Swimming Sweet Surprise/Mainland without a DPV
I’ve been getting a lot of pleasure out of reading people’s reports, and decided to do one on a pretty ambitious little series of dives I did at Ginnie on my last trip. In so doing, I hope to encourage people to realize that you can do some pretty big dives without a scooter, if you’re willing to do some planning and a bit of swimming. Hopefully someone will also learn from my lessons since there are some key things I learned in the process. Caveat: you shouldn’t do this unless you’re very happy swimming past the Henkle, and with playing with a LOT of stages.
The plan was to do the Mainland/Sweet Surprise circuit. The Mainland jump is at 2900 feet in, and then heads slightly off perpendicular back towards Sweet Surprise.
The Sweet Surprise jump is at 2200 feet roughly, and is also roughly perpendicular, but angling out a little to where it joins Mainland.
The “join” occurs approximately when you’ve gone 4100-4200 feet along Mainland, OR 3100 ft along Sweet Surprise. So really the total swim if you do the circuit is 3100 +4200 = 7300 feet.
To do the circuit, the idea was to do the following:
1) Drop off cylinders at 1200 ft, 1800ft and 2300 ft.
2) Do the Mainland swim. Take an extra stage, not to be breathed, and drop it at 3800ft in. Mark every T along the way all the way up to 4100ft in where it has started curving back towards Sweet Surprise. Use a reel to connect to Sweet Surprise, and exit. This setup dive is actually longer than the circuit, at 8400 feet total.
3) Take out the used stages, and drop a full stage at 1200 and 1800 feet
4) Do the Sweet Surprise side. This time there is nothing to mark except a reel from the main line to the white line. This can be picked up afterwards. Swim in, find your reel at the end, pick it up, find your markers all the way out, pick them up, take the stage at 3800 feet, and out you go. Pick up stages along the way, or at lest move them further out the cave.
Dive 1 - a quick swim up to the coathangers (1200ft) where I dropped off two stages.
Dive 2 -
a) Take in 2 stages;
b) Breathe one down and drop it.
c) Pick up one of the two at the coathangers
d) Swim two stages back ,one to 1800 feet and one to 2300 feet.
e) Exit, picking up the breathed down stage.
Dive 3: The intention was to do the drop-off at 3800, and to place the reel joining the two systems. Well, it was a... learning dive. I swam in too far,and got to the Henkel restriction. At 3100 ft I saw the arrow (on the ceiling), went D'uh! and started swimming out. At 3000 I saw a line, tied off a reel and off I went... to come out at 3100 feet again (you need to look at a map to see what I did wrong – I took the Henkle bypass instead of the Mainland line). Finally I got back to 2900 feet and found Mainland.
With all this futzing around I'd used up too much backgas to complete a drop off of a full stage at 3800 as planned. So I started breathing the stage, and went past 3800 to the second bend to the right where the passage heads off to Sweet Surprise. I wasn't at thirds yet but I was 80 minutes into the dive, 3900 feet from civilization, and decided that discretion was the better part of valour. So I decided that the circuit could wait for another day, and swam back removing my markers.
Mainland is stunning. Swimming it back was an utter pleasure. By parts narrow and wide, tight and open, it's gorgeous.
At 1800 I hit a conundrum - what to do with all these stages all over the place? I already had two stages on my burdened shoulders, each half (or more) full. Screw this I decided, I ain't swimming back here just to pick up a freaking stage - PLUS of course the gas in these cylinders was in my reserve planning. I picked up the third stage, and swam with it in my hand, breathing off it. I wanted it empty to drop at 1200. When I got to 1200 I dropped off the 2 emptiest cylinders and picked up one - what a freaking mission!! I must have spent 5 minutes stowing and unstowing regs, opening and closing valves, etc. Finally I got all the hoses, regulators, gauges etc organized and off I went.
This was probably the single most dangerous part of the dive. I was sorely tempted to NOT swap cylinders. No doubt I would have had plenty of backgas to exit, but my best option was to keep the fullest possible cylinders on me. It’s easy to become complacent after so much swimming.
57 minutes deco - damn! So I started stopping... Lips for two minutes... very slow meander down the gallery… 40 ft in the eye for about 5... 30 ft. for ages…. switch to O2 at 20... man it's cold!!... 10 minutes... get to a lower PO2... 16 feet... MAN it's cold... and 35 minutes to go. Damn it was boring. I had a waterproof copy of a Ginnie map in my pocket so I got it out and worked out my goofs... hmmm, THAT used up 7 minutes. Then played with fish, trying to help them find stuff to eat. Then closed my eyes. And so on. Did I mention it was cold?
Total run time 195 minutes. 5 stages and I breathed my O2 down below 1000 psi. What a GREAT dive. But very very tiring.
Dive 4: That night I set up a stage at 1200 for a 2 stage dive to the end of Sweet Surprise. A quick easy dive.
Dive 5: Sweet Surprise. If I’d managed to drop the stage at 3800 feet and get the reel between the two systems, this would have been the dive where I’d complete the circuit. Instead, I decided to use it simply to recce the other side. I had one helluva fill in my first stage cylinder- 3500 psi! (thanks Cathy) - so I managed to make that last on the way in all the way to 1200 feet where the next stage was. Went onto the second stage, and rode that to 2100. Onto backgas... and ONCE MORE overshot my line! This time I worked it out fast and turned at 2300. Came back, did the jump... and started just the sweetest dive. This is a pristine, gorgeous, BLACK piece of cave. It turns and dives and generally plays with you, necessitating lots of careful turns to not hit the sides or top with your fins. I rode it nice and slow all the way back to 3100. There was a line tied through to Mainland but I didn't want to risk silting it up so I turned at that point, with quite a bit of backgas.
Run time 125 minutes. 32 minutes O2 deco. Worth every chilly second. If I’d done the circuit the runtime would have been about 150 minutes I think.
It took two more dives to get all the stage cylinders littering the cave, but I did some nice dives (like the Sherwood split, and double domes) at the same time. 7 great dives altogether.
Overall I have no regrets about not completing the circuit. It’s really important to NOT compromise or push safety by becoming too task oriented.
However, I must admit that now that I’m DPV rated, I’ll be doing that circuit on my next trip… with only one setup dive to mark Mainland, on the DPV. But if you’re looking for a sweet dive with big bragging rights and some really interesting planning challenges, try doing this circuit purely swimming. Just make sure you always have huge gas reserves. And be warned – it’s exhausting! And – of course – don’t miss the lines at 2900 ft and at 2100 ft the way I did.
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Originally Posted by ARY
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