Catfish Hotel (dive 1 @ Manatee Springs)

Friday, early morning before sunrise, we woke up and made final machine checks and sandwiches for the day.  But when we went to put the regulators onto our new stages, we realized we'd forgotten to get stow-away tank bands, so we had to wait for Extreme Exposure to open at 8, oops. Bands sorted, we headed off to find Manatee Springs and Catfish Hotel.

We thought it would be extremely busy because it is the only dive site around High Springs that is open, but it was empty. In fact the gate guard looked at us as if we were crazy pitching up to dive. He warned us that there was duckweed all over the top of the sink, but told us that usually the water underneath is crystal clear. He also told us that the "skeeters" we're going to eat us alive. Braving the skeeters, I managed to snap a few pics of the map of the underwater cave system at Manatee Springs:

A little nervously now, we drove up, parked and went to look. The area is beautiful, there were deer all over the show munching away, as well as squirrels and birds, and we even spotted our first ever armadillo! Very cute. Catfish Hotel was flooded all the way up the stairs and it really is completely covered in duckweed. It looked like a murky swamp and my nerves went through the roof imagining getting in and diving into that sea of green muck. 

Catfish Hotel platform

But once i got my wetsuit on and took a look with a mask under the duckweed, it was amazing, beautiful clear blue water. Also the duckweed is not slimy, it is like a layer of grass seeds. This made me much happier, so we proceeded to carry our kit from the car to the platform. 

Manatee Springs Catfish Hotel

Carrying the kit was no easy task. It's about 100m, which doesn't sound that far, but when you're lugging scuba cylinders and rebreathers around and it's hot and humid and the mosquitoes are feasting, things start to get heavy. My arm muscles were burning as if I'd just finished a hectic weights session afterwards.

We were almost ready to dive when Kev discovered that his cave torch wasn't switching on. Disaster. We thought maybe the bulb had been broken with all the traveling from SA. So we couldn't do a cave dive, but we decided that we still had to dive and at least feel our kit out and make sure that everything else was working.  Plus, after all the worry over getting into the swamp, we had to actually do it!

Catfish Hotel is a sink. Both sinks and springs arise from the aquifer, but the water from a spring leaves above ground in a river, whereas the water from a sink leaves underground. The books say that a spring is usually caused by a geological weakness and a sink from ground collapsing into the aquifer. For diving what this means is that a sink has two cave openings, an upstream and a downstream.

The duckweed collected all over us as we clipped on our stages and fins, we looked like mounds of grass popping out of the otherwise flat pond. But once we slipped under the bed of seeds it was stunning. The light comes through the grassy bed filtered green and then sparkles over the white rocks. There is some thick green grass along the edges and then a hole going directly down to the cave entrances. It is not wide or deep, by 12m we could already move under the overhang, which is directly underneath the stair platform. We went left first until we saw the STOP sign which signals every cave entrance, then we came back out and headed right a little passed the STOP sign on that side. I could feel a slight current going from right to left so the right side was upstream. There were lots of baby catfish swimming all over the bottom, but no big ones. We did about a 40min dive just looking around the entrances and then headed out. It was a beautiful taster.

As our heads emerged the mosquitoes attacked. I at least had a hoodie on, but Kev's whole head became a skeeter swarm. We ran for the car and mozzie spray as quickly as one can with about 42kg of hammerhead rebreather strapped to one's back.

Once back in High Springs, we spent a good hour cleaning all those grassy seeds off our kit and then Kev contacted Sartek to see what we could do about the broken torch. Sartek were amazingly helpful, immediately getting on the phone and instructing Kev on how to check if it was a bulb issue or the electric wiring. It luckily turned out that the bulb was fine, and that we could short the wiring in the switch on the torch head, basically taking the switch out of the equation, but leaving the torch able to turn on. Relief.