. Getting to the site was the biggest challenge as the entrance was about three painful, rocky, jarring, untamed miles through the jungle. We were fortunate, actually, as the road didn't exist until recently and the only way previous to this "road" was by horseback. Nonetheless, my back is still very sore from the trip. I'm badly in need of a chiropractor to un-jam what was jammed and I'm concerned how this may affect the rest of the trip.But being underwater in scuba gear is a near-weightless experience and lets me forget that I have to take the same road to get back out... at least for the 90 minutes of the dive.
I have to step back a moment and describe the group. Connie LoRe is the organizer and host; she does these week-long tours several times a year mostly in wintertime. Her normal job is a manager of the well known cave dive site Ginnie Springs in central Florida. There are two couples, one from Ohio and the other from New York, I think. I'm here by myself and so is Sandra, my cave partner for the week, shown in the picture above. She's almost two decades older than I am and probably in much better shape than me. For this dive I loaned her my video system while I took my DSLR for the first time this trip. This is also the first dive I took my recently acquired Ikelite 400 strobe into a cave.
Now I need to step back yet again, this time to talk about strobes. Two years ago I was shooting with a Canon S1 IS using its built-in strobe. In darkness it had an effective lighting distance of about two feet... but in daylight the camera itself did a wonderful job. We still have it and sometimes use it. Last year, Andrew gave me his old DSLR set-up on long-term loan which I am still using. The strobes on this system are Sea&Sea YS-90's with an output power of about 67 watt-seconds. Most underwater strobes are in the power range of about 50-100 watt-seconds. The biggest ones currently made are roughly 150 watt-seconds and they're pretty big size-wise. But the king of commercially made underwater strobes is (or at least was... they're no longer manufactured) the Ikelite 400 which can put out an amazing 400 watt-seconds of power in one burst. In a cave where there is absolutely no natural light, you need this kind of power to get any sense of depth. Last year when I used two YS-90's the result was... nice... but wanting. Today, using one YS-90 on the left and one Ikelite 400 on the right, I got really GOOD results. Leaning towards the kind of results I have been looking for in underwater cave photography. I still need to fine tune my camera settings, fix my dome port (I scratched the inside of it last month trying a mutant lens set-up) and connect the sync cord directly to the strobe instead of trying to use slave mode. The reason for the latter is very technical and I'll skip it for now.
And of course, why have one Ikelite 400 when you could use two! Yes, I have two of them but they weigh so much (8 lbs each) that I haven't bothered to set up the camera rig with both at the same time. But *sigh* I am dreaming of the thought of 800 screaming watts for wide angle cave photography. Maybe the end of this week. We'll see.
Carrying a camera (still or video) with you on a dive is troublesome. It throws off your balance, it causes a LOT of drag, it adds a heavy amount of task loading (non-tech diver folks can simply read that as "stress") and in a cave environment it is a bulky part of your profile that you have to push... ever so gently, for the sake of the cave and the camera... through every tight passage you will face in the cave. I always burn a lot more air when I have a camera; there's no way to relax on a dive when carrying one. But when everything works: when the camera doesn't leak, when the batteries are all charged, when the camera itself doesn't keep resetting on me (another story for another day), and all the settings like aperture, shutter speed, ISO, sync rate, strobe angle, angle of reflection, subject distance.... you get the idea.... When all of that is working, the photos are wonderful memories of where I've been.
So. Today. We went to Tux Kubaxa to see mastodon bones. If you look in the picture above just behind the video camera you'll see the biggest bone of the lot. The picture at right is the best close-up I got. To get to this spot we swam for about 40 minutes, then spent three minutes crowding around getting in each others' way... three of us taking photos and video. I had a bad moment not being able to back up and though I wasn't near any panic, I was thoroughly annoyed that my delicate buoyancy control was out of whack. (My cave partner has it on video, it's most embarrasing.) Too many divers in too tight a spot, so says I. But we all survived, I got good pictures of the bones, Sandra has nice video especially on the way out as she was gradually mastering the nuances of the video housing.
Connie calls Tux Kubaxa a "Power Cave" with emphasis on the capital letters. It is big, it has lots of huge rooms that remind me of Mammoth Cave in Kentucky. Except these are filled with water of course. It has gorgeous white limestone formations all over the place. What else can I tell you? It was impressive.
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