Every trip has a “best dive”.  Sometimes it’s because you saw something amazing.  Sometimes it’s because of who you got to dive with.  Sometimes it’s because you learned something.  Sometimes it’s hard to put your finger on why it was “the best”, but you simply know it was.

Today was our “best dive” of the trip.  And it began as a rather ordinary one.  As part of the FOCUS, we were diving Grand Cenote and exploring lines — we had done Much’s Maze earlier in the week.  But we were curious about the jump off the Cuzan Nah loop — we had intended to look at it earlier, but the flow of that particular dive made us leave it for later.  It was now later.  We knew nothing whatsoever about the passage, except that it looked long enough on the map to make it worth trying, and that Chris LeMaillot had told us to look for a jump off it to the left, that he thought we would like.

So, armed with very scanty information, we set off for Grand Cenote, on a lovely, partially overcast and much cooler day.  We got there, looked again at the map, which told us little more than we knew, and geared up and got ready to hit the water.  We had brought a stage, just to buy us a little more time to explore, so of course, the gearing up and getting in process involved ferrying stages, which we for some inexplicable reason left until we were drysuit-clad.  That meant a very sweaty trip down the stairs, but also meant I could get in the water and clip stages off to the rope, which is much easier than pulling them down on your head from the platform.  There is nothing quite like losing control of the descent of an Al80, and seeing it aimed for some portion of your anatomy of which you are actually fairly fond.  It’s something I prefer to avoid.

So, we got in, did our checks, and headed off.  I did a nice job of the line running on both the jump to the mainline and the HoTul gap, but when I got to the far end of the gap, we had one of our underwater arguments about where the line should go.  Since I had gone to the left of the big stalagmite cluster, I wanted to tie in from the left, but Peter was adamant enough about wanting me to come in from the right that I was afraid the flashing light would give me a seizure.  Although I completely didn’t understand WHY he was so frenetic about it (and even after our post-dive debrief, I neither comprehend nor agree with his reasons) I sighed and put the line where he wanted it — and he promptly signaled to drop stages.  Of course, the way I had routed the line didn’t give us great options for doing that, but we managed, and I fumed my way through the jump onto the Cuzan Nah line counterclockwise.

Off we swam, through what I call the Disneyland room (where the stalagmites all look like Sleepy, Sneezy, et. al. to me) and onward, farther than I had expected, until we encountered the change of directional arrows that marks the jump.  I tied off and went exploring, and it wasn’t difficult to find the line we were going to swim.

But then the wonder began. Far from being a small, secondary passage, this line went into huge rooms with such extravagant decorations that they just stopped me.  I had to pause and spend time looking from side to side, and at the ceiling; it was too beautiful to hurry through at all.  We passed the arrow that marked the jump Chris had spoken of, and I started to query Peter, who interrupted me with a short and definite negative.  Later, we talked about this, and he said he felt where we were was so pretty, he just wanted to keep going — we could save the jump for a later day.  With this sentiment, I wholly concurred.

On we went, struck at every turn by the vistas.  I love Grand Cenote, because it earns its name — the decorations are not as delicate as other places, nor as white, but they are enormous and grand.  This passage mixed that grandeur with delicacy — ceilings dense with pipestems, and slender stalactites reaching vainly down to marry their thicker, more “grand” and earthbound mates.  As we went on, the passage gradually closed down and became more intimate and technically challenging, until it really began to squeeze down, and Peter turned the dive.  I don’t know if he turned it on gas, or on topography, and I didn’t care.  It was time to go home — I was essentially saturated with beauty.

On the way out, we paused for a lot of photo ops, to the point where I was beginning to get a bit uneasy about how much longer it was taking to get us out than it took to get in — but then again, both of us had large gas reserves, which loomed larger as we worked our way toward the entrance, and neither of us is foolhardy.  And the photos are worth it.

Too soon, we were back at our stages, and picked them up.  Then we went back to pedestrian cave diver mode . . . we had planned to go up the PDL line on what was left of our stage gas, but Peter had dropped stages on gas, so we had none, really.  We could have done a 200 psi backgas penetration at the point of the PDL jump, but that really wasn’t enough to get us past the part of the passage we know pretty well, and I wasn’t keen on doing it.  Peter, to my confusion, had remained on his backgas after he picked up his stage, which rather muddled the gas planning, anyway, so we turned to exit.  On the way out, we passed the jump to the “shortcut” tunnel, which neither of us had ever done, and Peter asked if I was willing to tie in and swim a bit of it.  Since we had made significant progress toward the exit, and I had tons of gas anyway, I had no problem with this — but my understanding of the whole recalculation thing was that we should have been on the stages while we were exiting, but back on backgas for anything that lengthened the exit (or amounted to additional penetration).  So I went back on backgas, but Peter was already there, and there ensued a comical set of signals about switching from one source to another, at the end of which Peter thumbed the dive.  I thought he’d seen what he wanted to see; he was irritated at my insistence that he do something with his gas management that he wasn’t doing.  We need to iron out these issues before we do any more of these dives.  His feeling was that, being back toward the entrance, we had tons of gas everywhere and it didn’t matter which source we were tapping; my position was that, as a bear of very little brain, I need a plan and a strategy, and I had come up with one, which was stages in and out, and backgas for side trips, and I wanted to stick to it.  Chaos versus order; it is the story of our lives, but it was a sour grace note to an awe-inspiring dive.

The rest of the exit was orderly, and I turned my light off deep in the cavern zone, to enjoy the sunbeams and the color of the open water as we came out.  And the icing on the glorious cake was that, for the first time this trip, I made it up and over the ladder and onto the platform ON MY FEET, and did not have to take my gear off or get any help with it.  Hooray!

The day was completed by running into our Monterey friends at ZG, and repairing to Tulum again for dinner with them.  As they were leaving the following morning, this was the last opportunity to see them,and really our first chance to spend time talking to Don.  It was a nice evening — they are lovely people, and I wish we didn’t live so far apart, or have to meet in Mexico . . .

So, today was to be the last day of the trip, and we were going to go to Jailhouse and just dive backgas, so the dive wouldn’t be too long, and we’d get back to the condo in time to dry stuff and get it packed for the morning’s departure. We invited Bentley to join us again, as he had never seen Jailhouse, and he accepted with alacrity.

It was almost cool — partially overcast, with a breeze. We met at Dive Center Akumal, and caravaned to Tulum, where we stopped and got the key. I was fascinated to see the entire family there sitting outside of the house, apparently comparing and trading MP3 discs. For folks who live in a house where the kitchen has no running water, and a tiny portable gas stove, it’s hard to believe they have MP3 players, but I guess they do. (I also found out on this trip that a couple of the cave diving sites have Facebook pages . . . who knew?)

At any rate, we then proceeded to the site, without having to negotiate with the bull (who was off to the far side of the road today). The dive plan was very simple — left at the first T, then right and right into the salt water passage, and swim until we hit turn. It’s a very pretty dive, and for Jailhouse, a pretty uncomplicated one.

No one else was there, and we briefed Bentley on the noxious pond and silt-minimizing procedures. Peter was leading, Bentley #2, and I was in the catbird seat — except on entry where #3 really has the worst role. It’s easy to get confused on entry, as the back person on a Jailhouse dive, and this dive was no exception . . . except that this time, I got confused because the folks in front of me had left the viz too GOOD, and I thought I was further into the cave than I was, when I could see around me, and was bewildered because it didn’t look like it was supposed to. I was probably ten feet short of the entry rock when the viz got clear — I have NEVER seen the passage there that well! Kudos to Peter and Bentley for leaving things totally undisturbed.

Down we went, and I enjoyed being the rear guy in a team of three, through the dark part of the dive. The fresh water passage at Jailhouse is really like Naharon; spectacularly decorated, but it’s so easy to miss that because it is so dark. With three lights, you see much more, and as the rear person, you have the benefit of the lights in front of you on the way in. I got a much better sense of how BIG the rooms are, as well.

About 15 minutes into the dive, we put in the last cookies for the third T, and shortly thereafter, swam down through the halocline. I couldn’t see the look on Bentley’s face, but I vividly remembered mine, the first time I experienced the transition from dark, spooky cave to enormous, cobalt blue and white hallway.

The dive went well. We both found the mastodon bones, and I confirmed the location and timing of St. George and the Dragon (wish Peter had had his camera with him, to take pictures of this formation, because I don’t think ANYBODY would argue with me that that is what it is). We made it to the beginning of the big breakdown room and turned on gas, and did a steady but unhurried swim out. It was a lovely, smooth, and beautiful dive on which to end the trip.

We got out, undressed, and packed gear, because Bentley had to hurry to Xibalba, as he was doing a guided cave dive that afternoon. So we bade our new buddy farewell at the gate, and headed home to deal with the mundane necessities of travel.

The evening ended with taking Danny and his wife, Libby out to dinner at La Nave, and hearing about how the house was going and the preparations for the twins’ arrival. We then repaired next door to Taqueria Diaz, to help Jacob Mellor celebrate his anointment as a Fundamentals instructor. It was a lovely, companionable way to end the trip.

Another great MX adventure. I loved the condo near the beach, and I was thrilled with the new passage we found in old, familiar cave. Can’t wait for November!

Today, we were meeting up with what Peter calls one of my “orphans”.  He finds it perplexing that I frequently meet people on line, and offer to dive with them.  He’s not as outgoing as I am, and pickier about his dive buddies.  In this case, someone on the Cave Diver forum had posted, saying he was going to be in MX the same time we were, and looking for people with whom to dive.  I had corresponded with him, and he seemed quite pleasant, and had willingly given me some references to check, although I wasn’t totally successful in checking them.  Since I’ve met some really wonderful people this way (and I think Peter forgets that our dear friend Ben Martinez was one of them) I set up a day of diving with Bentley.

We were originally going to go to Grand, since Peter and I are getting to know it pretty well, but I also needed to pull and replace my sensor at Carwash, so in the end, we decided just to go there and dive.  Bentley had never seen the place, so it would be new to him, but I did a lot of my training there, and Peter had dived it quite a bit as well, so we would be very comfortable.

We arrived a little before ten a.m., and to our surprise, the place was padlocked and no one was there.  Carwash is NEVER closed — it has no days off, and is such a common teaching site that it was really inconceivable to me that it would be shut.  We discussed the situation, and decided to wait a half hour, and see if anyone came, and it was the right decision, because about 20 minutes later, a young man showed up from the direction of the Luke’s Hope cenote, and unlocked the gate.  Apparently he was tending both places, and had been cleaning at the other site.

So we went on in and parked, and then we showed Bentley the entrance, and went looking for the little crocodile, who was actually in the water at the far side of the pond.  He hasn’t grown much since March, and he’s still pretty timid.  I wonder what will happen to him when he gets bigger . . . I can’t imagine the owners of the property tolerating anything that drives business away, and I sadly see a handbag in his future.

Our plan for the first dive was very simple: up the main line to Adrianna’s room.  But, of course, every cave dive starts with getting TO the main line, and you know who gets to run the reel, right?  And the line at Carwash has been moved since I was last there, and I had no idea where it now was.  So the line running through the cavern was almost laughable, as was abundantly clear when we came out and saw where it had gone — it was a veritable drunkard’s walk.  But I did find the line and tie into it, without running out of line or tangling anybody up in it, and we headed off upstream.

Carwash is darker than I remembered it, but very decorated.  It is sad, though, to see the overwhelming amount of damage that has been done to that cave over time.  When I dove it before, I didn’t realize all the white places are wounds, but that’s what they are, and there are many of them.  Some are in places where you would expect someone to make a mistake, especially in training, but some are really perplexing — you ask yourself why someone was there at all, and if they were, how they lost enough control to hit THAT part of the ceiling.

At any rate, the first big surprise for me was that it is actually only a 9 minute swim (at my pace, which is slow) from the mainline to the next cenote.  I remember, in training, that that seemed an awfully long way, and we were very proud of ourselves for getting a little ways up the next passage on sixths.  Of course, we spent a great deal of our gas putting that darned line in!  As I approached the cenote, I noticed a peculiar phenomenon — the tetras were schooling, and swimming in groups down the slope to the darkness, and back up again.  It was like watching a silver river pouring down the slope.  I have never seen them do that before, and Peter caught it in a photo:

The second surprise was that the passage just past Luke’s Hope, which I recalled as being roughly triangular in cross-section and really pretty small, is a subway tunnel!  It’s easily big enough for a normal frog kick, and no challenge at all to stay between the ceiling and the floor.  As our aforementioned friend Ben says, cave gets bigger each time you dive it . . . and he wasn’t referring to erosion.  If I had not had any other reason to realize that I have grown a bit as a cave diver, seeing that passage did that for me.

We got to Adrianna’s room, and hung out and admired it a bit, and then swam a little way further on, but the cave gets small pretty quickly, and Peter turned the dive, I think on cave quality rather than gas, but I don’t really remember.  We took our time on the way out, and I was pleased to see that our “instabuddy” was really a very nice cave diver, and probably better at knowing where his body parts are than I am (my fins still seem to be possessed by demons). 

We got out of the water and Bentley changed tanks, and we drank a bunch of water, although it wasn’t nearly as hot this day as it had been before.  Then we all reviewed the map Chris had drawn me of how to find the Chamber of the Ancients.

My friend Jason and I had made a valiant effort to do this in April.  We spent at least a half hour swimming into everything that looked dark in that part of the pond, and never found anything that “went”.  We eventually ended up in Satan’s Silthole, which I recognized, and we spent some recreational time there, but it didn’t do anything for the sensor pulling problem, and I was hoping not to repeat the experience.  And we didn’t, but I have to say that, without Chris’s careful coaching, we would never have found our way.  I might have spotted the first slot, to the right of the sign, and gotten us into the first room — I’m almost certain Jason and I did that, because it looked very familiar.  But the exit from that room is a small slot hidden behind some decorations in a place where it doesn’t look as though there is room for anything behind them, and I wouldn’t have explored it without the tips.

As it was, we wriggled through and easily found the line and tied into it.  (It was funny, because with all the absolutely aimless wandering around I did with the reel, trying to figure out where we were going, the line was really nicely laid when we followed it coming out.  Blinds pigs, and all . . . )  The sensor was still securely where I had left it six months ago, and was retrieved without issue, and we turned the dive at 18 minutes and swam out, being careful to do a very conservative deco, as we were going to do another 75 foot dive shortly thereafter.

Since the only reason to get out was to download the device, Peter and Bentley stayed in the water, and I had the brilliant inspiration to doff my gear there, and make climbing the ladder easier.  I got the case with the computer and adapter and cables and inverter out of the front seat, and there ensued about ten minutes of fuming, swearing, dancing and dripping, as I tried to make sense of a ThinkPad (who would ever have guessed that the red dot in the middle of the keyboard controlled the cursor?) and figure out why, when the adapter was plugged into what was clearly the appropriate cable, the computer kept saying I had the wrong com port.  This being well above my computing pay grade, I was ready to give up when I noticed there was a port in the back of the computer that was the same shape as the one on the adapter (I guess it’s a serial port) and I tried just directly plugging the thing in there, and it finally worked.  Whew!  By this time, I’ve had about six increasingly irritated queries from the pond as to whether anything is working, and I could finally say yes.

Download complete, we had the much easier task of swimming back down the already placed line and putting the device back, where it awaits my visit in November.  I really like being part of this project.  The data is kind of minimal, since the Sensus only measures depth and temperature, but it’s more than anyone has had before, and maybe will help people understand the dynamics of the fresh and salt water a bit better.

Diving done for the day, we repaired to the empanada place for lunch, and then ran to ZG to fill/swap tanks for the following day.

So, this day was one of my treats for the trip.  A large part of the reason we came down here at this time was because of the people who were here, and if there was one in particular, it was my very dear friend, Kevin.  Although we had had meals and drinks with Kevin, we had not dived with him to this point — we are baby cave divers in comparison (which is funny, because when he and I met, we were basically Fundies newbies and actually spent a whole dive at Lobos doing drills).  Kevin had been diving with Rob and Allison, and double-staging everywhere, and we do not do that.  But this was my “diving with Kevin” day of the trip.

What was hard was deciding where to go.  I really wanted to dive Naharon, and do the SW SacBe passage, because Kevin was the person who introduced me to it several years ago, when it was bending Cave 1 rules until they squeaked to run our own line all the way from the entrance to the second jump, to get into that passage.  (When Danny Riordan finally found out folks were doing that, he had a fit!)  I thought it would be delightful to go do it “legally”, and with Kevin; in addition, I just plain hadn’t done it for a couple of years, and never on thirds.

The problem was that Kevin had done Naharon the day before, and I really didn’t want to make him do something he didn’t want to do.  We did the “After you, Alphonse” dance for a while, and when I got tired of it, I just said, “Okay, I want to do SW SacBe with you,” and that’s what we did.  This time, in addition to having thirds at our disposal, we had stages, and we had a really complex dive plan, for me at least.  The plan was to drop stages at the SW SacBe jump, do the passage, come back and pick up stages, and go on up the Descondido line toward the Double Domes area.

Now, I have done a reasonable number of single stage dives.  Almost all of them have been simple — carry the stage until you hit gas, drop it, proceed on backgas to agreed limits, come back, pick up stage, and exit.  I was taught how to do that in C2, and it isn’t very hard to do the planning.  When you start talking about dropping the stage before you hit gas, and coming back and doing more penetration, it gets complicated.  When Karen and I proposed that in Pet Cemetery in April, I made it easy — I said, “We planned to use the stage to 1700.  If we pick up a stage with more than 1700, we can breathe it to 1700 and go home.  Who cares how much backgas we have?”  It worked for our PC dive, because I turned it on time and not gas.  But it’s not the way to make most effective use of your tanks.

Unfortunately, I didn’t KNOW how to make most effective use of the tanks.  But Kevin did, so we talked over the dive plan in the parking lot, until I had it straight (or thought I did).  Drop stage at the SW SacBe jump, do the passage on thirds.  Come back, pick up the stage, continue INTO the cave until we hit our target stage pressure (1700) and then use backgas to one third of what was left, over the 700 reserved to cover the stage.  Not too hard.  But everything is easier when your head isn’t underwater.

We checked out the entry, which was as I remembered it — a couple of steps down onto very slippery, sloping rocks.  But, to my surprise, this time the platform a little further around the pond was in good repair and the stairs had all their rungs, and the handrails weren’t very wobbly at all!  This meant a much easier option for getting in, which was nice with the extra tanks.

The water was perfectly clear and warm and full of the little tetras that nibble on your cuticles.  We got in, did checks, and headed for the entry.  I have some vivid memories of this entry — there are some very nice branches on the left-hand side, just outside of the drip line, and my memory is tying off to one of them, going down and putting in the secondary and a third tie, and then having my teammate at the time thumb the dive because he was worried that the branch I had chosen wasn’t really in open water, because it was under the drip line by about four inches.

Today, nobody was parsing anything that closely, so I tied off to my favorite branch.  I was looking for the line from the other team, who had preceded us, but I didn’t see it, so I figured they must have tied off on the other side of the hole, and once I got myself secured, I headed downslope toward the sticks.  Naharon, like downstream Carwash, has a long silty slope for an entry, and there is nothing there to which to tie a line, so someone has obligingly placed a set of tall sticks for that purpose.  (They’re fairly tenuous, and I have always wondered about what would happen if one actually needed to follow that line in zero viz, but given that it’s about 20 feet from an enormous opening to the outside world, and that people don’t dive at night in MX, if you’re in zero viz at the sticks, it’s because your eyeballs popped during the dive.)  I was headed for the left-hand stick (appropriate, since my line was tied off on the left) when I realized that the other team had used the sticks for their PRIMARY tie, and had used the left one.  My long-ago buddy would have had a conniption fit over that

So here I was.  They’re left and I, at the moment, am lefter — but I really don’t know what is going to happen as we continue in, or whether they will tie into the mainline from the left or the right.  I was too lazy to pull my primary and move it to the other side, so I just stayed lefter, and tied off on some interesting choices of things pointing down from the ceiling, and hoped for the best when we got to the tie-in.   I was, of course, to be disappointed, because the other team HAD tied in from the left.  I had options; I could run my line significantly further and tie in past them, or I could go under their line and come in from the right.  I chose door number three, and tied off about ten feet above their line, and came down vertically.  But Kevin didn’t like it, because although I thought the distance was enough that the other team wouldn’t foul themselves in my line coming out, he thought I was wrong, so he pulled the tied and went back and did it right.  I don’t know why I can’t ever seem to execute a clean dive with Kevin; here’s a person I admire and would really like to do well in front of, and I never do.

At any rate, we went up the short distance to the jump, and I put that in without issue (although either Peter or Kevin didn’t like the precise way I did it, but I can’t remember which and I don’t remember what the issue was, either).  On to the jump to the SW SacBe line, where I pulled out the little reel and began to tie it in, and remembered we had agreed to drop stages there, which I hadn’t done yet.  So I locked off the little reel and dropped it, just as Peter began flashing me to inform me I was brain-dead again.  I looked around, and concluded that the best place for me to put my stage was about three feet PAST the jump, which I did; Kevin and Peter put theirs a few feet short of the jump, where I thought the line wasn’t particularly well supported, but we talked about that later.

Back to the reel, and I was actually quite pleased with how well I remembered where the jump goes, because you can’t see the target from the line you have left.   I smoothly and quickly got down there, but I used a placement, which was later frowned upon.  Anyway, I got tied in, and we headed off.  The passage was as beautiful as I remembered it.  It’s a bit of a tall, narrow hallway, with very decorated walls, but what makes it really unique is that the floor is pale grey, the walls are cream and gold, and the ceiling is a velvety, jet black.  The passage winds a bit but never gets small, at least as far as I have seen it, and it is a lovely dive.

All too soon, we turned on gas and headed back, and when we got to the stages, the fun began, because my addled brain simply refused to disgorge the gas plan we had so carefully made in the parking lot.  At this point, I can’t recall what I was thinking, but I do remember that I was horribly confused about which tanks we were to be breathing and when, and how we were going to decide when to turn the next time.  When we went off the stages and back onto backgas, my discomfort became so acute that I strongly considered thumbing the dive on confusion . . . when suddenly, it was as though a light bulb had gone on, and the whole plan unfolded in my head, and I took a deep breath and relaxed, and went on with the dive.

What’s really interesting now, having gone through that, is that the plan was really quite simple, and I have no idea why I had so much trouble grasping it.  But having gone through that epiphany moment, how you do that kind of calculation is now absolutely clear to me, and I doubt I will ever have trouble with it again.

At any rate, this passage we were swimming was really very pretty.  It got small enough to be intimate, without being at all tight, and it was very, very dark.  The halocline ran a little above the floor, and played its usual games with the lights, throwing them in bands on the walls.  Again, the passage was quite windy, and I like that, and it was a disappointment when I got the signal from behind me, and we had to head home.

We did a little deco, which wasn’t really owed, but there is no reason not to pause in the cavern and enjoy the view out into the light.  Once we got into the open water, we swam back toward the entry, and then Kevin signaled me to wait a moment.  He had spotted a small hole, and wanted to check it out.  Well, in this case, that meant disappearing INTO it!  He was diving his new Bogaerthian sidemount setup, and I think it turned his head, because before I knew it, he was completely invisible.  I was sitting in the open water, thinking interesting thoughts about entering holes without a guideline, when his head reappeared.  He later said that he had heard there was a small going passage, but that that hole wasn’t it.

We got out, and took our time about dressing down and retrieving our gear, because the other team was still in the cave.  It was hot, and Kevin decided to go swimming — but swimming actually turned out to be jumping into the water in swim trunks, with an Al80 held under his arm, and cruising over to see if Rob and Allison were back yet, which they were.  So Kevin went down and offered to relieve them of their spent stages, which they gave him — at which point he discovered that two empty stages and no weights meant a quick trip to the cavern ceiling!

Once the others were out and packed, we decided to head for Taqueria Diaz, on the recommendation of our friend Jacob.  They were, however, closed, so we ended up at a place called Don Cafeto’s, about which I had read on my Tulum maps (which I always leave at home) and I remembered it was supposed to be pretty good.  I’d say the food is average, but there’s one incredible reason to go there, and that’s the limonadas.  They’re served in about quart-sized containers, and are lime juice and sparking water and crushed ice, and are one of the most refreshing things I’ve ever had to drink.  We actually did a second day here, just to have more of them!

So, the other half of the FOCUS for the trip was Jailhouse.  Peter and I had done several dives together there, and I had done more with other buddies, but we knew there were a lot of lines, and we wanted to explore.  So, when we showed up at ZG in the morning to fill tanks, we asked Chris for some input, and he drew us a spectacular stick map.  He recommended a fairly complicated upstream dive (for us, anyway) involving a right at the first T, a left at the second, a jump to the right, and then a right at the next T.  This would bring us down to deeper cave than I had ever dived in MX, with Chris saying it would run about 80 feet.  This seemed okay.  I should have known better.

Rob and Allison had acquired the key to Jailhouse the night before, when they had driven down to Tulum for dinner, and we had bailed and vegged out at home.  So they followed us down and we got access, and did the drive up to the dive site.  It’s a moderately long dirt road, in good repair for Mexico, but there is a farm at one point, where the road makes a Y.  Sometimes, there has been a horse tethered by the road, who can wander and stretch his rope across the passage.  Today, there was a cow.  Well, at first I thought it was a cow, until I got out, grabbed its rope, and began to try to lead it across the road — at which point I recognized that what I was leading was a BULL.  It was a young bull, clearly, and it seemed more nervous than belligerent.  He followed me reluctantly, snorting the whole time, until he got too close to me to tolerate (I guess I don’t smell at all familiar) and he bolted.  I let go of the rope, having had too much experience with bolting horses to try to hold onto a coarse rope with no gloves, when it is attached to a large animal departing rapidly.  Fortunately, the little fellow ended up on the desired side of the road, and we drove on through.  Peter said to me, when I reboarded the car, “Did you KNOW it was a bull?”  And I said, “Well, yes, but it was a baby, and it was scared.”  He said, “They charge when they’re scared.”  I swallowed quietly and relished my good fortune.

On up we went and parked.  It was hot.  This was probably the hottest day of the trip — sunny, with still air, and hot enough that one began to sweat copiously as soon as one exited the car.  The up side was that there were very few bugs — nothing like some of my prior trips to Jailhouse.  But whatever it is that likes to bite me at the edges of my eyes was certainly there, and the big purple bruises that come with those bites are still rather unnattractive today.

As we were gearing up, we noted that there was a dense swarm of butterflies circling a spot in the cultivated area off the edge of the parking lot.  We went over to see what was going on, and it turned out that the little guys were visiting a small pool of water left over from someone having irrigated the plants.  Peter took quite a few pictures:

Rob and Allison were going to stage downstream, but we wanted to explore upstream, as that was much more new to us.  Plan was as Chris outlined, dropping stages on gas.  We geared up and got into the water, which we didn’t mind, but Rob found disgusting.  I think getting into pea soup Puget Sound on a regular basis leaves me less fastidious about the color, clarity or even odor of the water into which I submerge!

We headed upstream, and did the left at the second T, as instructed.  This began my favorite part of the dive.  It’s a hallway much like the downstream, salt water passage, but the halocline runs about halfway down it, and the line runs in the halocline.  If you get your buoyancy just right, you can sit in the boundary layer.  Each inhalation will bring you up into the fresh water, with the dark browns and greens, and each exhalation will drop you into the salt water, with the intense, cobalt blue, and the white limestone.  The space was enormous, so we could separate on either side of the line and both enjoy stellar viz.  This part of the dive was so beautiful that it could have gone on forever, as far as I was concerned.

But eventually, we reached the jump to the right.  This was about 40 minutes in, and we dropped stages there.  We put the jump in, and I was surprised to be fighting almost Florida-class flow in the process.  The jump goes very steeply down to an entirely different “floor” of passage.  The first part is small phreatic tunnel and very decorated, and I thought it was stunningly pretty.  Eventually, the line made a right-angle turn, and I thought the tie-off was rather strange, because there was an arrow on it (facing our exit, I did check that) and then the line went UP behind the arrow, wrapped around a large protrusion from the wall, and then headed right.  I wondered why the arrow and tie-off were arranged the way they were, but I never stopped to ask WHY there was an arrow there (in MX, they aren’t just distance markers, but almost always mark a jump or T).  I failed to notice that there was going tunnel in front of us . . . and totally failed to see that the “weird” tieoff was the T we had been told to watch for.

We were at 90 feet.

I have no business there at 32%, and I know it, and I should have nixed the dive plan in the first place, or turned it when I realized we were deeper than the briefed 80.  Anyway, Peter saw the T, we marked it properly, and swam on a bit, but it got into bedding plane that was fairly low, and I was pretty unhappy about my error, so we didn’t go too far (15 minutes) before I turned the dive.  (Peter later said, “I know someone who would have loved that passage — Ben Martinez!”)

Back we went, through the lovely halocline hallway, through the prior T, and a leisurely swim out.  I was really delighted with most of the dive, but were I to do it again, I’d just keep heading for the Cenote of the Sun, instead of doing the deep jump.  Not going there again without 30/30, and spending $140 for a 15 minute deep penetration doesn’t pencil out in my brain.

A lot of discussion had gone on the afternoon before, about where to dive on Friday.  Don and Elissa were not going to join us, so it was the three Mocal folks, Peter and me.  We finally settled upon Pet Cemetery, which, although not part of the FOCUS for this trip, was a place I had insisted on going back to, so that I could actually FIND the Blue Abyss and redeem myself.  So far, I had been there with Nick Ambrose leading, failed to find the jump when trying to show the place to Kirk, and found the jump but didn’t believe it when diving with Karen.  It was time to actually get there.

But it turns out PC is snakebit for me, I think.  Although we had a relatively uneventful trip up there (I haven’t actually looked under the car, but there aren’t any fluids pooling where it’s parked, and everything still seems to work), and got geared up and ready to go without incident, as soon as I got in the water, I realized the leak from yesterday wasn’t a zipper that wasn’t fully closed, and whatever it was, it was BIG.  I got out and had a look, and discovered, to my dismay, that the zipper on the suit had really and truly failed — about a half inch of it simply wasn’t closing, or as it turned out, it WAS closing, but as soon as the zipper would flex, it would undo itself.  There ensued a bunch of discussion and decision-making on my part, at the end of which, we tried to Gorilla tape as much of the problem area as we could, and I decided that, if I had done a 2 hour dive soaking wet the day before, I could do it again.  The Blue Abyss was not going to elude me in this fashion!

Now, on prior visits, we had done a surface swim under the overhead to the big dome room, where the owners have punched a hole in the roof for access for their snorkeling tours.  But Kevin seemed quite perturbed by our plan to do this, and kept telling us that, if we were going to drop stages at the King Pong restriction anyway, we were really not gaining anything by doing it.  So we did it his way, and dropped at the cavern line and followed it around.  It’s a LONG line, and I think both Peter and I were beginning to wonder if we had missed the spot for the jump, by the time we got to it.  Of course, since the prior team had already been there, we would have had to miss not only the arrows, but a jump spool and a whole passle of cookies (remember, we’re GUE divers).  And we hadn’t, but it sure seemed a long way.

We headed up the IHOP line.  One of the prettiest spots on the whole dive, to me, is about two minutes in, where there are several thin stalactites that come down and broaden into big Christmas tree shapes.  You swim between the thin parts, holding your stage under your tummy.  It makes a gorgeous place for a photo op:

It isn’t far from there to the jump onto the Diaz line, which goes out toward the BA.  Peter put the jump in, and we began the swim.  We did drop stages before the restriction, and I had fun seeing if, on the fourth try, I could get through without touching anything.  I didn’t quite; I didn’t hit the ceiling, but I brushed something with a fin at the end.  It’s an interesting geometry problem.  I watched Lamont do it, holding a stage in front of him, and Nick do it with his huge camera rig, but I haven’t been that brave, myself.

This trip was really cheating, because the first team in had, of course, jumped to the correct line.  But I will take credit for KNOWING it was the right line, and it WAS the one I would have gone to, if they hadn’t been there.  Really, it was.

And we had the courage of our convictions, and persevered through the restrictions, and I was utterly delighted to discover that, at the very end, you do precisely what I remembered — go up very shallow, into an area of stubby, very tannin-stained stalagmites, and then you fly off the edge of the world . . . into an enormous, deep blue space.  The geometry of the Abyss itself made MUCH better sense to me this time than it did the first time.  I was able to sweep my light and see the walls and ceiling, and the rubble slope heading down, and stay much better oriented.

One of the most fascinating things about the caves in Mexico is how the light changes as you go through the halocline.  Above it, you can have creams and turquoises, and browns and blacks and greens.  Below it, you have blue . . . deep, intense cobalt blue, which contrasts sharply with the whites and yellows of the stone.  Big spaces make the color very rich and impressive.

At any rate, we only had time to spend two or three minutes inspecting the Abyss — but it’s really all you need, because the only line that goes out of there, goes out way below my hard deck for diving in general, let alone diving on 32%.  So we headed out, and swam the lovely Diaz line again (one of my favorite passages so far) until, off in the distance, we were greeted by the very odd vision of three aluminum 80′s floating, butt up, and apparently not attached to anything.  Of course, they WERE clipped to the line, but we could see the bottles a lot sooner than we could see the line itself, so they appeared untethered, and it was a rather odd and amusing sight.

We had enough gas to do a bit more diving, so we turned up the IHOP line.  Kevin had said it was a short line that ends at the next cenote, but then again, we weren’t planning a whole lot more dive time, so that seemed fine.  In addition, I was starting to get cold, as a result of being rather disgustingly wet.

I have a hard time with recalculating gas, when you have stages.  In formal theory, you mark the gas you used getting to the decision point, and reserve that much in backgas and in the stage to get out — the rest of the stage, and thirds on the remaining backgas, are yours to use.  In practice, in the cave, that always seems like WAY too much math to me, so I do something real simple, like saying we can use the gas we planned to use in the beginning (halves plus 200 from the stage) and then go home.  Of course, this results in leaving the cave with scads of backgas you never touched, but since time begins to limit me more than gas in these shallow caves (I don’t like much more than 2 1/2 hours of swimming, because my knees begin to say rude things to me at that point) so far the simple gas recalculation has worked fine, even if it annoys my buddies.

The IHOP line is very dramatic and NoHoch-ish — huge spaces, monument-sized decorations, and everything very white.  We went a little further than Karen and I had gone, but turned the dive on time and headed home.

Home, however, is actually a platform at the bottom of one of the steepest staircases you have ever tried to carry tanks up or down.

I had enjoyed Allison making a comment about how scary going DOWN the stairs was, because I always think down is harder than up.  So, arriving at the platform is just the first step in a long project of getting gear to the top.  I took my rig off on the platform, where there are nice shelves for doing that, and went up and got out of soaking wet stuff again (hearing a theme, are you?) and went down and began bringing up stages.  Peter, bless his heart, brought my doubles up.  I CAN do it, but it is a slow process.

We waited for the other team, because they had the phone number for Chris, one of the owners of Zero G.  I wanted to call him and ask him if there was a place he would recommend to rent a thick wetsuit, and I thought if there was such a place, it might be in Tulum, so I didn’t want to drive all the way up to ZG to talk to him.  I was worried that most of the open water dive shops would only have thin suits (and it turns out, for example, that Dive Aventuras only has 3 mils) but thought maybe one of the cave shops might have thicker ones, either for rent, or even for sale.  But, as it turned out, the number I carefully took from Kevin didn’t work — I’ve spent enough time trying to make phone calls here that I now understand how one says, “The number you have tried cannot be completed as dialed” in Spanish.  But I find it just as frustrating in that language as I do in English, especially when there is some urgency to the call you can’t make.

At any rate, we beat feet for ZG, where we discovered we had found the party.  All kinds of people were there, including Danny Riordan, who was my Cave 1 instructor.  I asked HIM my questions:  Is there anyplace to get a dry suit fixed?  No.  Is there anyplace to rent a dry suit?  No.  (These answers were expected.)  Is there anyplace to rent a thick wetsuit?  Hmm.  Now I’m getting worried, but Danny and David Ruiz get into a discussion, and conclude that I would probably fit better in Danny’s suit than David’s (he was willing to lend me a suit he hadn’t even DIVED yet!)  So into the storage room goes Danny, and pulls out his old DUI suit (he’s diving a demo these days) and puts brand new Zip seals on it (his last) and hands me his dry suit.  I was really nonplussed and thrilled, and I wanted to hug Danny until his ribs cracked, but I contained myself.  A bottle of Limoncello is going to be acquired and given, though!

While I was sorting out the dry suit thing, Peter quietly swapped out all the tanks, so we were set for tomorrow’s diving.  The crew was going to head back down to Tulum  for dinner, but we settled for heading back to the condo and doing a bit of relaxing.

Thursday, we decided to go back to Grand and go up the Paso de Legarto line to Much’s Maze. I had done this with my friends Karen and Kathryn on my last trip, but Peter had never seen it. There was some really beautiful passage back there, and I was looking forward to seeing more of this:

Our friend from Monterey had arrived the night before, and we were all going to be diving the same site, although different lines. Eventually, we had three teams in the water, all going different places. It gives you an idea of how MUCH cave there is there.

Our dive went very pleasantly, although I had to invent a new hand signal for, “Please check and see if my zipper is all the way closed?” because I felt a bunch of water come into my right arm as we went into the cavern zone. Peter checked it and said it was okay, so we went on. We did the jump into Much’s Maze, and I was surprised at how much flow I felt — I didn’t really remember noticing it that much when we had been there before. I love the triangular cross-section tunnel that starts that line, and it’s a perfect place for photo ops. Peter didn’t have his camera with him, though — never takes it into cave that’s new to him. (Two days later, that was to prove very wise.)

We followed the Maze line to the end and jumped back onto the mainline and turned right. We followed this through some very decorated, smaller tunnel to a T, where we went right. Shortly thereafter, the line went steeply up and through a fun restriction — we went maybe five minutes past there, and turned on gas.

As we were exiting, I was beginning to realize just how wet I was. It seemed unlikely that it was from the zipper being open a bit at the beginning, although I know how much water can come in quickly, even through small holes. I was starting to get a little cold, and was actually looking forward to getting out to the early afternoon heat.

In the open water basin, we ran into a pair of sidemount divers. I looked at them curiously, wondering what they were doing just sitting there, and at that point, they turned to enter the cave, and WAVED to me. I stared stupidly at them, wondering who they were, because I don’t know that many sidemount divers — until I realize it was my friends Don and Elissa! Don had acquired a new, red DUI dry suit and I didn’t recognize him at all, which is funny, because I knew they were down here (although I didn’t know they would be at Grand with us).

We finished the dive, and as usual, I was unable to get to my feet from the platform. Apparently, I should have tried the ladder again, because Allison said they fixed it, but after skidding across the deck the day before when it slipped, I wasn’t hot on the idea. So I got out of the gear and waddled wetly to the car, where I stripped out of all my sodden undergarments and hung them on the car door. I am WAY too familiar with how to deal with wet clothes!

But one of the reasons I had gone up to the car was that there was a cavern tour group going in which had discovered a bubbling octo. The guide was going to scrub the dive, but we offered to let them use one of our second stages for the length of the dive. So my trip to the car was to acquire the save-a-dive kit with its wrenches, so we could take off a second stage and lend it. The guide, a very nice young woman named Amber, told us she owed us dinner and beers. If I knew which shop she worked for, I’d take her up on it!

Pretty soon, everybody was up and disassembling gear and packing, and we agreed to try to find the wonderful restaurant John and Karen and I ate it in Tulum for a late lunch (except Don and Elissa, who were doing another dive).

Except for driving the wrong way down several one way streets (all too easy to do in Tulum, where most of them are not marked or poorly marked, and your first clue is when you turn into the street and all the cars are facing you. Of course, by now, you’re committed for a block at least ) finding the restaurant went smoothly, and the food was as good as I remembered. They have this odd sauce which appears to be made of chilis, oil, and small seeds, and has the most wonderful, rich, nutty flavor. I’ve never eaten anything like it in Mexico or in any Mexican-type restaurant, but I’d sure love to know what is in it so I could make it at home. Everyone agreed that the lunch was really good, and we headed home replete.

Later that evening, Rob and Allison came over to the condo for what was supposed to be drinks, and turned out to be half a bottle of tequila, two small loaves of bread, a bunch of crackers, and a whole MESS of salami and cheese. I’m not going to lose any weight on this trip.