In The Dark

One of the primary rules of cave diving is that you must be equipped with (at least) three independent sources of light. The title of today's blog post refers to what happens when your primary light fails, and both your backups fail too. Yes, this actually happened to one of the divers today, though it was someone in Connie's team, not ours. Fortunately he was in the middle of a line of 6 divers and had light from other people's bright HID lights to go by. Still, I can only imagine this was very frustrating for him.

So, we finish a 4th day of our cave dive tour and haven't yet broken our streak of primary light failures. Will it never end....


I enjoy cave diving for so many reasons. So even when a dive is less than average it is still a very good dive. Both dives today were examples of this. I still enjoyed every minute.

Vaca Ha

Now that I have my story straight, Vaca-Ha means "Cow Water" in the Mayan, or literally a watering hole for bovines. I guess it is no surprise that there are cow bones inside the cave entrance in about 15 feet of water. I have started calling this cenote "Cow Wash" because it is only about a mile from the well known cenote "Car Wash." Connie will not dive in Car Wash because a nearby garbage dump is leaching heavy amounts of bacteria water and causing many cave divers to get ear infections.

Vaca-Ha is a relatively deep cave compared to the others we visited, and has only a smattering of speleothems (decorations). Its average depth is around 60-65 feet and it is easy to hit 90 feet if you want to. I did this dive with 34% nitrox and was happy I did, as most of the others on the team using air incurred a minor amount of deco by the end of the dive. This cave is best known for its plentiful and well-defined halocline. It is a pristine blu-ish shimmering layer that is perfectly set in the middle of long passageways for most of the cave at about 65 feet depth. Aside from the halocline, there is not much else noteworthy as it has only a few areas with stalactites as compared to other nearby caves.

Calimba towards Bosh-Chen

Calimba has seen better days. One rumor has it that the land owner had damages the cenote in an attempt to open it up for snorkeling. Now it has a high bacteria content because of the high light exposure and lack of flow, and I am over-zealous to use ear drops whenever I dive there.

Calimba is an entrance into system Sac Aktun and for you readers who have been paying attention you will remember that it connects to Grand Cenote. In fact, Connie used to do a traverse (go in one Cenote, come out another) from Calimba to Grand Cenote. I don't know if she still does but it is an easy traverse that takes only about 50 minutes bottom time.

Our dive today was to go in and take two "T"s to the Bosh Chen cenote. There are five of us today, Lena-Alex1-Mike2-Mike1-me. I like being last sometimes, for reasons I'll explain later in my "reflections of cave diving" post. Calimba has many winding passageways including one called the Boa Constriction. I enjoy challenges like this as it is the ultimate test of how good my trim and buoyancy are. Well, maybe not the ultimate but these restrictions are lots of fun.

We make the 2nd jump on the Bosh Chen line. Lena then takes a jump to what she thinks is the Bosch Chen loop but it turns out is a side passage that leads back to where we came from. The jump she intended to make was another 20 yards further. Anyway, we go on this line for about 5 minutes and then one of the team calls the dive because of "a bad feeling." It was not me who called the dive, however I respect the choice to call the dive for such a reason because if you are diving in a cave and you suddenly don't want to be there, you should get out. The cave diving culture has a golden rule that states: "Anyone can call the dive for any reason at any time." And that's exactly what happened today.

To date I have made three dives from Cenote Calimba. I have yet to see Cenote Bosh Chen. Here's hoping it'll happen on #4....