"Damn, it's awfully dark in here!"

Another fine day of diving in Aerolito de Paraiso. Since I am sure some of you are wondering what Aerolito really looks like, I decided to take the camera this trip and show you. Here are pictures of the entrance to the cave and the surrounding cenote. As you can see there is a group of five divers about to go in for a training exercise. The entrance to the cave is towards the right side of the picture. I think I'd mentioned in a post last year that you have to share this cenote with the local crocodiles. There used to be a small sign near the entrance that stated simply "Peligro - Cocodrilo" but now there is this distinctly placed sign, written in two languages. I've only once ever seen crocodiles here and they were far from the cave entrance.

When tourists or passers by see me in dive gear with double tanks, they naturally get curious. Questions I often get are: is there really a cave in there? is it dark in the cave? how far back does it go? do you need any special kind of training? is it salt water or fresh? how long do you dive in there? The answers are: Yes, yes, thousands of feet, yes, both, a long time.

I'd been having bad luck with the camera on previous dives with Brad in Aerolito, mostly because of a bad sync cord or a bad bulkhead. Probably both. Since those problems were sorted out a while ago it's been smooth sailing in open water dives, but could I get a successful photo session Aerolito? YES! So without much further ado, I'll spend the rest of this post uploading photos and making brief comments. Read my blog post from yesterday for some elaboration of what you see.


Above: The cave floor, in the passageway(s) at 55-60 foot depth. Well into the halocline layer and away from the freshwater flow that deposits so much silt.


Above: An albino starfish, originally thought to be endemic to Cozumel caves, it has recently been identified as a species of deep-sea starfish. It is still a mystery how it got into Aerolito.


Above: A blind cave shrimp. Sorry its not well in focus, I was in a rush to take the picture as it was moving fast, and it is quite small. Probably only 1" long.


Above: Brittle star. Common, same variety as can be found in the ocean nearby. The cave floor is littered with these, but usually they are hiding in holes in the silt. It took a bit of searching to find a good photography subject.


Above: This is a.... I have no idea what this is. Some kind of sponge? A symbiote of two sponges? This was in the middle of the cave floor not far off the permanent line. It was about 9 inches in diameter and 15 inches tall. I'll have to ask Brad if he knows what it is.


Above: A type of fire worm. This one was about 2" long, and moving pretty fast.


Above: Permanent main line covered with sponges, as described in yesterday's post. This section was by no means the worst I'd seen.


Above: Some stalactites in the cave, at about the 50' depth level. Dark, aren't they? Aerolito has only a few places with speleothems like this, and they are all dark colored same as in this photo.

Macro photography in Aerolito is easy, as long as you're not too close to the halocline layer. But on all of my attempts to do wide-angle of the cave passage, I have been thwarted. Even with a wide aperture on the lens, high ISO setting of up to 800, and even with my uber-powerful Ikelite 400 strobe set to maximum output, I still could not get a good shot of a passageway wider than 3 or 4 feet. This cave is just so incredibly dark, it just absorbs all my strobe's light!

I really need to do a set-up with both my 400's and spend a whole dive working on the right camera settings. So the only good photo I have to show you of cave passage comes from Brad himself, taken two years ago. Here is a link to that picture.

Our dive today was to find and explore the cave passage we were looking for on yesterday's trip, which should have been a "T" or a jump off of the loop/circuit someone made up to replace the old line. Well, we did find it but were only able to penetrate a couple hundred feet until Brad's two spools ran out. That was far enough to run into another permanent line but neither of us knew which one it was. The original line we were following was still there, but torn apart at virtually every tie-off and would have been unsafe for navigation.

Dive was called at about 45 minutes after running out of line. We surfaced after a total of 95 minutes which included a 5 minute safety stop. A considerable amount of time was spent in the 55' deep passageway but neither of us incurred any deco.