The Dive Evangelist

I don't speak any Spanish. This is a marked disadvantage when trying to order tacos from a roadside stand where not one of the three women cooking speaks any English. I know it makes me the stupid American and no matter how many times I resolve to speak the language spoken where a great bulk of my diving takes place, I never do because I'm too busy playing on the internet. Sometimes a word jumps out at me, though, close enough to English's Romantic language roots as that I can translate.

Ponderossa was the name of the cenote in which we spent our morning. While it could just as well mean "Toaster Oven" I'm guessing that the word means "Ponderous." And Great Gary Cooper... how ponderous it is. One of the largest sinkholes in the Yucatan, it acts as a community swimming pool to the locals as well as being the premiere place for checkout dives for students from Open Water all the way to Full Cave. The cavern zone (defined as the area where one still has a direct eye-shot towards the door and sunlight) is simply cavernous, being a nearly 5 minute swim down, just to get into the proper cave zone.

We were planning to do what is called a circuit, which is to swim in one entrance to the cave and out another, making a huge, underground circle. For more than a half an hour we swam through tunnels made of sponge-like limestone tunnels so incredibly delicate that just the exhalation bubbles hitting the ceiling produced a tiny tumble of stone which was able to hold its weight in the reduced gravity of water, but not in an air pocket.

Since I first heard of the idea of a halocline in my open water class I had been obsessed with the idea of experiencing one and, as I wrote before, the experience is unique and exciting. Though, by the end of this dive, I decided that the blurry mix of the halocline was a nuisance and wished that the cave would commit to being either salt water or fresh and just knock it off with the trying to blind me. We all agreed that there were a few interesting effects that the haloclines produced during this dive, though. The first is that, when you’re swimming below it, it tends to produce a ceiling effect. Visibility is clear where you are and you know that should you move up another few inches it will be shot to hell, so you tend to keep your head down, even when the floor comes up to meet you.

One by one, we all broke ourselves of this habit and discovered the second effect. Remembering that the halocline is not, in fact a ceiling, we each popped through it to swim well above in those areas where the water column was more abundant above than below. At this point we looked down at our blurry teammates who seemed to be rooting around in a stream below us. The water under the water effect can scarcely be described fully. It’s damned weird.

Though interesting, as I said, it becomes annoying after having to make the transition about forty dozen times depending on the topography of the cave. Mostly, to me, due to the waste of gas. Remember, salt water and fresh have different buoyancies. So any time one is neutrally buoyant in fresh water, hitting that thermocline was like hitting a wall of positive buoyancy you have to dump a ton of air from your BC to sink into. Alternately, coming up from the salt layer one bobs up from the momentum a few feet, before sinking like a rock strait into the thermocline again from being so negative in the fresh water which requires the addition of a few breaths worth of tank air TO the BC.

We didn’t make it all the way to the other entrance, having to turn back the way we came because of gas restraints. So we marked how far we got and figured we’d go around the other way on a second dive. We were, Victor reported, only a few feet from that second door.

On the second dive nearly everyone had to turn back without getting to the marker of how far we’d reached on the first. Victor and Paul came back, finally, about ½ hour later.

“The marker was about ½ way along the circuit,” Victor admitted. So in almost an hour and a half… we’d swum ½ the cave.

Our third dive of the day was in a different cenote called Choc Mul. The name being that of the Mayan Rain God, this indicates another reason these holes in the jungle were so important to the Maya. There was a type of bird Victor pointed out earlier in the day called a Mok-mok. These non-aquatic birds love the cenotes and, when left relatively alone express their happiness for being where they like to be by producing a funny sort of a squawky song. The Maya would follow this song when they needed to find the nearest cenote. And why would they need to find one? The Caribbean is a lovely place made of water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink. The cenotes solve that problem. Naturally, their sole source of fresh water became synonymous with the Rain God.

Choc Mul is another of those Indiana Jones sets with a pain-in-the-calves staircase to climb after the dive. It is also another one of those places where the sheer enormity is brain-bending.

At one point during the dive I found myself hovering in this… this… room. The floor was 40 feet below. The ceiling was 20 feet above, an endless sprawl of decoration. While there were some heavily decorated bits of column and wall nearby, just beyond them my light could not penetrate through the 200+ foot visibility to the actual walls of the room in any direction. I could clearly see the rest of the dive team in as much wonderment as myself, hovering and whipping their heads about trying to take in every one of the limitless billions of beautiful details, the water so clear as to seem to fix them in mid-air.

It may be under the ground, but it is heaven.