Wow, that's uncomfortable for me to watch. Extreme effort and putting your life in danger to squeeze through tiny holes in ripping current to see... rocks? No disrespect intended but, personally, I'll never understand the fascination with this type of diving?
The entrance to Rock Bluff can be a bit funky when the flow is up, but once you’ve navigated the entrance restriction, it opens up and yields some truly beautiful passage. Well worth the effort, but I was very grateful for the advice of our guide, who gave my husband and me excellent pointers on the best way to position ourselves to squeeze in. There are quite a few spots in North Florida where having local guide who is up to date with information about site access and current conditions is invaluable, and Rock Bluff is one of them.
As to why we cave dive...undoubtedly it’s different for everyone, but for me, it’s a combination of feeling part of something bigger than myself and meditation. The caves are monuments to geologic time - they took literally millennia to form, and are mute witnesses to all the events that passed overhead: everything from meteor strikes to mass animal extinctions (and the evolution of new life), the rise and fall of human civilisations, and cataclysmic climate events. It’s all there, in the colours of the formations, their physical composition, and the bones and artefacts that can sometimes be found in the caves themselves. For a brief moment in time (relatively speaking), we get to be a part of that, to bear witness to it. It’s unspeakably wonderful. And with time and experience in the water, it can also be an incredibly peaceful and meditative endeavour (adrenaline has no place in cave diving, as far as I am concerned). I’ve become a stubborn atheist in my middle age, but the caves are to me what I imagine a temple, chapel, or cathedral to represent to a worshipper. You surface feeling reborn, and I can’t imagine a better state of existence than that.
