The Dive Evangelist

Evangelist's Note: Well, my bum foot got me. While most of the gang went cave diving, I've been sitting here eating ibuprofen like Pringles and staring hopelessly off the balcony at the reef only a few dozen yards into the clear, blue Caribbean, which is currently calm as a bottle of vicodin. So, instead of my just making a whole bunch of ridiculous stuff up about cave monsters and probably some sort of dramatic scene involving bad guys with underwater scooters and spear guns, Scott volunteered to be guest commentator for the day's dive. Enjoy.


Casualties of Leisure

Paul lied. Well, I guess it was a white lie. “You can skip tomorrow if you want,” he had said. But he hadn’t mentioned that skipping tomorrow would be a damned shame, too. OK, let’s face it. Every day can’t top the last, ad-infinitum, but the fact is that no dive among these cenotes is quite what I’d call “optional.”

We’ll try to keep that detail quiet around Roger (who, having sold his foot to the devil to see Grand Cenote, didn’t make it into the water today) and Anna (who stayed behind as well, a little under the weather, a lot behind on her work, and maybe a tad sympathetic for Roger).

So, today we had a cozy group: three divers (Polina, Jim, and myself) with two guides (Paul and Victor) between us! The van ride on the way to Dos Ojos was noticeably more sedate, owing to our missing comrades, the absence of their wit, the lighter load of tanks and equipment, and perhaps a touch of sixth-day late-awakening. After a quick trip down the main highway we cut off onto a side road, expecting the usual one- or two-minute washing-machine ride over ruts and boulders to the dive site. Instead, we were greeted by a freaking dirt road to heaven – a brilliant white trail, wide enough for two vans (oh, my!) and stretching off as far as the eye could see. I half expected to find a Long Island wildlife sanctuary at the other end.

Oh, well, at least this wasn’t quite as bumpy. Taking advantage of the void left by Anna and Roger, I made a bunk out of one of the seats and got in a little quality relaxation time. The gentle rocking of our chariot, not unlike mild Atlantic swells, combined with the clink-clink of the now-fewer tanks like riggings rapping mast, briefly took me back to my former life on the open water.

Very briefly.

“We’re here. Let’s go!”
“Where’s the entrance?”
“Are there facilities here?”
“What did they pack for us for lunch, anyway?”


Eye, Captain

Back in the swing of things, we all go into automatic. Within twenty minutes we’ve checked out the site while our driver hauled the heavy stuff out of the van; donned exposure protection and gear; and hit the drink in the first ojo of the Dos Ojos cenote.

Dos Ojos is named for its dual presentation. Composed of two oval openings in the earth revealing twin blue caverns just a few hundred yards apart, it is undoubtedly more obvious from the air (and just goes to prove that the ancient Mayans – or their alien accomplices – clearly had advanced aerospace technology long before NASA and the ESA).

Our journey through the cavern takes us past the second ojo, so we enjoy (more like endure, since we’re anxious to see the cave) a double-length cavern swim. This extended lighted zone will be more enticing in the relaxed finale of the dive. On the way in, I notice the first unique feature of this system: what I call the construction wreckage. Piled on the floor below and near each cavern opening are huge pieces of broken earth, layered haphazardly atop each other. It looks like somebody wrecked a concrete causeway and scattered the pieces around in piles. No, it looks like the gods built these holes on the cheap and instead of renting a dumpster, just busted the cut-out remains over their knees and tossed them under the sub-cellar, thinking nobody would notice. Or maybe they just needed a latrine. I can see Thor yelling, “Clancy, we need a hole here. You can use my hammer…”

The walls here can be odd as well. Rounding a corner and looking up from the rubble field, I spot a perfectly flat wall to the right, set in a perfectly rectangular frame below a flat ceiling. Looks like a movie screen, I think to myself. At that instant, the massive silhouette of a cave creature, haloed in blue-green light, floats across and fills the screen. Wicked cool! The bulky, prehistoric, awkward and finned mega-fish is, of course, yours truly, projected by a team member’s HID light.

Eventually I stop thinking like a five-year-old, and we all pop our heads up at Ojo #2 to recalculate our turn-around pressure (since this second cavern is a nearer potential escape hatch), then make a beeline for the cave we crave. The first hint of the end of the road for cavern divers is encouraging and only a teensy bit disturbing.

Don’t ask. I really don’t know.


Clear the Set

Finally reaching the end of the cavern line, I run a jump to what’s known as the IMAX line.

IMAX, eh? Hmmm. Subtle clue. Oooh. Oooh. I know, I know. It’s a site of the filming of the IMAX blockbuster, “Amazing Caves.” We’re officially cave tourists now! I remember not seeing this movie and therefore not appreciating it, but I’ll bet it was absolutely breathtaking, because here we are in the middle of it and I am passing through a scenic sampling of some of the best features we’ve encountered throughout the week – moderate-sized rooms, wide passages, ornate ceilings, and walls dripping with frozen calcite sludge. In our path, in the walls, and above and below us we see architecture reminiscent of Gaudi, or maybe Tim Burton, or both, forming altars, huts – heck, entire miniature cities at times.

A couple of jumps and a dozen or so minutes from IMAX land, a surface appears in the water above us, illuminated by – oddly enough – large, fixed halogen lights. As Paul leads us toward this new source of fresh air I feel like I’m approaching a movie set. Poking our heads out, we discover a cute little dry grotto called Tak Be Lun, complete with cute little openings in the ceiling with cute little ladders hanging from them and people hanging from the ladders. And more halogens. Turns out it isn’t a movie set; it’s a tourist attraction. Now we’re part of the attraction – cavemen (and woman) from the deep. Actually, Paul explains, it was the support site for a movie set. For several weeks this dry cave, with a moon pool to the wet cave, was the field office and staging area for the filming of “The Cave.” Ah, this one I’ve seen!

Naw, the dry cave itself wasn’t in the picture, but the cave I just swam through was. And what a blast this is from my past. “The Cave” was the beginning of the personal journey that led to this very dive. I remember watching this sport-adventure-action-thriller because I was a diver turned on by anything involving SCUBA gear, but being totally in awe of what was going on: people actually swimming miles horizontally into tunnels, through twisty, scary passages and picturesque landscapes from another world, using tons of special equipment, and hanging out in cool grottos lit by HIDs. I dreamed of doing this kind of stuff. Yeah, right. Me. Like where and with whom? One of the guys who made the movie, like Paul Heinerth, I suppose? Sure, in your dreams.

Side note: Get involved, guys. If you’re reading this, take my advice: Come to club events. Meet other divers. Hook up with folks with similar interests. You may find one thing will lead to another, and that thing will lead you in unexpected directions.

Back to the mainline… having taken in all we could of Tak Be Lun without getting out of our gear, we do a quick gas check and decide that each of our double-tank rigs holds enough to push on further. But after ten minutes or so, we reach the end of the particular line we’ve been following, which converges with the end of another line, both bearing arrows pointing back the way we came. A sure sign that if there’s anything at all interesting beyond this point, you’re going to have to drag out another reel and look for it. Since we’ve had a satisfying dive up to this point, Paul throws a question to us in the form of a thumbs-up illuminated by his HID: Wanna go back up?

Up. Funny thing about up. It’s a universal diver’s signal to end a dive, so we use it in a cave, too. But it’s an odd (or maybe sadistic) concept in the context of a cave dive. In an open-water environment, “up” literally means, “let’s go up.” You know, as in, “I’d like to move toward that big atmosphere of free breathing gas at a rate of one foot per second.”

In a cave, “Up” means, “You’d better hope we planned this dive right, because we’ve got a 30-minute haul from here to the first place where there’s something other than rock over our heads.” And then we can go up. Maybe. If we don’t have a decompression obligation.

Fortunately, today we’ve accumulated no deco time, and there actually are several holes in the grass along the way to which we could escape if necessary. Not that they are needed. We meander routinely back to the cavern zone, where Polina lingers well past our lunch break capturing images of stalactites, rocks, snorkelers, and me.

As we surfaced, we got officially chewed-out by another diver. A cavern instructor (note rolling of the eyes as I type) stops us while we’re removing our fins and says, “uh, you might want to read that sign up there.”

“Really,” we ask, “What does it say?”

It says, “No touching the formations,” he says with a sincere, though protractedly weighty, tone. “I call those “expensive pictures.”

He is, of course, referring to my touching of a large and sturdy stalactite at one point in our photo shoot, as I hovered extremely close to it, in order to steady myself and ensure that I would not bump it with something hard, like a tank. But he is right. Were a few thousand people to do the same, it would be irrevocably changed. Better to add a few inches of clearance and make do with a photo your conscience can live with.


Trust and Traversal

One of the lessons from my first cave course that will always stand out in my mind is the lecture on “trust-me dives”. The lesson is pretty simple, actually:

Know what you’re doing. Know where you are. Know the landscape. Know the way out. Don’t just follow someone else. And, if someone suggests that you abandon some or all of that and just follow them, run for the hills.

But what if that someone happens to be the instructor who gave you that lecture? Sort of reminds me of my driving road test, when the tester turned to me and said, “See that stop sign? Just go straight through.” Could be a test. But we’re not in a class, so I’m thinking he’s serious. Here’s the offer: to follow a traversal route downstream from Dos Ojos to a remote cenote. We’ll cover over a mile of cave; all we have to do is trust that there’s light at the end of this particular tunnel instead of turning back after we’ve used a third of our gas. Of course, Paul says, there are several cenotes along the way, just in case we don’t have enough air. At least, says Paul. As far as he remembers.

Well, I guess you’re always trusting someone – trusting your instructor’s training, trusting the guy who planted that arrow, trusting the other jokers in the cave not to silt it up or cut your guideline to the surface.

Hell, we’re trusting Paul Heinerth. And, of course, we’ll be noting the distance from the last cenote every kick of the way.

And, man, are we glad we decided to make the journey! Mile River Traverse is a wonderland. During our trip we pass a kick-butt variety of terrain, from wide tunnels to tall and narrow and winding passages. At one point, we cruise through a series of cathedral-ceilinged passages with dramatic, craggy ravines below. A few minutes later, we’re cruising through a horizontal crack with a ten-foot ceiling, with stalactites and stalagmites forming an obstacle course of bars and turnstiles. There were moments we wished we all were diving sidemount.

It was in this passage that we discovered some enterprising users of the water supply. Tree roots, growing in fine-stranded veils, emerged from cracks in the rock like the mops of long-haired divers waving in the water column. At times these feathery growths took on the character and color of dense furs. We also discovered the roots of human infiltration into the aquifer.

Most of the time, the floor has been flat and sand-covered, giving the impression of a thick, solid bottom. But, as we discover, it’s a flimsy façade. At many points the “floor” is just an inch-thick crust; we can see through holes punched by falling debris that there’s a whole other cave layer below.

That’s the thing about these caves. They’re fragile. Look up at any time and you’ll see tons of rocks and formations over your head, cemented together by what amounts to soft, wet chalk. Any disturbance, like bubbles, or an earthquake, or – say – a construction crew overhead, and….

Brrrrrrrrr-rup-bup-dididididididididdididum-dum-dum.

Paul stops and points to his ears. Do we all hear that? Sounds like a helicopter or a jackhammer nearby.

Brrrrrrrrr-rup-bup-dididididididididdididum-dumdumdumdumdum.

It’s getting louder as we progress.

BRRRRRRRRR-RUP-BUP-DIDIDIDIDIDIDIDIDDIDIDUM-DUMDUMDUMDUMDUM.

As we round a corner, we no longer just hear it; we feel it reverberating in our chests, our ribs rattling with every rap-a-tap, our brains quivering as the shock waves run through the water-water boundary between river and our bodies like a bullet through queso fresco.

BADABADABADABADABADABADA-BRRRRRRRRRRP-BADABAP-BAP-BAP!!!

Polina pauses to snap a photo of another tree root. The rest of us are thinking, um… do you really need that shot?

We give her a few seconds and then press on in a gesture that says, “enjoy the rest of your dive; don’t get buried alive!” She gets the message and pries herself from her subject, and within a minute or so we’ve cleared the cave-in zone.

3,800 feet into the dive, we pass the Dos Palmas Cenote and pop up to visit some local bathers, check our gas supply and continue. More enticing scenery later, we finally arrive at our destination. Having left the watery eyes of Dos Ojos upstream, we emerge over a mile away through the humble opening of Motz-Sayha cenote.

And, of course, the smiling face of our driver, [the other] Roger, is waiting there to greet us. What a day!