Strategies for the traveling cave diver

[battles2a5]

Right now I'm about a 6.5 hour ride from cave country, which is manageable for weekend trips. The drive sucks but I can easily cart my gear back and forth in the back of my truck. However, I'm starting to look at some jobs back up north which would put me outside of driving distance. I know there are a lot of you in the same situation so I was wondering how you guys manage the logistics behind traveling to and fro cave country. Do you rent tanks or store them down there? What about scooters? Do do travel with the rest of your equipment or do you leave cave-only sets down there? Where do you usually fly into? Just trying to weigh some of the pros and cons and figure out what it would take to make this happen. I'm currently making 5-6 trips a year so that may impact the rent vs. store equation. Thanks in advance!

Ryan

[metaldector]

Check with Rich at CEE, they have some storage lockers behind the Cave Diver's Museum for rent. Good luck with the move.

[Al]

Stay in the south; once you live there you will hate living in a frozen hell. When I moved north I got a storage locker near the Jacksonville airport and kept tanks and other cave-dedicated gear there. I also kept gear for wreck diving in SoFL there. A the time, there were better flight deals to JAX and rental cars were cheap there. If I went down to go wreck diving, I had a bit of a drive to SoFL, but I had the caves as a fall-back if we got blown out. We've had some issues that stopped our trips to FL for a while, but I am very soon going to put some gear down there again.

[curtschu]

There are also so AC storage units in High Springs That others have used.

[MORGAN]

Tracy & I live 24 hours driving time from Luraville. We drive back & forth. We've thought about flying to cave country but have never tried it. We do our best to look at the long drive as a road trip adventure rather than a hassle, and are mostly successful. Snacks, music, and audiobooks are some of our coping strategies.

I know several people who fly and rent cars - some rent tanks and scooters too. Others rent a storage unit in cave country where they can store their own heavy stuff.

Our strategy is to load up our Chevy pickup (it has a lockable cap) and drive down. We stay for two weeks, and then drive home. We bring everything with us. We do this twice a year, usually October & February.

We used to do more frequent one week trips, but 48 hours driving for 5 or 6 days diving didn't seem ideal. 48 hours driving for 14 days diving is a better driving : diving ratio. The downside is that it can seem awfully long between cave trips, either 4 months or 7 months. For instance, my last cave dive was February 29th , and my next one if all goes as planned will be October 4th . We deal with this by diving cave configuration all the time, doing cave skills & drills on almost every non-cave dive, and spending the first few dives of a trip tuning up and scraping the rust off our technique.

One way to look at it is that we only go cave diving twice a year. On the other hand, we spend a month of every year doing nothing but cave diving. Not bad for living 1450 miles away, but a single-wide on a Suwannee County back road is looking better & better!

Mike

[FW]

There are some divers that always fly in, especially from Europe. They leave all the heavy stuff (tanks scooters, etc) in FL, and only carry the light stuff with them. Some have friends in FL, to get around, others rent cars. If you are really brave, you can leave your gear at a fill station, and let them rent it out, that way storage is free.

[Oister]

http://www.amigosdivecenter.com/ Has lots of gear to rent.

[Luxrok]

FYI: Now, we have dive storage lockers here in Playa Del Carmen, Mexico. The lockers are big enough to fit one of the fruit crates we use to store and move dive gear.

The place is: http://www.playaresale.com. They don't have any information about storage on the site right now, but I know they do it.

So, if you come to Playa, Puerto Aventaurus, Akumal or Tulum and want to store you gear here between trips, this is a really great solution. I have some friends that store their stuff there now.

Hans

[battles2a5]

Thanks for all the feedback. Sounds like there are plenty of options, just need to crunch the numbers to see what makes sense, based on the number of trips I plan to make (if the move even happens).

[outlaws]

Ryan You could always store it at my house and I could bring it down for you!

Butch