SuPrBuGmAn
Contributor
Temperatures weren't uncomfortable Sunday morning, it was a bit cool, but the sun hadn't come close to breeching the horizon so it was to be expected. Overcast skies were all that would have shown, if we had light, anyway. A front was passing through and Dale Wilson and I expected rain throughout the day as we loaded up the Miss Jellyfish and headed East.
A quick stop at Edds to drain a good bit of 32%, then retopped with air to lean out our mixes and chatted with Gordon(and Dive_Aholic for a bit too)for a minute. We made our way to the Florida Caverns State Park afterwards, and found light rain on the way. We set the boat up in short order and packed it full of dive gear. The river water was still high, but down about a foot from last weekend.
It didn't take long to make our way up river and into the spring run. We planned to enter this spring group through the first entrance, at the most downstream basin. The line starts here and continues upstream and crosses through a karst window in the second basin. The water was crystal clear and the skies had cleared, so we were looking forward to sunshine on the way out and some rays to warm us up after the dive.
I lead the dive and we made our way into the first entrance, down to about 50-60' where the line shoots up and levels off into a really low sidemount bedding plane. After crossing through the bedding plane, you cross through the karst window and head into a vertical fissure that takes an immediate left. At this point the flow is kicking pretty good but we dropped down into the deep section which opens up significantly. You move between very large rooms and very wide bedding planes throughout the deep section. The bottom is a mix between sandy areas and silt. We went straight through a 4-way intersection in the line, then a left at the next "T". The line shot up again and we were in a slightly shallower section(~90') I'd imagine and into another bedding plane with some very intersting breakdown on the floor. We hit another "T" and I figured it'd be a good enough place to turn as it was our first dive in this cave. Dale and I had considered exitting from the karst window and swimming back to the first basin from the second in OW, but decided to continue on to our original entry. By the time we reached our exit point, the rain was absolutely pouring. I cleared 8 minutes of deco and we made our ascent into a tourent. Had a great dive with a max depth of 120' for a dive time of 73 minutes total. I wish I could have gotten a good picture when the rains were really coming down, but it had slackened off a bit by the time we had geared down and were ready to hop back in the boat.
We had hoped to do a bit more exploring but agreed the weather wasn't all that favorable and we headed back to the launch. We packed the boat and all the gear away and headed around in the park a bit. Took a little hike down the Bluffs trail and looked at all the exposed limestone and caves along the way. Very neat little trail. After that, we squared up with Cave Adventurers, and headed West. On the way home we stopped at Falling Rivers State Park and took a few pictures of the waterfall and the sinkholes along the short little trail there.
I'll include some park pictures in the next reply.
A quick stop at Edds to drain a good bit of 32%, then retopped with air to lean out our mixes and chatted with Gordon(and Dive_Aholic for a bit too)for a minute. We made our way to the Florida Caverns State Park afterwards, and found light rain on the way. We set the boat up in short order and packed it full of dive gear. The river water was still high, but down about a foot from last weekend.
It didn't take long to make our way up river and into the spring run. We planned to enter this spring group through the first entrance, at the most downstream basin. The line starts here and continues upstream and crosses through a karst window in the second basin. The water was crystal clear and the skies had cleared, so we were looking forward to sunshine on the way out and some rays to warm us up after the dive.
I lead the dive and we made our way into the first entrance, down to about 50-60' where the line shoots up and levels off into a really low sidemount bedding plane. After crossing through the bedding plane, you cross through the karst window and head into a vertical fissure that takes an immediate left. At this point the flow is kicking pretty good but we dropped down into the deep section which opens up significantly. You move between very large rooms and very wide bedding planes throughout the deep section. The bottom is a mix between sandy areas and silt. We went straight through a 4-way intersection in the line, then a left at the next "T". The line shot up again and we were in a slightly shallower section(~90') I'd imagine and into another bedding plane with some very intersting breakdown on the floor. We hit another "T" and I figured it'd be a good enough place to turn as it was our first dive in this cave. Dale and I had considered exitting from the karst window and swimming back to the first basin from the second in OW, but decided to continue on to our original entry. By the time we reached our exit point, the rain was absolutely pouring. I cleared 8 minutes of deco and we made our ascent into a tourent. Had a great dive with a max depth of 120' for a dive time of 73 minutes total. I wish I could have gotten a good picture when the rains were really coming down, but it had slackened off a bit by the time we had geared down and were ready to hop back in the boat.
We had hoped to do a bit more exploring but agreed the weather wasn't all that favorable and we headed back to the launch. We packed the boat and all the gear away and headed around in the park a bit. Took a little hike down the Bluffs trail and looked at all the exposed limestone and caves along the way. Very neat little trail. After that, we squared up with Cave Adventurers, and headed West. On the way home we stopped at Falling Rivers State Park and took a few pictures of the waterfall and the sinkholes along the short little trail there.
I'll include some park pictures in the next reply.
There is a way to bypass the sidemount stuff, if buddied with a backmount buddy, but I wasn't, so we started at the beginning. I'm glad, it was alot of fun in an entirely different way than what I enjoyed about the deep section(which kinda reminds me of a cross between Hole in the Wall and JB mixed into one).
