Day 3:
First day of Intro Cave. We arrive at the dive site and Johnny introduces us to a new instructor that will be shadowing us to learn how to teach cave courses, he didn't play a huge roll in any dive other than the first one though. So Johnny has a line set up on land to discuss the different types of markers we can/will see. He does a good job of explaining how "popular North Florida" caves are marked, signifying that the more advanced caves and caves in other regions can and are slightly different. He goes over the different arrow configurations for jumps, midpoints etc. Then we talk about the diveplan, dive 1 is a simple follow Johnny in, and air share on the way out. Charlie and I are the OOG divers and Johnny and the other instructor, Brett, are the donating divers. Now the plan is set, time to DIVE!!!
Dive goes as planned, simple and straight forward; we get to the Lips, the dive is called and now Charlie and I are OOG. Brett donates his long hose (he is in SM btw, the rest of us BM) and we do a very controlled exit while air sharing; we drop to the bottom of the cave and let the flow carry us out. Piece of cake. Johnny tells Charlie that he got out of whack for a second (trim wise) when we initiated the OOG drill but this was mainly due to where he was, it was a tight part of the cave so he dropped his fins to turn more easily.
The Second Dive was arguably the most stressful of the trip, not for me but for Charlie. This dive was a lost buddy drill; we go in with Johnny leading, we turn the dive, but Johnny had "light problems" and swam away from us into some small chute away from the gold line. This is where the stress came into play, Charlie was a Marine in his younger days and so seeing a buddy swim away from us like that struck a chord with him, but he stayed in control of himself and stayed with me as we put into action our predetermined lost buddy plan. We attached and arrow on the gold line and tied in one of my safety reels and we went off after him. I lead with the reel and charlie followed me so we both had continuous guideline, by the time we swam 20 feet into that little chute we were back on the gold line not 15 feet away (at the time i thought this was funny because I appreciated that Johnny knew this cave inside and out and so we weren't going that far away). By the time we got through there was Johnny behind us, he just magically showed up lol. So we turn around and follow my reel back to the arrow I placed, and I start to put away my reel and arrow. Well, Charlie was focused on me and by the time we were done... Johnny was gone again!
but luckily he was just hanging out above us so I rather angrily signed to Charlie, "F***ing watch him!" but then we were all good and actually exited. On the surface we discussed our lost buddy procedure and Johnny helped us out in coming up with a better one. Now what we'll do (in a 3 person team with the 3rd person missing) is I'll attach an arrow and reel and go looking for the lost buddy while Charlie stays and acts as a lighthouse for the lost buddy and can use my line to communicate with me if he is found. All in all, a good day's work
Day 4:
The final day of training! This day was my day to mess up apparently, but I was happy to learn from my mistakes. The first dive was supposed to be 2 drills in one, lost line and lights out air sharing exit. So we gear up, do our predive check and go. We get to the lips and use the bowl area in front of it to do our lost line drill, we first turned off our lights and replaced our mask with blacked out ones Johnny gave us. He then took us away from the line, spun around and GO! So we followed procedure: found and anchor, tied into it, and aggressively searched for out ticket back to sunlight and unlimited air supply. I actually enjoyed this (with the small exception of the blacked out mask constantly leaking, it might've been easier without it lol) but I found my way to the stone ledge of the lips and I knew where I was! I knew I was close and kept moving closer, trying to keep my line taut when all of the sudden slack! so I reel it in thinking its just a little slack. But I keep reeling and reeling and finally Johnny squeezes my arm signaling the end of the drill. I put my good mask on and see I am 6 inches from the gold line but my anchor had come lose, dammit. But I reel in the rest of the line and we proceed to the lights out air sharing drill. This is where I goofed; Charlie was the OOG diver and so I donated my long hose, no big deal, except that instead of positioning him in front of me I turn around waiting for him to grab my arm so we could begin, clusterf*** ensues and the drill is called and we exit normally. On the surface we talk about the lost line drill first and overall good remarks are made; Johnny said my anchor came loose but I would've reeled it in, made a new one and found the line soon, he called it just to prevent the excess line entangling anyone. But then we move on to the lights out air sharing drill and I straight up admit "yeah... my bad, I goofed". We laugh about it for a minute and Johnny says we'll try it again on the last dive.
The last dive of the course is fairly straight forward: go in, turn, OOG, grab line, lights out. This time everything went much smoother until the end. We go in, get to the lips, and I call the dive. This was intentionally done because so far every dive has been called by Charlie, not by design or anything but his air consumption is a lot higher than mine. But I didn't want to get accustomed to relying on him to call every dive because of that, so I told him I would call one. This dive we get to the lips and I'm still ~150 psi over my turn pressure and so I called it, yay me! This time we do it right, I'm OOG and charlie donates, I lead the exit and we get on the line. We turn our lights off, and hand our Petrels to Johnny (just one more reason I love that computer is they are bright as **** in total blackness, its essentially my fourth light on a dive lol). We can't see **** and proceed, I remember Johnny telling me that I needed to keep my hand up and I suddenly wonder "Why hasn't he told me to keep my hand up yet? It isn't up now... OH **** if I don't get my hand up I may actually bust my head on something!" needless to say my hand got up and stayed up after that realization. We were doing well until we got to the 90 degree turn at the reaper sign (forgot to mention this earlier but this time we went in through the Devil's Eye, so we needed to make that turn) this is another mistake. I stop and try to trace that unbelievably tight gold line around this rock, well the flow of the cave doesn't give a **** about us and pushes Charlie in between me and where I know the exit is. I spend probably 60 seconds trying to tell him to go forward to no avail. Finally Johnny calls the drill and we turn lights on and head out. On the surface he tells me that with the gold line I can just find it without tracing because it is so much thicker than the line found on reels, if I had just done that we would've made it all the way without the lights, he did concede that since we could see daylight at that point and we were familiar with both exits we could've simply just exited out of either. I was a little disappointed that I didn't successfully go all the way out but still...
We get out of the water, go over our written exam and BOOM!! We are cave divers! It was a great feeling after those 4 days to successfully complete the course, partially because ever since I scheduled the course I was preparing myself to accept that I could and would fail if I didn't step up to the challenges, that made this moment so sweet.
We did 2 more cave dives that day, just Charlie and I, and they both ended well. Johnny was an amazing instructor calm, cool, and definitely knew what he was doing and was talking about. When we're ready to do full cave we will in all likelyhood good back to Johnny.
