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.
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| 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.
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| Twin Caves Mooring |
Then we continued upstream to take a look at Jackson Blue from the Merritt's Mill Pond perspective.
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| Kev driving the boat away with Jackson Blue Spring in the background |
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| 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!
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| 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.
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| 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!
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