Cave Diving Trip Report...

[Omicron]

Just got done unpacking all off my stuff from Florida.  I had a great time spending a week and a half cave diving in North Central Florida.  And, we have two new Wisconsin cave divers after this trip   My girlfriend and one of our friends passed their Intro To Cave courses, so we are actually building up a decent group of cave divers now.  At least there will be some people that won't look at me too funny when I do lights out line drills in the local quarries

We had decent weather down there - it got cold during last week though, but it was still better than around here.

The diving was great.  We only dove the Devils System and the Peacock Springs system.  We wanted to explore some other caves, but due to the flooding the visibility was a little rough in some of the caves due to the tannic river water intrusions.  Peacock springs only had about 60-70 feet of visibility, and the walls were stained a brown color instead of the normal bone-white.  It kind of dulled the cave for us - things were a little dark and a little gloomy in the cave, but it was still gorgeous.  It was good to be back in it - we did about 10 dives in the system, alternating in between diving the peanut line and the main line of the cave.  My dive partner (Fred) and I did really well in Peacock...a couple of our dives got us a little over 1100 feet back in the cave, so we were pretty happy about that considering we were only diving singles.

At the Devils system (at Ginnie Springs) the visibility was amazing as usual.  I love diving the Devils system, even though Ginnie is really, really overpriced.  My first dive of the trip was in the Devils Ear, and it kind of kicked our butt.  We had forgotten how to dive in the high flow caves....but we quickly learned again.  We had 8 dives in this system, and we only managed to penetated about 650' into this one, but considering it is a high flow cave (where Peacock is a very low flow cave) we were happy with how the dives went.  We had a great time diving it - there is nothing like turning the dive in this system and just riding the flow out - it's like a rollercoaster that just pushes you along....it's beautiful - almost makes you forget to breathe.

We had the opportunity to go to a cave geology/biology seminar at the Ichetucknee Springs State Park that was being presented by a Dive Rite employee (I forget his name now...argh...) that was really good.  As an added bonus, I won a Dive Rite hat and my girlfriend won the "Mile Run At Peacock Springs" DVD from Cave2Ex productions.  It's an awesome 90 minute video of one of the coolest cave dives around.  I can't wait until I can do the dive myself.

We got to meet a lot of cool people while we were down there too - that's one of the cool things about the cave diving community - everyone is really, really friendly.  I got to meet the diver that was featured in the DVD that my girlfriend won (Kelly Jessop) who is also a park ranger for a lot of the parks w/ springs.  One day, my girlfriends instructor brought Lamar Hires over to meet us - he's the owner/founder of Dive Rite.  Even though he runs Dive Rite, he is still dedicated enough to cave diving that he was teaching a group of full cave divers.  It was fun meeting him, as well as a few other Dive Rite employees throughout the week. 

And as an added bonus, I think I gave the Friends of Peacock Springs group an idea for a best selling T-Shirt.  I was talking w/ our instructor (Reggie Ross) and one of the rangers @ the park (Janet, who is also a cave diver) and was telling them about this shirt that I saw last year that had the "Open Water Divers Prohibited" sign on the back and then a logo of some cave system on the front.  Everyone thought it was a cool idea, and Janet took down my address and said she is going to have some of them made and send them up to me when they are done.  I can't wait

I had a lot of fun seeing some cave fauna this year too.  I was doing a dive in the Ginnie Spring by myself (I was bored and no one else wanted to make a fourth dive of the day...) and I was jus putzing around with my reel doing drills, and I saw a freshwater eel crusing along the bottom.  I also finally saw the albino crayfish in the Peacock system, so that was definitely a highlight.

Overall a great trip!  Unfortunately, they all come to an end eventually and I was greeted with 8 inches of snow in my driveway when I came home.  Ahhh...Wisconsin   At least I have my trip to Cozumel to look forward too - we are going to be diving the cave system on the island, which is a whole different type of cave system and is supposed to be very, very neat.