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.
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| 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.
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