Cenote, Cavern and Cave Diving

Why Overhead Diving?

I remember reading a Sunday Times Magazine article about cave diving when I was very young and being thoroughly horrified at the idea. It seemed insane that anyone would want to do this. Ok, they could see some cool stalagtites in air pocket rooms, as long as they pushed past enough of the dead bodies jamming up the passages, but surely a cave is a cave, a dark nasty hole in the earth where sane humans have no right to be, and if it happened to be full of water then that was absolute madness! Not for me thankyou very much!

I never really thought much about cave diving after that until on my 'relocation' flight to Miami as a newly certified Open Water diver. I happened to have the book "Underwater Florida", which had some nice articles about Springs diving and particularly some of the better known caverns in the area such as Devils Den, The Ginnie ballroom at Ginnie Springs etc.

Now this did appeal. I could dive in 200' visibility water not really cave diving, but just poking around in beautiful grottos. As it turned out I didn't actually rush up to Ginnie Springs the instant I landed, but waited quite a while. I followed the PADI way of things and soon had racked up a couple of hundred dives and sufficient little plastic cards to be certain that I was the dogs bollox in diving. Oh dear! Like so many open water divers who feel this I was so very wrong!

So one day my friend and original dive buddy, William Anzueto and I packed our snorkels and Miami diver attitude in the back of the car and headed up North to do a springs trip. We went to a Paradise springs met some guy who had a reel in the carpark and proceeded to completely silt up a 140' deep tunnel after tieing in the line to the grim reaper sign. A real air share on the way back just to make things interesting and we had survived. Fortunately for us we had the sense to heed the warning. A little humbled, but not entirely, we headed back to Miami, where William booked us into the first available cavern course at Ginnie Springs.

Arriving back at Ginnie Springs a few weeks later, we met our instructor 'Rose Meadows'. While we both realized the necessity of learning to do this properly, we still had our attitude (and also our snorkels) and we could still show these straw chewing Hicksville bumpkins what it was to be a cool diver.

Rose removed that atitude very very quickly. After 4 hours sweating at the back of the Ginnie Springs shop and realizing that our equipment was barely adequate even after some hefty reconfiguration. When we saw her in the water we realized that we were barely beginners at diving, never mind cave diving and for all our nice PADI certification cards we were still rookies.

A few weeks later we went back to Ginnie Springs to take the intro to cave diving course of the NSS-CDS (National Speological Society, Cave Diving Section). The second part of four, that would eventually lead to a "Full Cave" certification.

While I am far from being a top cave diver, now at least I have some of the basic skills pretty much sorted out leaving me at a level where I really need to do a lot more diving to advance.

Cave diving for me is about exploration, whether hacking a route out in the jungle to find a beautiful caveless cenote or laying line thousands of feet back in a system that has hot showers in the carpark. For this reason I choose to stand outside the, at times, ridiculous politics of diving and cave diving. I will always admire explorers, even ones with snorkels!

Cave, Cavern and Cenote Diving in Mexico...

I can't imagine anywhere else in the world that can offer such a variety of overhead diving than Mexico, and in particular the cenotes around Puerto Aventuras. It really is the best in the world, with something for everyone. Beginner divers can enjoy the open water cenote basins, while more advanced open water divers can experience overhead diving, by being guided by cave divers in specially designated 'safe' caverns'. Experienced cave divers have everything available to them with even the possibility of exploration of virgin cave systems.

Cave and Cavern Diving in Florida...

Florida is pretty much the home of modern cave diving, most modern procedures and equipment come from there and a lot of what happens in Florida is propagated beyond the niche cave world to the technical diving world as a whole. The caves are not decorated like the caves of Mexico and most don't have haloclyns, but they are still very beautiful. Facilities at the main comercial sites such as Ginnie Springs and the state parks such as Peacock Springs state park are generally excellent. A hot shower after a night dive in the Devils Ear is particularly welcoming in winter!