For those of you who tease cave divers about diving with wet rocks, I thought you might want to read what Tom Mount wrote about it. He wrote the IANTD student manual for cave training, along with several other books on the subject. He first started diving in 1958 and since that time has logged an average of 325 dives per year, with approximately 50% of those being technical dives involving cave, wreck, deep air and trimix. He has an enchanting description of the intrigue and fascination of cave diving.
"Since the beginning of mankind, underwater caves have held a special fascination. The uninitiated have often looked at them as dark, foreboding, serious mazes opening into the bowels of the earth. The ancient Maya of Central America believed them to be a watery window which the dead used to reach the Underworld.
Those of us who have penetrated this watery underworld know cave diving is one of those few experiences actually offering the opportunity to explore inner space. We know it really is a trip into an imaginary, computer-generated "virtual reality". For us they are passages into a world of intrigue, a dreamland where fantasies often abound. We have learned that caves mirror the reflection of timelessness, penetrating beyond our presence into the realm of eternity. We have felt the intrigue to discover what lies beyond the next turn. We have, indeed, taken the road less traveled. We have been down a passageway into the unknown. Our senses have been alerted. The cave, for a brief moment, became a lover. She became a seductress drawing us into her body, into the earth itself."
"Since the beginning of mankind, underwater caves have held a special fascination. The uninitiated have often looked at them as dark, foreboding, serious mazes opening into the bowels of the earth. The ancient Maya of Central America believed them to be a watery window which the dead used to reach the Underworld.
Those of us who have penetrated this watery underworld know cave diving is one of those few experiences actually offering the opportunity to explore inner space. We know it really is a trip into an imaginary, computer-generated "virtual reality". For us they are passages into a world of intrigue, a dreamland where fantasies often abound. We have learned that caves mirror the reflection of timelessness, penetrating beyond our presence into the realm of eternity. We have felt the intrigue to discover what lies beyond the next turn. We have, indeed, taken the road less traveled. We have been down a passageway into the unknown. Our senses have been alerted. The cave, for a brief moment, became a lover. She became a seductress drawing us into her body, into the earth itself."
