I was leading this time round. We descended the chimney and I'd been told to look out for turtle bones that were resting on a ledge in the caves. I wasn't sure if the bones were here or at Pothole Sink, so I had a good look at all the ledges to the right after the chimney and as I looked upward I saw what looked like a skull looking down at me! I got a huge fright and checked it twice to make sure I wasn't seeing things. Then I chuckled and thought "well that's a great omen for the start to a dive" and on we went. We took it easy to Pothole and just after the turn I spotted the turtle bones I'd missed yesterday just sitting on the ledge. They were huge!
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| Skull someone has put up on a ledge looking down at you as you swim into Peacock I |
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| Turtle bones found in the cave and laid on a shelf for divers to see just after Pothole Sink |
We headed around and onward toward Olsen. Just before Olsen the rooms start to get really beautiful. They're tall and a bit narrower so that you can get the reflection from both sides of the white limestone walls in this level of visibility. The main line ducks through a hole in one of the limestone walls but there is also space below to pass through the structure. I really enjoyed this section of the cave. Then it started to get narrower and head upward on a huge slope of silt. At about 10m the line ducked right and there was a jump marked. We followed the line up to Olsen Sink and I pushed myself forward to a narrow point where I could see the light and the trees, but I could also see that there were lots of branches and debris in the way on the route out. I decided against heading up there, in fact I couldn't believe that there was enough space up there for another entrance or line, so I moved back down and indicated to Kev to go and take a look, and then we turned around and headed back to the jump.
At the jump we swam across and looked at the line and Kev indicated that it wasn't yellow. This meant that it wasn't the main line from Olsen to Challenge, but it was most probably The Crossover jump. So I grabbed Kev's reel and we made the jump and then I headed on along this white line. The passage was narrower, dark and extremely silty. As I swam into one room I pointed my light upward and it was just black above me. As my light moved upward along the white limestone wall it just disappeared into blackness. This had a very ominous feel and I couldn't quite work it out. Was there another blacked over opening above us? What was going on? Then I moved along a bit further and my light disappeared onto wall of darkness ahead. It was then that I clicked ... this was tannic water. We'd been told about the pockets of tannic water left over from the flooding and this was it. There was no way I wanted to swim into that wall of blackness. This had to be the first time ever in a cave that I've thought of "monsters in the dark". It was scary and I wanted nothing to do with it just yet. So I signaled to Kev a turn around, and we headed back.
Kev collected up the reel and I picked up my cookie and we started on the return journey. Now Kev was in front, so I had more time and light to examine the cave. Now that I'd seen a tannic pocket up close and personal, I could notice both the tannic in the water blocking our light from reaching the walls, and the very dark tannic pockets above us that closed in around the ceiling blocking off our view of the real limestone rock above us.
The cave depth in Peacock goes up and down constantly. And at one section as I watched Kev disappear under a wall I tried to clear my ears and my left ear stuck. Uh-oh. I signaled my light quickly left to right to try and notify Kev that I needed to go backwards and up a bit but he kept going. I tried to make the duck under but it was painful and since I still had space above in which to clear it I didn't want to push it. So I signaled again quickly this time up and down and he noticed and turned. I showed him ear problems and asked him to wait on the line while I went up a couple of meters to clear the ear pressure. This was my first time ever to feel a real bout of nervousness inside a cave about my ears. I knew we had over 300m of traveling up and down to get back to the entrance and if my ear wouldn't clear I faced possibly bursting the ear drum and lots of pain. But about 3m up it cleared and I quickly descended and indicated to Kev "let's go". Phew!
We passed some divers heading in as we headed out and up the chimney. At about 9m in the chimney we had a quick underwater exchange about heading back along the Peanut Line and picking up our reel. Our dive time was only about 90 minutes at this point, and we were equipped and prepared for at least another 90 minutes or more. We were still warm in our cosy dry suits, so we decided to go and fetch the reel.
Once again, I took the lead and we headed off. The Peanut Line was just as nice as our first dive here. In 6-8m visibility, close walls are the difference between feeling dark and feeling light. Plus it's fun to pull yourself along a narrow passage that isn't silty and it gives you a break from swimming. After we descended down the breakdown, I lay down on a huge flat limestone rock and pulled off my mask and cleared my sinuses and got all freshened up and ready for the swim ahead.
Once we got to our reel at The Crossover, I indicated to Kev that I wanted to follow the line we'd jump to and see if we could meet back to the main line we'd left at Olsen about an hour ago. I couldn't have swum more than 100-200' when once again I encountered the black wall of tannic water. This time I wasn't nearly as spooked as I'd been on the Olsen side. Both Kev and I closed in on it and where exclaiming how amazing it is that it forms such a wall. There isn't much flow in that tunnel, so surely the layers should mix with each other, but they don't. They form a layer as oil would on water. What is in the tannic water that means that the viscosity is so different to that of the spring water? Not only that but when I floated into the tannic water along the line with my fingers circling it because visibility was so low, the temperature spiked upward. We thought that we would try to push through that tannic layer, and Kev took the lead (clearly I was still a bit spooked by this weird warm dark block of "mist" in our way), but after just 3m where I could barely see my own hand on the line, Kev also turned back into me and we exited. We later found out that if we had just followed the line for another 10m or so, we would have come out of the tannic to where we'd been on the Olsen side. What an awesome experience though. I still want to know what's in that water and why it doesn't mix with the spring water.
We got back to our reel and I collected it up and then I followed Kev out on a nice relaxing exit. Our total dive time was 2h20, our approximate distance was 5274' which is a 1.6km swim non-stop underwater! ... very nice dive :)
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| Map of our swim around Peacock 1, Olsen, The Crossover and Peanut |
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