Are swim-throughs really caverns?

[MikeFerrara]

I did it a few years back, and I was in the middle with 3 divers in front and 3 divers behind me.

That dive certainly goes near the top of my "stupidest things I've done" list.

Now that I have a bunch more training and I am more qualified to do that dive, I'm smart enough not to.

I think it goes that way for a lot of us. My wife and I did our share of stupid dives but we didn't fully realize just how stupid they were until much later and after quite a bit more training.

 

[a_siren]

On the other hand, long single-file tubes at major depth, like Devil's Throat, sound scary to me, and I was quite happy that our group's use of Nitrox in Cozumel gave us a good reason not to do that dive (I don't think any of us would have done it anyway).

Wouldn't use of Nitrox be better than regular compressed air on that dive in that you'd have a bit more leeway on bottom time?

Sorry if this is a dumb question. Just trying to learn and have fun without becoming a statistic...

 

[rongoodman]

The max depth of the swim-through, 125' I think an earlier posting said, was probably too deep for the mix TSandM and her group were using.

 

[MikeFerrara]

Wouldn't use of Nitrox be better than regular compressed air on that dive in that you'd have a bit more leeway on bottom time?

Sorry if this is a dumb question. Just trying to learn and have fun without becoming a statistic...

As Ron points out, it may have been too deep for the mix she was using.

The way to get more "leeway in bottom time", IMO is to be carrying enough gas, some redundancy and the ability to go ahead and do a little bit of staged decompression because NDL's are kind of short at 130(ish).

My prefered way to do a 130 ft dive is in a set of doubles (in an overhead I'll have the doubles for certain), a light trimix and at least one decompression gas. Now, I can relax, take my time and enjoy myself with plenty of time to straighten out any problems that might come up.