My Journey To Cave Country...

[Omicron]

Okay, I'm posting this in several parts as it turned out to be too long for just one post...yikes.

Ever since I've started diving, I've wanted to go cave diving. It seemed to be just about the coolest thing one can do underwater - the pictures, the stories, the skill required to do it....to me, it was the stuff of legend.

By chance, I got to plan a trip to the Keys this year. While planning, someone said we should stop by Ginnie Springs on the way back so that we could rinse the salt out of our gear. As long as we were stopping there, I signed up for the cavern course. Everyone else did pretty quickly thereafter too. After talking some more...we decided that as long as we were down there, we should take the Intro To Cave course as well. So we registered.

We made our way down to the keys and got some good easy reef diving in, as well as some good little drift dives in shallow sea grass. An interesting time - got to hang out in Key West for New Years and see some fun stuff. On New Years day, we began the trip up to Ginnie Springs. We arrived around 10 at night and I went to look at the spring. All I could think was....This is IT?!?! That little...puddle?? It's not real impressive looking from the surface. That night we went to bed fairly early as class started at 8AM.

The first day, we met our instructor. We filled out paperwork, waivers (LOTS of waivers....) provided C-Cards and headed upstairs to the classroom. A funny note - our instructor was glad we only each showed our highest C-Card...he said they have a saying at Ginnie that the diver’s skill is inversely proportionate to the number of C-Cards they lay on the table when registering.

Class was interesting - cave geology, how it forms, what to call things (faults, bedding planes, phreatic tunnels, etc, etc). Went over emergency drills, line laying, exit protocols, gear configs, weighting, conservation, gas turnaround calculations, stress management, hand signals and so much other stuff. It was a lot to absorb! After a good day of class we had a few hours to do gear configs.

We set up our rigs on picnic tables and our instructor went over them. It's funny when you get down to cave country....up here, you hear how certain gear configs are supposed to be because one group or another says it's the correct way. Down there, you realize that most of these people's claims are pretty much BS and the things we think are interesting up here are just normal cave diving rigs. Streamlining and no danglies are the key goals in gear configuration. In looking at what I did to my setup, here is a short list: Removed all hose protectors, removed knob from line on reels and replaced w/ a hairball, Removed dust caps from tanks, removed dust caps from din 1st stages and replaced w/ screw on covers, removed whistle from inflator hose, added D-Ring to lower left tank band, zip-tied bolt snap to primary reg (zip tying preferred on reg over actual tying – everything else is tied on with cave line ONLY), added a wrist slate, made a line arrow/line cookie holder for arrows/cookies, added D-Rings to waist belt on harness. I had most of it set, but there were a lot of little things – get rid of all unnecessary bulk, items and danglies.

After doing gear config our instructor made us put on our stuff and double check D-Ring placement and light/reel locations. We were set and ready to begin land drills. We practiced running a line, primary/secondary tie-offs, placements and line traps. We also did several exercises on following the guideline – eyes closed alone, eyes closed w/ touch contact, etc. Some of the drills were designed to show you that you really can’t dawdle when the lights go out in a cave. You really need to move!

The next morning we met @ Ginnie Spring and geared up and got into the spring. The first portion of the class was weight. This was worth the price of class alone. I went from 14lbs to 0. None. Zip. I couldn’t believe it – with just a little extra time and work, I’m down to no weight. The ankle weights got tossed out the window too. As our instructor called them, “weenie weights” – I couldn’t dare wear them after he said that So…anyone want to buy a nice weight belt??

The next portion of class was fin kicks. Our instructor demonstrated the modified flutter, frog, 3 shuffle kicks, 360 turns and pull n’ glides (or if you do it incorrectly, the pull and pain for the sensation of your fingertips scraping along the limestone rock). After his demonstration of each kick we had to do the same to his satisfaction. So far, so good.