Nohoch nah Chich (revisited)

If ever you wondered WHY I do this cave diving thing, the picture at right will speak a thousand words. Occasionally I come across stuff in the caves which is so utterly mind-blowing that it exceeds my understanding. These ARE stalactites. They ARE underwater, probably about 20 feet down but 2,500 feet from the nearest entrance. I KNOW that they formed during the last ice-age, but how?? How long did it take? Were air currents involved? This set of columns covered an area about 5x5 feet... not terribly large but amazingly complex. Click on the picture and see up-close for yourself how bizzare these are.

On Saturday, Glenn and I rented tanks from Villas deRosa and made two long cave dives into Nohoch nah Chich. Yes, this is the same cave system I blogged about earlier when I took the tour with Connie LoRe just three weeks ago. But this time we were there to have FUN. And I was armed to the hilt with camera gear! On this trip I had the Canon 300D in an A300 Aquatica housing, a 10-22mm f/3.5 lens, one Sea&Sea YS-90 strobe on the left side and a big honkin' Ikelite 400 cranked to full power (400 watt-seconds) on my right side. In addition, I put my second Ikelite 400 on Glenn's back using a remote sensor. The strobe points backwards and the sensor points forwards. This is a common configuration among underwater cave photographers and if you look closely at some of the best-looking cave photos you'll see these back-mounted strobes subtly in action. Hey, what the pros can do, I will try to do too!

The good news: It worked marvelously. This was my first time ever having both my 400's in the water, and the results were excellent. Not spectacular, yet, but it was definitely another big push forward in my underwater photography skills. The bad news: the remote sensor on Glenn's back flooded during the dive and malfunctioned horribly. But not before getting at least a dozen really nice shots. The sensor is probably toast; but what the hey. It was a $25 purchase off of eBay.

Glenn and I understood before dive that we both had a lot to learn about composition and modelling and that this was to be a training dive. I set the ground rules: "when I target a formation with my light, I want you to swim over to it, point your tail at it at a distance of 5-15 feet and then face me so I can get a shot. If there is any risk of disorientation, we place a directional marker on the line before photographing." For the most part this worked really well, but I think I should've pushed for wider angle on the lens. Too much Glenn, not enough formation.

And point of note, since I never really changed my orientation it never became necessary to mark the main line. But it was really good we discussed and agreed on this protocol before we started the dive.

Our first dive was not quite to plan; we both had trouble finding the main line and ended up on a completely different line. No matter, our dive plan was straight-forward which would have been appropriate for any of the lines in this cenote. This line ended up being a loop which put us back onto the main line after about 1000' penetration. Laughing in my regulator, I surmised this to be the main line and shortly afterwards recognized the formations to our right. I told Glenn to go left when we "T"eed and we ended up at the NatGeo platform within a few minutes. This was a good opportunity to explain what had happened and discuss our plan of action. We continued to swim back to the cenote, this time on the main line, until it was in view. Once Glenn was convinced it was the main line we turned the dive reversing our path, picking up our jump reel as we hopped back onto our errant loop trail. Total dive time: about 112 minutes. There was PLENTY to see along this passageway and I'm glad it worked out the way it did because I would probably never have explored this part of the cave otherwise.

It was nearly 4:00pm by the time we started our second dive and we agreed to turn it at 45 minutes or 1/3rds whichever came first. We knew we'd be coming out near sunset and we didn't want to inconvenience the landowners if at all possible. Our plan: We were to take the main line (now that we knew where it was) until we reached the second visible jump to the right, then take that jump for however long we had time. My goal was to look for the same beautiful passageway that Dallas had taken us on last year... and to find the "spiny spines" as I'd been calling them since I saw them the first time. The spiny spines are in fact the photo above.

There is other bizarre stuff here as well. This photo is... well, I don't know what it is. It was just there along our way looking like a carved statue -- maybe this is the bird in the "giant birdcage?"

Anyway. Two more great dives in Nohoch nah Chich and almost 200 more photographs to enjoy and share with my friends. I only wish more of my diver friends were into cave diving....