Day 5/Day 1 of Round 2.
I've been excited for and dreading this day for eight months. It's a real delight to be back in cave country and to be gearing up for my next series of dives. I put work into the summer dive season to be better... and today is the day to face the underwater music.
(If you've never been cave-diving before, the sound of exhaled bubbles hitting the ceiling is thunderous in an interesting way. To me, it sounds like a rock concert in a bar after the bathroom door shuts behind you. Loud and muffled.)
I went over to Cave Country Dive Shop in the morning to meet Reggie, and I'm glad I got there early. Although I left Chicago with four full tanks, my doubles AND my EAN50 bottle were bled dry when I checked them. Shop owner Kristi Bernot (a lovely woman, an accomplished diver, and a role model to me) looked everything over for me and put things back into filled, working order.
Reggie and I went over to Ginnie Springs today so that I could take off my post-break training wheels in a familiar environment. As I mentioned in my teal deer, my core equipment (drysuit and fins) has changed completely in the last 7-10 days. Because my Fundies course dives were all drill-oriented, I asked for a low-frill dive so that I could get acquainted with the real-world behavior of my rental Santi drysuit.
We planned to enter through the Ear, have me run the primary reel to the main line, penetrate to Hill 400, and then have me take another stab at the line recovery drill during the exit phase.
The Santa Fe River is much lower than during the January flood, and seems much less tannic right now. I could see the mouth of the Ear from the tarp at the end of the run. The better visibility seriously increased my spiritual comfort: my brainstem doesn't mind plunging into the depths when my optic nerve can see where we're going. Flow is also down substantially - I would venture that it's 50 fpm or so, rather than the 70-80 from during my first visit.
Since my last challenging descents into the Ear, I've done about 40 more dives with my doubles and wing. The additional experience made me a better judge of how to adjust my negative buoyancy appropriately for a comfortable descent. Reggie specifically highlighted my improvement in the descent phase in his debrief!
I still find running the reel challenging from a task-loading perspective. During the few minutes that Reggie guided me through making placements, I chewed through 500 psi of my 1100 psi allotment. Not my best performance!
I waved to the Grim Reaper as we passed by on our way to the Gallery. This is one of the most familiar spots to me in the cave and I think, one of the most beautiful. It's a long tunnel that's about three times as high as it is wide in most places, with wavy limestone walls and immense piles of white boulders. The blue-white illumination of a flashlight filling the chamber feels both vaguely alien but totally beautiful.
I did a much better job of reading the cave this time and was in fine cardiovascular shape when we got to the Lips. We made it through the Keyhole, over the cornflake rocks, and were only 30ish feet from Hill 400 when I hit my turn pressure and signalled to head back.
We stopped a few yards past the Keyhole for the line recovery drill. Reggie handed me the blackout mask, pulled me off the line, and deposited me at the test rock.
I took a mid-length number of seconds to feel up the rock, Lover's Lane style. Once I found the most prominent protuberance, I pulled my smaller spool out of my pocket and tied off. I picked a direction and began the painstaking process of sliding my guide hand across the floor in a straight line, then bringing my spool hand up to match. Every few "paces," I made a series of arm sweeps to see if I had made contact.
After about 8-10 paces, I did a sweep and felt hard rock above my head. I realized that I had picked the wrong direction. I wound up my spool, using the tension in the line to VERY gently pull myself back to my tie-off.
I felt up the rock again and decided to depart at a 90-degree angle from where I had started. Slide guide hand, bring up reel, slide guide hand, bring up reel... sweep... LINE!
Elated that the hard part of the drill was over, I clipped off my spool. The second part of the drill is following the line in touch contact, knowing that you are heading towards the exit.
I "okayed" the line, exhaled slowly, and waited for the flow to move me towards the exit. I did pick the correct direction, we terminated the drill, and went home.
The dive ran about 70 minutes total, and we racked up a 1-minute stop at 20 feet. Based on our pre-dive planning, we extended this to a 3-minute safety stop in the Eye.
Coming soon... dive 2.
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