Cathedral

[tomhauburn]

Talk with Todd about upstream. They did some dives out to Exleys line on OC and then came back and placed bottles in the system and went a lot further on RB80's. I believe he said on land it was below the spray fields that the dairy is using now. I not sure just how many feet that works out to though but he would know. It was interesting talking to him about the dive as he said it was apparent there used to be more opening into the system but they appeared to have been filled in over time by folks.

[FW]

The quote below is from the new description of Cathedral.

"On December 16, 1990, Sheck established what was then a record penetration of 10,939 feet on a multi-stage dive lasting nearly 12 hours, including decompression. (Upstream exploration was extended to over 18,000 feet in 2005.) "

[TN]

What have the conditions been there? The way I understand it, years back it was 100+ vis. Is that gone forever? Is it a good dive?

[traveler]

The quote below is from the new description of Cathedral.

"On December 16, 1990, Sheck established what was then a record penetration of 10,939 feet on a multi-stage dive lasting nearly 12 hours, including decompression. (Upstream exploration was extended to over 18,000 feet in 2005.) "

Bjarne and I went a bit past 17K, our last exploration dive being 7/24/04 (although we didn't get out of the water until sometime on the 25th). I'm not aware of any exploration out beyond that. We did long dives there in 2005 and 2006 as well, a little past the end of Sheck's line.

We never saw great viz like Sheck wrote about in Caverns. Skip and I did one dive in 2001 or 2002 where we were stunned to find viz in the 50ft ballpark -- I still give him grief about it because he talked me out of bringing scooters to the site just to keep it simple. That was the only dive with truly good viz. Anyway, some of the long dives we did had viz in the 15-20ft ballpark, but many were quite a bit less than that. It's not too bad for swim dives, but throughout most of the main tunnel the conduit is far broader than the available viz, so scootering and exploring had some interesting challenges.

I've seen a lot divers who find Cathedral to be a "spooky" dive, which I interpreted as general discomfort with limited viz, stained line, dark walls, etc. That plus the fact that it's deeper than most of the more familiar sites leads me to encourage people to start out somewhat slowly there, and get a feel for the place before you bite off too much. I also encourage the use of trimix... 18/45 is what I generally use there, although for the first few thousand feet 21/35 could also be a viable option. Anyway, the more helium the better for this site, in my opinion.

[FW]

Thanks Todd, maybe I should edit our new Cathedral description