Cave Dive

Today I am posting something written by a friend.  Les and Monika Knotts have been friends of ours for about 20 years.  We (meaning my husband was the active duty one, I was the proud Army wife) served in the military together and were stationed together three times.  Les is an adventure junkie,  Monika, more subdued.  I thought nothing ever rattled Les.  But after reading this, I realized that I just had not been in the right place at the right time to see this side of him.

By way of commercial for Les and Monika, they serve with the Military Community Youth Ministry, an organization dedicated to serving the sometimes forgotten population of our military - the teenaged children of deployed service members.  Club Beyond, their primary vehicle for this ministry, has saved many a teen from a life of lonliness, fear and despair.  If you would like more information on MCYM or know of a military family who can use this type of help, please go to their website, http://www.mcym.org/.

So back to the post - Les went to Cozumel with some friends and did some scuba diving.  Here is his description of the dive.  And Thanks, Les, for letting me share this!

Cave Dive



As advertised, the water at the entry was especially clear and placid, save for two inexperienced (cocky?) divers floating on the surface after their dive. I say inexperienced because, as our dive leader noted, the male left his gear floating on the surface and dove down into the cave without his breathing apparatus. That’s zero-defect diving. After all, 320 divers have expired in Mexican caves—and most of them were experienced dive leaders*. That was, of course, what the submerged sign of the skull and crossbones was about at the cave exit at the far end.


Stalagmites and stalactites threatened to chomp any diver who had not assumed neutral buoyancy. Our dive lead had donned not one or two, but three layers for this dive, plus an additional tank for back-up air. And a hood. I had none of these additional accoutrements, and I was working my legs the entire dive in an attempt to remain horizontal (as the rest of the group appeared to be doing easily), to stay below the stalactites, and because violent and continuous kicking is the routine that I am accustomed to when I am below the surface of the water during a lifetime of seeking the life-giving air up there in the direction of my last bubbles. “Heavy Breather” is what I have been dubbed on this trip. He-Who-Kicks-Forever is my Indian name. I have been a sinker for much of my life, and I quickly revert to old habits of survival even when the means of survival are strapped to my back—a tank and BC.


And so we dive. 3000 pounds of air seems enough for the 45 minutes we plan to be looking at fossils and Karst formations. We switch on our lamps and explore side to side as we follow the guide. Our easy movement near the surface is to get us comfortable with the potentially claustrophobic conditions soon to greet us. Monika would surely hate this: Dark. Closed in. Under water. Any of us can call off the dive with a simple signal at any point. I know that I am the most likely to do so. And Monika? For her part, she has elected to call it off from the remote safety of Colorado, a thousand miles north and 6000 feet higher and drier than where we are at this cenote.


We make a slow clockwise loop beneath the surface. Rounding the stony and irregular subsurface column gave us the sense that we were going to need our lanterns for the remainder of the dive. Not so. If a man took the time to stop fussing with gauges, his perpetually flooding mask, and the constant struggle to maintain neutral buoyancy, a dramatic vista in hues of aquamarine presented itself on the left flank. An absolute cathedral of angular rays penetrated the green water after plunging through the thin canopy of deciduous greenery covering the opening like a gigantic translucent umbrella. The scene was brighter at the top, and shifting to darker, but no less luxurious, tones in layers of shifting greenish hues as the eyes were cast deeper—a visual parfait. If this had been my big screen television, I would not have changed the channel for a long time. I nearly lost the group lingering over the playing of the lights—an underwater aurora borealis, moving with gentle air currents above and the mild aquatic current below. We were moved with it.


I rejoined the group. We propelled ourselves slowly through wider and now narrower and next wider formations. Prehistoric fossils were embedded in the rock, and the guide was careful to point them out as we glided past. For the more adventurous, gaps of varying widths to left and to right beckoned for closer inspection. They explored with head, hands, and lights, hoping to see—what? To the less adventurous, the caverns appeared as gaping, open maws of death with thousands of still-forming stony teeth above and below that would grab your vest and rake at your breathing apparatus, robbing you at once of breath and means of escape. . . .

Part 2 to follow!