majestic; and in parts it's like flying through a cathedral. You can almost hear the organ and with just a bit of imagination your bubbles rumble in unison, almost Gregorian. And in other parts you crawl and pull and kick through current eyeing the mainline as it drops out of sight. I imagine myself like Spiderman and scurry along as if up the side of a building. It would not take much to imagine becoming a cave-adapted species. Staying generations until the sense of touch and the sense of sight traded places, until the offspring of offspring of offspring and more, replaced eyes with pigment bumps, and developed lateral lines to sense the subtle vibrations of the deep. We would become a second sapien species, the subterraneous aquaticus sapiens. But for now I was shining my 10 watt HID all around enjoying the visual beauty and grandeur all around me.
Then my light blinked out. It shone again for a moment when I struck it against my palm, but only for a moment. It was too early to end the dive! I seriously thought of signaling Mike that we could continue the dive; after all I had two backups…. Then I thought better and gave the thumbs up. Mike agreed and we exited. On the surface Mike told me he saw the look in my eye, the look of "we could go on diving without my primary…." I laughed and said, "Yes, I thought we might could do it…, then changed my mind."
We returned later that day and made the same dive again, a bit further in and a bit longer in bottom time, but no less or more of a dive. It's funny how a light failure half way in and a good long dive with no problems sometimes come out the same. Both are good dives, and maybe the one with the light failure turns out to be the better one. You get a chance to practice your skills, your training, to put them to the real-life test, and you see that it all works out fine and oftentimes it works out most enjoyable. The success of overcoming odds is what may be behind the smile and good feeling that washes over me as I float on inflated wing and breathe the free air, but I don't think so. There's more.
Once again we grilled and campfired and planned. It was Edwards in the morning, and Telford in the afternoon. At Edwards we ran a rope from tree to tree all the way down the path to the small slit of rock where the water spewed out and ran the few yards to the Suwannee River, just downstream from where the Withlacoochee feeds into it. It was a steep walk down and a steep descent to 115 feet. No more than a vertical crack with high flow, it drops down like the gateway to hell. Like a nightmare where the hallway telescopes out further and further the faster and faster you run, the dark crack below us just kept on going. The tunnel, at the bottom of the endless crack, was like a funnel. It narrowed, but turned and twisted as the visibility darkened and the water turned turbid. I sensed micro-creatures in the water, parasites looking for hosts, and clamped my jaw tighter on the regulator, determined not to let any devil-demons enter my body, take my mind, steal my soul. I smiled then and checked the depth gauge. We were at 122 feet and the dark narcosis was hurting my teeth. I smiled again and relaxed my jaw. I stopped, and hovering scanned the passage, watched Mike swim on ahead, looked from side to side and back behind us. The line was dark, hard to see. The cave was black and silty with maybe 40 feet of viz and it suddenly reminded me of home. Our caves in Tennessee are much like this, but shallower. Darker and less viz too. I caught up with Mike.
The climb uphill was a climb. We felt down in, but good about it. We were out in the woods, a long way from a park or a business or even a town. As we de-geared, retrieved deco bottles, rolled up the rope, we talked of the difficulties and the triumphs of this dive. The current tries to blow you out, the poor visibility tries to spook you, and the depth grabs the back of your head when you don't pay attention and sometimes even when you do. I know most technical divers see 120 feet as mild, hardly deep at all, but it's respectable in my book; not a depth to be ignored or discounted. Add the darkness, the current, the steep hillside access, and the narrow foreboding crack in the planet spewing water and you have the makings of a sci-fi B-movie in the screening room of your narcosis-saturated mind.
It was then I thought of the plastic skeleton. I had brought it to Florida to place in one of the caves, but had forgotten it or decided not here on all dives and now we were at the end of our trip. Well, maybe next Halloween. We drove from Edwards back to Rennaker's for fills and then on to Telford. We figured after Edwards it would be late in the day and Telford doesn't lock a gate at sunset. A group of three divers from Croatia were there and we talked a bit about the dive. Mike and I had checked a map at Rennaker's in planning our dive and I had learned a great deal on this trip about relating the map to the place. I noted the depths on the map and where they were in relation to the formations (breakdown, restriction, large-open or narrow-small) and so on this dive for the first time I saw where we were on the map! It was like "Eureka!" The map shows the cave! You are Here! The big picture and the little picture, the forest and the trees, the real and the symbolic all became one.
This was clearly the best dive of the week. And not just because I felt like the map and the cave made sense in relation to one another, but because of the cave. It presented terrain of all types. It was small and restricted, it was tunnel and passage, it was crack and ball rooms, and it was smooth and continuous, and rubbled and broken. It was all things in one dive and I wanted more than ever to see just what was around the next bend, what was just ahead in the darkness beyond my beam…., but Mike signaled time to turn the dive. I stopped him, and signaled hold. I then turned and proceeded just a little way further…just a little way to where the line turns the corner and disappears. I stoppped and looked and wondered. I turned back to Mike and stuck a thumb up, then shined my light on it and we left.
We left Telford, then left camp, and left Florida to come home to Tennessee. As we crossed into Tennessee at Chattanooga, we crossed the lake there as the sun set between the green mountains tops. The soft yellow rays from the setting sun reflected off the lake as a barge made its way downstream. A lone power boat left a white wake as it silently sped upriver. We sat transfixed, driving along the interstate, stuck for just a moment in a timelessness, between the setting sun and the beauty of the earth. And at that moment I realized that cave diving is not the only place to find peace on earth, to feel awed and to gasp at the beauty and the uniqueness of experience. That it is all around us, every day, and all we have to do is look.
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