A Photographic Journey through Jackson Blue

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Photo Legend

(1) Cavern entrance with air bubble mirror reflecting

(2) Start of the chimney from entrance to main passage

(3) Mid-way through the chimney from entrance to main passage

(4) Coming out at the bottom of the chimney from entrance to main passage

(5) Approaching the first breakdown

(6) Towards the end of the first breakdown

(7) Wide passageway between 1st and 2nd breakdown

(8) Up the 2nd breakdown

(9) and down the 2nd breakdown

(10) Passage from 2nd breakdown to1st T

(11) Passage from 2nd breakdown to 1st T

(12) 1st T

(13) Right passageway after 1st T

(14) Right passageway after 1st T (getting quite tight with beds of fine muddy silt below)

(15) Right passageway after 1st T, approaching 2nd T

(16) Right passageway after 1st T, final rise before 2nd T

(17) 2nd T, right passage has orange-yellow, left (Court's Squeeze) has red-white

(18) Heading up Court's Squeeze from the 2nd T

(19) Through Court's Squeeze and heading on up and out

(20) Looking towards the 2nd T through Court's Squeeze

(21) Jackson Blue entrance, home and reeling out

Boat Day Take 2 - Twin Caves and Hole In The Wall

With our machines in working order and two magnificent Jackson Blue dives behind us, we hired a boat for Sunday. Our plan was to dive Hole In The Wall first and then move on to Twin Caves, but there were three GUI divers who got there before us and also wanted to follow the upstream tunnel, so we headed straight up to Twin Caves.

The Russian from Moscow and his guide Kevin were just setting up to dive Twin, but they seemed less unhappy that we would be diving into the same cave as them. Kevin (the guide) even offered to point out the entrance to us before they descended. So we waited while they kitted up and once they'd disappeared under the still water we started to kit up ourselves.

Moored at Twin Caves

Kevin, the guide from Alabama

Me and the Russian from Moscow kitting up to dive Twin Caves

Twin Caves above water, Merritt's Mill Pond

Me on Twin Caves Platform

On our swim out to find the entrance, Kev started scootering but got the clip that's attached to the torch glove caught on the scooter trigger wire. He was trying to get it free and it activated the scooter which pulled and caught the torch into the rotor blades which made a horrible clunking-grinding sound. Thankfully that snapped the trigger wire and it seemed there was no damage to the torch or blades. But it meant no scootering for the dive. We decided to clip both scooters off once inside the cave, and continued looking for the entrance.

We had been warned that there are two entrances. The first is a narrow side-mount entrance which apparently silts up very badly and shouldn't be attempted. The next entrance is also quite narrow but shaped more like a keyhole. We examined both to be sure we were heading in to the right one, then I led the dive into the keyhole.

I tried to fit myself through the narrow entrance without scraping in the mucky silty bed of moss-like plants at the bottom, but I was unsuccessful and the silt and plants billowed out behind me with some of it filtering forward into the cave. The start of the line is right at the entrance on the left hand side so there is no reason to lay your own line. The first room is flat and wide (about 1.5m high), and the line stretched directly in and then took a right turn towards a huge chimney. As I looked backwards and to my right I could see the other entrance. The floor was very silty with a fine mud that disturbs and disburses easily, causing the visibility to diminish and the cave to become cloudy.

Our timing wasn't great because as we were going in, the other two were coming out, and that's not the sort of room one wants to have a traffic jam in. I was so worried about that silty floor that I allowed myself to go to the roof, but I need my feet to extend above my head otherwise they drop down and my head pops up, and once you're in that position it's difficult to get back horizontal without using your fins and making a mess. So I'm afraid I made a bit of a mess right there at the entrance waiting for the other two to come out, but Kev says that they also silted a bit picking up a camera on the way out.

Once the path was clear we continued in and went to clip off our scooters. Then we followed the line to the large shaft and dropped down into Twin Caves.

Twin Caves Map

The shaft bottomed out at about 15m and then we followed a square passage which was about 2m wide and 3m tall most of the time, although it did sometimes narrow .. it reminded me of the Badgat mine passages at Komati Springs. The cave was full of catfish of all sizes from footling to the size of a fingernail. There were also lots of white shrimp. There was no flow to speak of. The bottom is really fine silt, even the catfish swimming blow up little dust clouds.

After about 400' we passed the jump right to a side-mount passage which we'd been warned not to try. Then at about 1000' we flew over a beautiful chasm and came to the T where the line splits to make a circuit. The right line led down into the chasm and the left continued over it. We followed the left line and I got to just before where I could see the line head down into another chasm to the right. At this point it was about 1200' and 35min, so we turned the dive without trying to make the circuit.

It was a long slow swim back. On the way back up the shaft I was preparing myself to be on the line and expecting a very cloudy and silty entrance, but the mess had all cleared away and it was beautiful peaking up from out of the shaft into the flat room with the blue-green light pouring in from the two entrances.

We quickly took the scooters back to Cave Adventurers and Frank kindly said he'd fix the trigger wire on Kev's scooter while we went back out diving.

Hole In The Wall was next ... Woohoo! I'd been looking forward to this dive since the last time. Unfortunately, on the Twin dive, Kev's primary handset had switched off twice which was the same problem we had experienced before the service. So we decided that I would reel in this time so he could keep an eye on the handsets. When we arrived at Hole, the GUI guys were still in the cave, so we ate some yoghurt and waited for them to finish up. Watching them swim out was something else. They each had about 5 or 6 cylinders on them, as well as humongous scooters (at least twice the size of my Minnus), and the lead guy was towing a spare scooter. I thought I had a lot of gear!

Just before we started the dive, Kevin and the Russian arrived. Last time, as we reeled in, we'd really disturbed the sandy floor. This time I was determined not to. Knowing that divers were coming in directly behind me was added incentive. I tied off on the log and then floated in, allowing my face to be cm from the sandy floor so that I didn't hit the roof, and finning only slightly with my feet against the ceiling. Once I hit the chimney / shaft, I turned around and looked up and it was perfectly clear above me through the entrance ... Success! :)

I hovered there at about 14m looking for a place to tie off before descending, and also taking the time to switch my primary to 1.2 PO2. I run the machine manually while reeling at shallow depths so that the solenoid doesn't inject oxygen randomly, causing me unexpected buoyancy issues. So I hadn't noticed that at some point during my reel in, the primary handset had switched off - Murphy's Law that when I reeled in, my handset instead of Kev's would switch off! Our machines are both definitely not fixed! I switched the handset back on and continued down to find the main line leading upstream, which was down and to the right.

Hole In The Wall Caves

The drop is about 8m down to 20m where the line is tied off against the ceiling, although the floor is lower. Then we started to follow the main line with Kev leading this time so that I could see if he had any problems with his machine.

Hole In The Wall is magnificent! The rooms are huge and you pretty much pass from room to room to room through wide passages. The bottom is brown and silty and some of the walls are also brown, but the roof is mostly white limestone, so it reflects back at you. I felt like we were swimming through massive cathedrals with arches and turrets all over the show. The water is not crystal clear though, apparently there is always silt clouding the visibility a little. If it were clear it would be absolutely amazing. At one point we swam up and over a big saddle and at another I noticed a one meter diameter peephole at the ceiling. I thought this dive was exquisite!

At about 600' I took the lead, and at 800' we discussed whether or not to go further but decided against it and turned around. You can see from the map above that we hardly even scratched the surface, and there is still the downstream passage to explore!

Kev kept our positions at the turn around, so once again I got the beautiful view from behind :) I spent a lot of time swimming about 2-3m higher than Kev just enjoying the view above and below. When we passed the peephole again, I swam all the way up and looked through it down to Kev and the passageway below. Very cool. Definitely a favourite dive for me.

Microtel

Ford Flex on moving-diving days

For some reason, both of our big diving days at Jackson Blue coincided with days where we had to move hotels. This time, we had to move from the Marianna Inn to Microtel because the Marianna Inn was full for Saturday night. This time I got pics of the car on diving and moving days.






Microtel was really excellent. Its price was between the Comfort Inn and the Marianna Inn but cheaper than the Marianna Inn without the diver discount, which is crazy because the room was huge with a full kitchenette. It was very clean and not at all dark or dingy. Sadly for our packing and unpacking speed we were on the third floor.

This is what a hotel room looks like after diving days:

Microtel Room - very nice

Diver Explosion in Microtel Room

Jackson Blue - King's Canyon

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A 2700' penetration wasn't enough for the day, now we wanted to go back to do King's Challenge and King's Canyon. When we were in South Africa we bought and imported a dvd of people swimming through King's Canyon in Jackson blue, and so it's been something we've wanted to do from the start. Now that we'd been passed the jump's start and end three times, we felt we were ready.

Blue Springs Park was getting really busy, there was a group from Atlanta on their monthly dive trip (they had also rescheduled to Marianna because of the flooding at Ginnie), there was a guy from Moscow (!) with a guide called Kevin from Alabama, Edd was taking a course, and there were a few more people who we didn't get to chat to ... it was a mad-house.

Amongst the chaos we descended for our dive. The front section of the cave was definitely milkier from all the cave diving traffic, but we were headed out to the King's Challenge jump at pace, so it didn't really matter.

The jump to King's Challenge comes at about 1550'. After you've swum down a breakdown after the 1200' T, you swim along a flat passage that opens out and up with a large limestone dome forming the floor and then a crevice in that floor to the right with a limestone wall forming up against the right. Just before this, as you're swimming upward along the main line, you will notice the jump to King's Challenge at right angles to the main line and about 2-3m below it.

We had left our scooters at the breakdown after the third T (about 1400'). Kev was leading the dive, so he tied off our jump reel and off we went into King's Challenge.  From the jump the line cuts across open water and then follows the ceiling which slopes down and narrows. After 30m or so the line was hugging a horizontal crevice against the left wall and ceiling. The floor was a massive bed of deep thick silt. The line was about 1.5m to my left, my feet were touching the ceiling and my face was 20-30cm above the silty floor. It was hair raising. You always have to imagine the worst scenario and how you would recover from it while cave diving. The worst scenario in this case would have been a silt-out and having to squeeze ourselves further into the crevice and silt to get hands on the line, and then somehow follow it outwards with us on the floor and it tight to the roof. It would have been very tough, and was definitely something to avoid.

We followed that narrow passage around to the left and then we hit King's Canyon. The canyon towered above us. We followed the crack along the line upward from about 28m to 20m and when we started to swim forward again there was still a huge canyon above and below us. Spectacular :) Eventually we turned another slow bend to the left and there ahead we spotted the main gold line.

We were very naughty here in terms of cave diving. We knew from the maps and topography that the jump had to be to the main line. I even saw the arrows on the line, and it was gold with knots. But the rule is one continuous line to the surface. We should have either reeled the jump and then swum along the main line to find our first jump, or turned around and gone back through the canyon the way we'd come. But after hovering over a large limestone rock that the main line was tied on to, and chatting away at each other about whether or not to follow the line without putting in a jump, we decided to risk it. We both memorised that rock, and although we were 110% sure that this was the main line, we also spent the next few minutes in doubt, swimming along making sure that we didn't pass any other large rock tie-offs. I heard the whoop when Kev spotted our first jump reel and was washed with relief. We had made the circuit, we had seen King's Canyon! :)

Jackson Blue to 2700' (Sweet Passage)

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It was time. We wanted to push the main line to the Sweet Passage ... about 2600' (800m). In preparation we asked for diluent fills to 30% helium and ended up with a 20/37 mix (20% O2, 37% He). This was a bit rich, but we worked out that the helium would only double our decompression time to about 15min for an 80min dive. Although the max depth of Jackson Blue is only about 28m, you still get "narked" to a level of 3 shots of whiskey, and although we hadn't noticed being narked, our memories of different areas of the cave differed and were a little bit vague. Helium would solve this problem, and for a dive to 800m penetration, why not?

The helium worked brilliantly. We reeled in and then scootered to just beyond the third T where the main line splits into the lower and upper route. There, at the rocky section before the chimney down to the trash room, we clipped off our scooters. At this point the dive time was just 26min, we had made good time. I was leading this dive, and as I swam down into the trash room I couldn't believe the difference to the last time we'd been here: the chimney wasn't as tight; it was crystal clear how the line from the lower route joined the line from the upper route; the floor didn't even look as silty, in fact the room was huge with plenty of space. We got familiar with the tie-offs and then continued deeper into the cave along the main line. Just after the trash room, there is a huge passage with tall ceilings and nice topography. In fact, after that chimney the route didn't get narrow again, and while I was swimming up ahead of Kev, I kept thinking how he'd be cursing that we were swimming this section instead of scootering.

We made the 90 degree left around the Elbow on the map, and swam on until about 100' after the 2600' marker to 2700' (820m). We were just in front of another massive room where the line dipped right when we hit 42min and it was time to turn the dive. Sweet passage really is sweet :) This was a beautiful dive! The way back was more beautiful than the way in because I was behind Kevin and could swim above him and see his light reflections as well as mine. It was awesome, and no problems with the machines. I also had my heated vest at 60% from where we clipped off the scooters and 100% on the way back, and it managed to keep the freezing shakes away. Woooohooooo :) Total dive time 86min, max TTS 13min.

Going Solo

Our heads and Kev's new 7mm Pinnacle Tempo wetsuit with Merino Wool had arrived for us at Cave Adventurers. We collected everything from Frank and headed back to the Marianna Inn for the $50 diver special accommodation. The Marianna Inn is not the cleanest, it is pretty dingy and smelly, but the diver price makes it a real deal.

On Tuesday when I had woken up, I had found that my painful right ear was completely clear, but somehow even after keeping both ears dry in the sea and pool, my left ear had suddenly started hurting in the outer canal. I ignored it that day and let it get wet at Adventure Island and the pool at the Travelodge. On Wednesday morning it was sore to touch, and by Wednesday evening it started to feel like there was a hot furnace inside my ear. I assembled all my kit that evening in hope of diving the next day, but it was not to be.

On Thursday we had to go to a doctor. We had seen a "minute-clinic" advertised on the wall of the CVS pharmacy on the way to Cave Adventurers, so we went there. The nurse practitioner was very thorough and informative. The diagnosis, a middle and outer ear canal infection ... drat! She put me onto a 10 day course of antibiotics, and the whole incident put us back $140!

There was no holding Kev back from getting into the cave. So I helped him get everything ready, went over his dive plan to go to 1200' and just beyond but pay particular attention to the handsets to check that all was in working order, and then sadly watched him descend alone into the cave. Waiting for a solo cave diver to return from a dive is not the best. I think I checked the time every minute. But Kev did a champion solo dive, and emerged on time and happy, having been without incident to the 1200' mark, and on to the start of the Hall of the Mountain King.

It was early and Kev wanted to do another dive. This time he did the circuit, going to 1200' in 12min with the scooter (100'/min), and then coming back through Court's Squeeze. I'm not sure if the throbbing in my head was the infection or jealousy! He was super happy with his day's diving as he should be ... 2 big solo dives and no problems except that one of his handsets switched off right at the start of his first dive, but hopefully that was just a glitch in the matrix.

The next morning I decided my ear was almost ok to dive, it was still very sore on the outside and a bit hot and full inside, but I could clear it without pain and all I wanted to do was dive. So our first dive would be the testing of my machine after its service, and I would also be testing to see if my ear could handle the pressure changes.

We scootered on the main line, swam through Court's Squeeze, then clipped off the scooters and swam all the way to where the main line splits at about 2000' into the upper and lower routes. My ear was fine and my machine was working perfectly.

Kev pre-breathing his machine

Kev had also come up with an ingenious idea to move the weights from our lungs pockets to the top of our cylinders (see pic). This works very well for enabling us to keep our feet up above our heads and our bodies horizontal without us having to fight the additional buoyancy from the counter-lungs at our shoulders all the time. It has an added benefit of giving our rebreather lungs more inflation space. I loved the change.


Because we were swimming slowly against the current this time, we got a good look at this section of the cave. It is very silty but there is also lots of room to move and no doubt we can bring the scooters this far again. Satisfied, we headed home.

Unfortunately my ear was feeling quite sore after the dive, and I didn't want to push my luck with it as there is much more diving ahead. So for the third time I said goodbye to Kev as he descended on yet another solo dive, this time taking his camera with him. He went as far as the first breakdown, getting good shots which I will use to make a tour of the cave map with pics later on.

Tampa Bay

5hr trip from Marianna to Clearwater (Tampa Bay)

Tampa Bay Area

Tampa Bay is beautiful. You can hardly believe it's a fairly large city (or collection of cities). Wiki puts the Tampa Bay area at 4.2 million people in 2010, and stats SA puts the whole Western Cape at 5.2 million and Gauteng at 11.3 million in 2011. So the Tampa Bay area holds at least a third of the whole of Gauteng and 4/5ths of the Western Cape. It is flat, and green, and clean, and the bays and beaches extend through-out with access to the different regions by long bridges.

Tampa Bay from the most NW bridge from Clearwater

The weather is generally hot, and sometimes humid, but mostly just pleasant. In the afternoon there are thunderstorms. The people are friendly, polite and helpful - just as we found in "cave country". There seems to be none of the anger and rushed impatience that I'm used to in people who live in large cities.

We stayed at the Travelodge, which is close to the beach in Clearwater. Thanks to Tripadvisor which found us this cheap 2-star rated motel which was much more like 3-star, and was clean, comfortable, had free high speed Internet (16 Mbps/sec !!!) and an awesome pool area right outside our room.

Pool area from our room at Travelodge

Saturday night, just after arriving we hurriedly booked tickets for the Tampa Bay Rays vs Seattle Mariners baseball game. Our first ever baseball game and our first (and last) ever corn dog :) It was an authentic American experience and a lot of fun, although at times baseball can be as slow scoring and boring to watch as a five day cricket game.

Clearwater Beach

On Sunday we hit the Clearwater beach. The sand is soft and white like chalk, and very clean. The sea was so warm it was like a bath, but there were no waves, it was more like a lake. I think that most of the Gulf of Mexico is like this.

By 1pm it was packed, but because there is so much beach and sea available the density of people is not too bad. It's just amazing when from the sea, to left and right, there are people and umbrellas stretching out as far as the eye can see.



On Monday we went to Busch Gardens which is an amusement park with loads of fast roller-coasters. One of them, the Sheikra, does a 200' (60m) drop at 90 degrees (yes, that is straight down)! Awesome!

Sheikra ... aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!

And on Monday night, we went to watch Dark Knight Rises on a huge Sony 4K High Definition screen in Downtown Tampa :)

On Monday our heads had arrived at Juergensen Marine at about noon. By the time we got back from the movie we had news on email ... the heads were already on their way back to us!!! Wooooohooooo, how is that for service?! They had made hardware fixes to both heads, and apart from a GPS antenna that is broken in my head which they will fix when they get parts if I send it back, the heads are now in working order and ready to dive! We were ecstatic! This was the best possible news for our machines and diving holiday. Thank you Juergensen Marine and Trish for understanding our urgency and being so quick and efficient to fix the machines and get them back to us in record time.

We quickly looked on the cave diving forums to find out what was happening with the caves and the flooding in areas other than Merritt's Mill Pond. We found out that Madison, Ginnie and Manatee are open now, but the diving reports for Ginnie indicate that the viz is very low at about 20 to 30 feet (< 10m). People who have been diving Ginnie for years say that they barely recognize the system. So we decided our best bet would be to head back to Marianna and Merritt's Mill Pond where the waters are crystal clear, and we have a lot of diving left to do. Besides, boat day is still calling! I can't wait to dive Hole-In-The-Wall and Twin.

The heads would arrive at Cave Adventurers on Tuesday late afternoon. We decided to stay in Tampa for one more day and then drive back up to Marianna on Wednesday, collect the heads and get ready to dive on Thursday morning.

On Tuesday we went back to Busch Gardens for some more rides, and then went to Adventure Islands which is the water park next door. We got thunder-stormed out by about 2pm, so we headed back to the hotel and chilled by the pool and read.

Nice and relaxed, and ready for more diving, on Wednesday we headed back to Marianna.

Boat Day

Today was boat day, and I was very excited. We wanted to dive Hole In The Wall and Twin Cave. Two cave systems that are on Merritt's Mill Pond, but only accessible by boat.

We headed to Cave Adventurers at about 9 to rent the boat and Frank helped us load everything onto it and gave us instructions for find the cave entrances and reeling in to find the main lines.

Frank and Kevin loading the rebreathers onto the boat

We drove upstream a little to find Hole-In-The-Wall, but there were some divers climbing out, so to give them time to finish up we drove on to Twin to have a look at the entrance. We found two divers preparing to dive Twin and I snapped some pics.

Twin Caves Mooring

Then we continued upstream to take a look at Jackson Blue from the Merritt's Mill Pond perspective.

Kev driving the boat away with Jackson Blue Spring in the background

Kev with boat moored at Hole-In-The-Wall

Then it was back to Hole In The Wall. We moored the boat and located the cave entrance from the bubbles still boiling out from the previous divers. From the boat it was an easy setup to carry everything into the water, and in no time we were ready to dive. Woohoo!

Hole-In-The-Wall entrance

The plan was for Kev to lead. From Frank we knew that we could tie to a log in front of the entrance, then go through a narrow passage into a large chimney. From there after descending a little we would find the upstream entrance upward and to the right (opposite to the flow in Merritt's Mill Pond), and below that the downstream entrance to left. We wanted to go along the upstream passage which apparently was big enough to scooter in. We expected it to be very silty, and had also been told that the cave walls here are brown instead of white limestone.

Down we went and Kev tied to the log. Then I watched him squeeze through the opening. It is very narrow and you have to have your scooter flat in front of your head in the same plane as your body, and even then you scrape a bit on the floor and ceiling. The narrow entrance passage is about 5m long. Once you're through, it opens up into a huge room that goes up and down. As I got through Kev indicated a problem with his secondary handset. I looked and it was off completely! I pressed hard and it started to turn on, then as we watched it, it reset again. Then Kev checked his primary handset and it was also in the process of restarting. This was not dive-able, so sadly we called the dive and scraped our way back out.

A disappointing end to boat day. We made our way to UPS to ship the machine heads back to Juergensen Marine immediately and prepared to start our beach holiday early.

Kev's crazy face at UPS shipping heads to Juergensen Marine

Hopefully, they will get the heads on Monday and have the parts and ability to fix them quickly and send them back to us by Friday. In the meantime, we are headed to Tampa which is 5 hours away. I think we are both bitter-sweet about the change in plans. We want working machines and we always wanted to fit in some beach holiday while we're in Florida, but man-oh-man were we looking forward to diving more of the caves around Merritt's Mill Pond. We will have to come back!

Jackson Blue Scootering Heaven

Today we planned to do two dives again. Dive 1, I would lead us back to 1200' on the scooters, and then on the way back I would make any jump I saw and we would explore the side passages. Dive. 2, Kev would lead and we'd try go passed the trash room and a bit further in up to the Sweet Passage at about 2600'.

As usual, we got there early, but today there was another diver there as well ... Jim. He was going to be scootering alone with side-mount all the way out to Middle Grounds and then making a circuit through about 4000'. He told us of places we could make jumps into large rooms at about 2600' and was very friendly.

It seems we can't get in to the water and dive immediately without having to get out at least once, and today was no different. Although I'd positived and negatived my machine, when I started to descend I heard a "glug, glug, glug" in the loop. That means the machine is taking in water, and for a rebreather diver that's one of the most dangerous failures because a flooded loop could mean water getting into the back where the sofnolime that scrubs the CO2 out of the air is, and this could cause you to breathe in and swallow a caustic cocktail. Imagine breathing in and swallowing a concentrated toxic alkaline solution and being 700m deep in a cave! Even bailing off at that point might not save you.

As I ascended again and tipped my head back I saw that bubbles were coming out of the BOV (bail-out valve). Again this should never happen and was probably the source of the leaking, so we took the regulator apart in-water and reseated an o-ring there. I tested it and it was fine, but I didn't want to dive without checking if any water had gotten passed the right lung into the back, so out we got to check. All good and re-positived and negatived, we set off again.

This dive was fantastic! I loved every minute of it. We flew all the way to 1200', and I mean flew. My scootering has improved so much that I was able to go up the first restriction at the first breakdown and down the second without stopping or slowing down. It is so much fun flying along down there and maneuvering through obstacles. It was brilliant. And exploring on the way back was also great fun. We tried one jump between the first and second T, but it was very narrow and pretty silty, and as I was laying line into the restriction pretty much hugging the roof but almost touching the floor I heard Kev say "Bean, Uh-uh" and I knew he was right. So I came out and headed on to the next jump.

On the way back as you go up the breakdown there is a jump that leads right. We looked along there but I decided to go back to the jump that I've been wanting to do just before you go down again. We did this jump. It was also quite narrow, but not as silty. There were loads of fossils in all the limestone walls and rocks along the passage. Most of them are shells, but we finally found a circular doughnut shaped one which Warren had told us about, but unfortunately I can't remember the name - it may be a sea biscuit?

By the time we got back to the main line it had been about an 80min dive and we were both freezing. Kev is wearing my heated wetsuit vest at the moment because his wetsuit pours water down the back whereas mine is pretty snug. So we used the scooters to race each other back to the chimney using gear 3 :) At least in a wetsuit you start warming up as soon as you get to the surface, so after a warm up session, some yoghurt, and some chatting to the other divers, we were ready for dive number two.

Everything went smoothly and I was enjoying following Kev in. There is much more light as diver number two, it's very relaxing and enjoyable. But about 50m after going down the chimney Kev turned in front of me and started heading up and out. Confused I went to find out what was wrong. We stopped at the ceiling and Kev showed me that his primary handset had frozen. This is another problem we've had with the Hammerheads, particularly Kevin's has frozen a few times and at least one if his handsets resets during every longish (> 1.5 hour) dive. We have kept diving them and watching them thinking maybe the batteries are faulty and continuing to try new types of batteries. At the ceiling Kev indicated that his solenoid (this automatically injects O2 into the loop for you) was still firing and he was happy to continue, but only to 1200' again. So we set off, motored there and back and then packed up to phone Juergensen Marine for the second time in two days!

Kev chatted to a technician at Juergensen Marine, and he said that we should send both machine heads to them because they shouldn't ever be resetting or freezing underwater, and we should be getting at least 5 hour dives with the batteries. We decided we would stay in Marianna until Monday, then send the heads to Pennsylvania for Juergensen Marine to fix while we headed to the coast for some beach holiday. Not ideal, but not too bad a compromise to get fixed machines.

Jackson Blue Photo Day

Try number two for taking photos. Our pre-dive checks went fine, we got into the water and clipped everything on, and as I checked my machine's PO2 before breathing the loop, I saw that my first cell was dead. This has happened a couple of times before. The first time it happened to me was when I was ascending from a 70m dive in the shaft at Badgat, on one of my first 10 dives with the machine. It is the second time that it's happened to me on this trip. The last time Kev pushed the head around a bit and the cell came alive. We have always assumed the cell cartridge comes a bit loose. This time no amount of smacking, or jiggling or my swimming upside down got the cell to read, so I had to get out.

Even after opening up the head and pushing the cartridge back in, it didn't read. I called Kev out the water. We took the whole cartridge apart and removed the wiring harness, and there we could finally see that one of the wires was unconnected. It looked like it had been pushed, instead of soldered, into place.

The light went off for both of us as to why my cell had sometimes just stopped reading and then started again with some bumping. We would have to contact Hammerhead to get a replacement wiring harness, but in the meantime we both really wanted to dive. So Kev pushed the wire back on and managed to get the cartridge back together without it bumping. Back in the water and finally we got to take the pics :) I'm putting albums of all the links at http://www.facebook.com/StatesOfImmersion, but here's one of the entrance into Jackson Blue, and others are scattered through my posts.

Looking out from Jackson Blue cavern to the entrance

Afterward we contacted Trish at Juergensen Marine (manufacturers of our Hammerhead Rebreathers), sent a pic of our problem, and luckily they had a spare wiring harness which they sent overnight to Cave Adventurers ... once again the efficiency in the States is incredible, in South Africa I would have been out of action for weeks.