A Day In the Cavern

After a lovely two week excursion to Cozumel to celebrate my dad's 75th birthday (Happy Birthday, Pop!) with the rest of the family, January and I came back to the mainland and jumped straight into the second half of our Cavern course. It was four long days of running guidelines and practicing skills in zero visibility.

One of the sites we used for training is a cenote called Orquidea. It's set way back off a jungle road behind an unmarked gate that you can't enter without the key to the padlock. Many of the cenotes that we use for training are close to the highway, have gift shops and snack stands, and just feel pretty touristy. The glory days of trekking through the jungle with your gear to reach the cenote entrance are mostly gone now. Orquidea, however, has a bit more of that old school feel to it. As we bounced our way along what could only be considered a road in the very loosest sense, I imagined what it must have been like here in the early 1990s when the majority of the systems were not yet fully explored.

The open water area in cenote Orquidea.

We were the only ones at the cenote, apart from the owner of the property and a few members his family who were there clearing brush. Orquidea sits more or less in the middle of his farm and while we were diving he kindly left left us a huge papaya on the back of our truck. 

To papaya or not to papaya? Definitely papaya.

Unlike most of the cenotes in the Rivera Maya, Orquidea doesn't have a divable connection to any of the other cave systems in the area. It is, essentially, a big sinkhole. What it does have is a very thick hydrogen sulfide layer at about 65ft. It also has a large open water area and is also significantly deeper than most other cenotes, with a max depth of around 120ft. This made it perfect for the particular drills that we would be working on.

Most cenotes have a map of some kind showing the basic information and routes, through the level of detail varies greatly depending on the site.

After practicing mask failures and swapping to our backup masks in the open water, we switched our lights to high and headed down the guideline into the darkness. Passing through the hydrogen sulfide layer is both eerie and fascinating. It hangs evenly in the water column and is so dense that I half expected to land on it and just stop, as if it were a giant, fluffy pillow. As we passed through the layer the visibility dropped to nearly zero. I immediately reached out with my left hand to secure myself to the guideline and I caught a brief glimpse of January doing the same further below before my vision was fully obscured by hazy white. I could taste the sulfur through my regulator and feel the tingle on my exposed hands and face. Fortunately, the layer is only a few feet thick and we emerged on the other side as if passing through into another dimension. Whereas before there has been plant matter and tree roots all around us, we were now under a large rock overhang that extended along the west wall of the sinkhole.

January and I about to practice a gas share in the open water at Orquidea.

In Mexico, unlike most other cave systems in the world, the passages are mostly shallow and you can do entire dives without going below 25ft of depth. By the time we reached the mid-way point in Orquidea, however, we were at 106ft. Whether you feel it or not, every diver starts to experience nitrogen narcosis at around 80-90ft, sometimes even shallower. The deeper you go, the harder it is to think and the slower your motor skills become. Some people call it the "martini effect," but everyone experiences being narced a little differently. For me, it's usually a tingly sensation in my face and arms. I don't really like it. 

Of course, we're not just down here to simulate having one too many drinks. Nope, we're doing a primary light failure! When we're at the deepest point in the dive our instructor, Arja, swims over to me and turns my primary light off. The cavern suddenly gets much, much darker. Since I am in the rear of our two person team, I must quickly switch on the backup light mounted on my helmet, signal January to hold so that I don't get left behind, and communicate with hand gestures what the problem is. (With a light failure the problem is pretty obvious, but it's important to practice every step.) Then, once the team (i.e. January) knows what's going on, I take another backup light (we carry a lot of lights) from my pouch and stow the broken light. I then move to the front of the team so that if there's another problem the team will know right away.

It doesn't sound like all that much, right? But when you're over 100ft deep, in a dark cavern, trying to dig the correct piece of equipment out from your pouch, all while maintaining buoyancy and not floating away from the guideline, it's easy for the situation to get away from you. Even doing it as a drill, where in reality everyone's lights actually work, there's an instructor present, and we're a relatively short swim to the surface, it still feels intense. I can't help thinking about what it would be like trying to handle a real emergency on an actual cave dive where there's no instructor and the exit is a half hour away. It makes my skin crawl a little bit. But that's what we're training for. The ten hour days of checking and double checking gear, blind folded gas sharing, moving along the guideline as a team. We do these things over and over until there's no need to think and our bodies just know what to do. 

I'll be the first to admit that the further we go in this journey, the stranger it seems that people are willing to go through such lengths to look at wet rocks. And on the other hand, I totally get it. The level of focus and skill that's required is weirdly addicting. Having such little margin for error requires the total commitment of one's mind and body. It is in those moments that I feel most alive and connected with the world around me.