Labna Ha

If I have my story right (and mind you, I may not be 100% accurate) a small group of entrepreneurial foreigners bought 124 acres of scrub land in the middle of the Riviera Maya... with the purpose of discovering, exploring and exploiting for tourist trade the caves known to be in the region.

One of many discoveries was the underwater cave system now known as Labna Ha. It is very exclusive; you can only dive there with an owner or a highly trusted representative. There is no underwater photography permitted. Photography above water is permitted but only without a tripod. And I've heard that you may be charged as much as US$150 for one cave dive. The owners now boast that the property was recently appraised at $7 million. With the growing popularity of cave diving and other forms of tourism in this region, I think they were very smart to do what they did.

Today we split into two groups of four; those who'd been to Labna Ha previously went with Pep, one of the owners, to visit side passages off the main line. I was in the group led by Connie as we would do a long penetration along the main line only. We made it 62 minutes into the dive (approximately 3000' or so) before one of the team called on thirds. I was still about twenty minutes from calling thirds myself but that's okay. We ended with 120 minutes total dive time according to my watch -- that's a LONG dive.

Labna Ha is not a big cave in terms of cross-sectional area and there are many tight restrictions where I felt like a rhinoceros trying to walk gingerly through a china shop. I will proudly say that I hardly touched a thing; without a camera I could dedicate all my awareness to maintaining perfect trim. Unfortunately I witnessed periodic damage being done by others on the team (I'm sure I wasn't 100% perfect either) as fins brushed against those delicate formations. Oh well. I have always accepted that it was one of the sad truths about this sport. You cannot make a cave better by diving in it, only worse.

After the dive we were treated to a lunch of barbecue chicken and chorizo, Mayan style. Afterwards we shot down a zip line to a dry cave to tour there. The owners lit it very nicely with coloured lights. Even though we were not allowed tripods, I would set the camera down on the wood walkway to get the 2-3 second exposures needed in that amount of light. The results were spectacular. The photo above is one of the best; be sure to click on it to see it in full size. I uploaded the original JPEG for you to enjoy.

Labna Ha was talked up all week as one of the best caves to visit. Although I saw some really awesome formations, it would not be my #1 choice for a return dive. Not really disappointed, just not as impressed as the hype led me to believe. IMHO it isn't even as fun as Sac Aktun. And in Sac Aktun we're allowed all the photography we can manage!

Mastodon Bones

Welcome back to my journey through the Riviera Maya cave systems. Today was a l-o-n-g trip to Cenote Tux (or Tush) Kubaxa (pronounced toosh ku-boh-sha). 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.

Cave Diving with Connie

About two months ago I was actively looking for new venues to do cave diving, particularly in the Riviera Maya region of Mexico. I was flipping through the recent issue of Underwater Speleology (the rag put out by the NSS-CDS) and came across an ad for a week-long cave "camp" hosted by Connie LoRe, a well known personality in the cave community. Sounded perfect to me, so after a few quick correspondences I plopped down a hefty deposit and waited patiently for the trip to start.

The base of operations is at Villas deRosa in Aventuras Akumal. Aside from some staffing problems having to do with the cooks, the operation at Villas deRosa runs pretty smoothely. Connie's group is six divers, three women three men and (as I'm getting used to in this business) I am the youngest. There is another larger group here from Alabama, a combination of open water and cave divers. This hotel caters specifically to divers and appears to be a popular vacation spot, ideally situated on the ocean and within a half hour's drive of some fabulous caves.

I'm now in Day #3, having completed four wonderful cave dives in: Grand Cenote Paso de Lagarto, Grand Cenote Cuzan-ha Loop (and one jump beyond), Vaca Ha, and Minotauro. Some details on each follow.


Grand Cenote I've visited many times in the past few years so I won't go into too much detail here. It is still one of my favourite cave dive spots and is currently ranked as the #2 largest underwater cave system in the world as Sistema Sac Aktun (it lost its #1 slot to sistema Ox Bel Ha last month).

This year I purchased a (used) underwater video set-up including two nice 20w halogen pod lights. The video was via a friend of a friend and although it is many years old, it IS digital and it DOES work very well. I spent the past six weeks using it on open water dives so bringing it into the caves was not my first attempts with it. I'm glad I spent the time in open water, because the resulting video footage I got yesterday in Grand Cenote was better than I expected... much of it will be useful should I edit down later.


This morning (Monday 12/10 to be precise) we went to Vaca Ha, a tiny cenote on private property. It started as a difficult restriction then opened to a very nice, but small, cave. Most notable were the long tunnels with copious halocline. I say copious because, being 6th diver in a 7 diver series, the salt/fresh water layer was pretty well disturbed by the time I passed through. Going a few feet either up into fresh or down into salt made radical improvements in visibility. The halocline was at about 60-65 feet, I think. This cave system was pretty deep most of the way, making me thankful for having 36% nitrox. Fortunately no one on any of the dive teams hit deco or it could have been a much longer dive. Vaca Ha was interesting, but on a cave dive scale of 1-10 it only rates about a 3 or 4. In other words, I'd go again if that's where the group goes, but I wouldn't choose it for myself. I also didn't bring either video or DSLR on this dive choosing just to enjoy the cave.

The afternoon was at Minotauro. Also situated on private land, the cenote was large and beautiful. We were the only ones there. An extremely odd bird call taunted us as we suited up -- we never saw the bird but it was kind of spooky. The mosquitoes were also homing in on us quickly so suiting up and jumping in the water became a top priority for me. This time I had the video ready and started out by filming the cenote before diving in. Minotauro was fantastic - it had such a variety of everything any cave diver could ask for. Beautiful formations, ceilings coated with soda straw stalactites, breakdown areas, a tight restriction to squeeze through (only 18" tall!) and lots of halocline to play in. I got what appear to be really good shots of the halocline. I won't know until I can see the video on a larger screen. Believe me, it is very hard to film the halocline and the "green mirror effect." All my previous attempts at doing it using DSLR photography turned out meaningless. Video is the only way to do it.

Tomorrow we are off to Tush Xabaxa (pronounced "toosh kah-basha") where there are said to be mastodon bones. I will be giving the video a rest to do still photography instead. Hopefully I'll get some nice stills posted for you tomorrow.

Beyond Alaska

Oh, wow. It's been six months since I finished the Alaska tour and I never completed the story. Well for anyone reading this I'll have to summarise in the next paragraph. If we meet in person before I forget the details I'll be happy to elaborate with much enthusiasm on the following:

Juneau was pretty, and expensive. I will never forget that a salmon lunch at a remote cottage for two (accessible only by seaplane) cost $400. But the glaciers were most memorable and seeing them by seaplane was a great way to do it. Skagway was my favourite port of call: the town retains its rustic Gold Rush image. The White Pass train ride (diesel powered) was spectacular with fantastic scenery worth every moment sitting out of the car, getting vista photos with the wide angle. I even saw a working steam train in Skagway, doing maintenance duty and not pulling passengers, but running nonetheless! Ketchikan was a let-down partly because we arrived into port so late that the best tours were booked out. We did a last minute taxi tour just to do something and although I got nice shots of the bald eagles it was more disappointment than pleasure. For those who might go on this cruise in the future, save your money for Ketchikan. Some of the more unique local items I saw on the trip were sold there.

Since Alaska I've done the usual summer things, the two most notable being (1) I learned how to swim and (2) Pennsic War. It was uncomfortably humid at War this year, that kept most of the folks sweltering away in their tents instead of being out and about. For merchants that meant drastically reduced sales. No one wanted to think about shopping. Those of you who don't know, I am part owner of a merchant business at Pennsic: we run a cyber cafe for the masses. And I have to say we put a lot of effort this year into improving both appearance and services. It paid off. We did well despite the heat although I am certain had the weather been more tolerable we would have done much better. Anyway I am happy to have done as well as we did, and I personally want to thank everyone who patronised our business and appreciated our upgrades.

I'm back in Cozumel now, on a three month stay. Actually the truth is I am in Akumal a small hotel district south of Playa del Carmen as I write this. This blog took a back seat for too long and I needed to do some quick catch-up. I'd been on Cozumel for six weeks already, doing open water diving and whatnot, then started a week-long tour of cave diving. But that's for the next blog entry, starting in just a moment!

I'll have some nice pictures of Cozumel-so-far-this-trip after I've had a chance to slow down and post-process them. This trip has been somewhat difficult because I've been spending more time per week consulting than I do at home. Great for the income, difficult on the vacation part of my vacation. Oops, did I say I was on vacation?

Juneau (part 2)

Yeah, I'm writing this two weeks after the cruise. But there are still many great memories popping up as I settle back to my daily grind. Especially of Juneau, as this was the nicest town and the most picturesque of the trip. So a few more random thoughts to complete the picture, if you don't mind.

The Taku Lodge was a remarkable little collection of cabins, notable not in how it looked so much as where it was. There is absolutely no road access, all supplies (and people) are brought in only by floatplane or by barge. The story of how it came to be, and the owners that managed it over the past 84+ years or so is what makes the place so remarkable. Here is a link to a fairly thorough history: http://www.wingsairways.com/taku-lodge-history.html.

Long before we arrived in Juneau we were given warnings about black and grizzly bears. They have a set of rules all their own, and once you go venturing outside into Alaska on their territory you're under their rules, not yours. This couldn't have been made more punctual than the sign that greeted people to Taku Lodge.

One of the most memorable things about Juneau, and Taku Lodge, was the smell. The air was FRESH - I mean, unlike anywhere else I'd ever been. And it being the early spring season when we visited there was a smell there (probably a flower I never was able to identify) that remided me -strongly- of the smell of an apiary. That is, when I used to keep bees, there is a distinct sweet smell of bees and beehive when you first open the hive Or standing next to a hive when the weather was warm. That's what the air smelled like. It was a really pleasant memory that I'll never forget.

The floatplane was a DeHaviland Beaver, made back in the late 40's and early 50's as military marine transport and rescue(?) planes. They are extremely well suited to the Alaskan climate and terrain, and even with seven of us packed into the plane it had an impressive amount of power to take off of water. (I've owned a floatplane and I know what it takes to break contact from water and take off.) I was able to negotiate the co-pilot seat. Tracey got the very back seat of the plane, the only seat with views from both sides of the aircraft. We both had SLR cameras and got splendid shots of the glaciers, vistas and waterways. See my web album to view the best of these photos. The most remarkable was, as I'd mentioned earlier, that "glacier blue" colour in the ice which came out extremely well considering the plane was in motion and we had to shoot through the windows.

In case anyone reading this is curious... my camera rig for most of the Alaska trip was a Canon 30D with a 4gb card. The new lens I had just purchased for the trip was the 70-200mm f/4L lens which I chose because of its zoom power, "L" rating and because it was considerably lighter than its f/2.8L older brother. At over $1100 for the lens alone, it was barely affordable but the results are worth it. Lots of people on the cruise had Digital SLR's, probably an equal number of Canon and Nikon owners. I loaned my lenses to a few Canon owners who were using the (blah!) 18-55mm kit lens and they were all impressed. I'm telling you, if I were a Canon salesman I could probably earn my way on trips like this just selling lenses.

Sailing the Alaskan Coast - Day 3

Day 3 Memoirs

Welcome to our Alaska cruise. I'm starting blog entries on Day #3 (Juneau) because I didn't remember I had a blog until just a few hours ago! Many interesting things have happened but I'll have to write about them later. Here's starting from yesterday (Sunday, June 3rd).

After seeing so many eagles on the train trip up from Seattle to Vancouver I shouldn't be so surprised to see another one. But this morning one went past the window of our cabin, passing a scant 20 feet away!! Oh, if only I had my camera in hand at that moment.

The weather cooperated magnificently today -- we weren't sure if any days would have good weather so we'd thought the first chance at seeing glaciers on a day without rain would be one we try to book an air flight. These tend to be between expensive and downright highway robbery. But it's one of those things you have to say, "Well I'll only be this way once in my life and its the only chance I'll have."

Finding tour operators in Juneau was a frustrating mystery. Where were they? We wandered Juneau's nice, clean streets with elegant shops aimlessly and finally found the "discount" shops. Not many, but we managed to be persuaded into a flight tour over five glaciers, with a salmon bake dinner thrown in to boot -- at the low price of only $225 each. Well, low it isn't but it was a lot less than taking a $398 helicopter tour if we'd booked on the boat.

This tour was to the Taku Glacier Lodge (long and very interesting history about this place -- ask me about it later) by seaplane, dinner and a short hike, and then back by seaplane to Juneau. All in about 3 hours. This had better be one helluva good time at $75/hour.

The salmon bake was quite good, better actually than most of the food we get on the ship. Fresh salmon, caught 16 miles upstream, then roasted on an open alderwood fire (not baked) to just about mouth-watering perfection. Add to this tasty beans (homemade home cookin' style), slaw and some of the most flavourful biscuits I'd ever had and I was quite impressed with the meal even though it was pretty much standard homestyle fare. It just happened to be the best of its class.

One of the most impressive parts of the meal was to learn that the ice used in our drinks was actually from remnants of the Hole-in-the-Wall Glacier across the river! I was literally drinking melted ice formed from snow that fell 4,000 to 5,000 years ago! Talk about the novelties of life.

The flights to and from the Lodge were... well, spectacular. I'd never seen glaciers in person and didn't even know the term "glacier blue" until I was hit rather suddenly with it in tiny pools just below me. I used a lot of digital film on these blips trying to get the best representation of that blue that I could. I only had a little bit of time to review the photos but I have to say that even in film the colour of "glacier blue" comes out rather well.

After morning whale watching, snow-capped mountains' glory, harbor seals, Juneau and glaciers, downloading the camera cards took quite a while. All told almost 500 pictures were taken on two dSLR cameras. 3.5 gigabytes!!

Today was a four meal day, since we took the sushi bar option for late dinner, just before the evening entertainment. Imagine this... five hours of All-You-Can- Eat sushi every night of the cruise! My first two meals of the day were lighter than average, but add to that the salmon bake and sushi and I started to wonder for the first time this trip how much I was going to weigh by the end.

Tonight's entertainer was ventriloquist Don Bryan of Canada. His bio provided to us in our daily schedule was impressive so we decided to go. A lot of his schtick was a bit old, dated, stale and sometimes too racy. However two of his acts really shined: one was with nothing more than a tennis ball and two O-rings (another great short story behind this I'll tell you later). But it was his last section that had me laughing hysterically, my eyes tearing so much I couldn't see for ten minutes straight! He used a live member of the audience as his 2nd "dummy" -- for this he chose a man about 40 years old and fairly stocky. He used touch contact to emulate puppet control (by squeezing the man's shoulder the man was supposed to open his mouth but not say anything). With a series of three different voices, each more ludicrous than the last, the whole audience was lost to laughter. I hadn't laughed so hard in anytime I can remember of recent past.

Tonite while in Juneau we once again cheated the evil Cruise Line of their money grubbing capitalistic greed. I brought a really powerful Wi-Fi antenna (15 dbi for those who are curious) and started poking around the town across the water from the boat. Our room was not dock side this port so the nearest houses were 2 or more miles across the water on the opposite side of the fjord. It took three attempts but found an unsecured router I was able to establish free service. Voila! And for all of 45 glorious minutes we had access to our email. Thank you, to whomever you were, for your generosity of sharing your internet. If I can do this at our other two ports of call we would have saved at least $100 in access fees.

Turks and Caicos Explorer

Well... our time in Cozumel had ended for this year. It was 100+ glorious days on the beautiful "Island of the Swallows" with scuba diving galore. I think my final tally was 95 dives making my total dives to date around 303. But Wait... there's more!

For six months we'd been planning to do the Turks and Caicos Explorer, a liveaboard run by Explorer Ventures. Our first experience with this company was two years ago on the Caribbean Explorer II, an excellent scuba trip with an itinerary that had us diving in St. Kitts, Statia (St. Eustatius) and Saba. Could this trip be as enjoyable and perfect as the last one? Read on to find out...

The Turks and Caicos are a small set of islands near the Bahama Island chain. They are a non-sovereign territory of the United Kingdom. Scuba diving is so popular here that on the immigration form there are checkboxes just for scuba as your reason for visiting. In terms of commercialization the island seems moderately built-up but there are no cruise ship visits here that I know of. The island's economy and general appearance reminded me a lot of St. Croix. Food is very expensive here: a simple snack/dinner for two consisting of one appetizer, a glass of wine, a bottle of beer (local, tasted like rusty pipes) and some water came to $50.

Our group consisted of four people: Andrew, Kathleen (whom we'd met on the Caribbean Explorer II trip), Tracey and myself. The passenger list showed there were a total of 15 divers for this trip. The boat has a maximum of 20 passengers.

We arrived a day early, partly to give time to decompress after a day of travel and partly to add assurance that we wouldn't miss our boat departure. Four others on this trip did miss the first day because of weather delays in Minnesota. For our first night we stayed at a lovely hotel near the town of Providenciales called the Miramar Resort. On the day of our embarkment, the T&C Explorer had already arranged our taxi to the dock so we had an easy morning walking around "town" and relaxing until the pickup at 3pm. With the exception of small groups of hotels at beaches and a few retail shops to keep their tourists happy, we didn't see much in the way of a downtown area.

We arrived at the boat mid-afternoon and were greeted warmly by several of the crew. I then spent several hours assembling the digital camera housing. Unlike the Cozumel trip, I was most pleased to discover that not a single thing was left at home. Relief.

On to the business of diving. This boat trip was a 7-day itinerary very similar to Caribbean Explorer II. Five days of diving with up to five dives a day, then a last day with two early morning dives. That's a total of 27 dives you can do in one week!! A daily plan kind of went like this:

7am - Light breakfast

8am - First dive

9:30am - snack

10:30 - Second dive

12noon - Lunch

1:30pm - Third dive

3pm - snack

4:30pm - Fourth dive

6pm - Dinner

8pm - Night dive

Some of the most awesome things we saw on this dive trip:

A wild dolphin played with us! No shit! After 300+ dives this is the first and only time I have seen a dolphin underwater.

Good picture of a Reef Squid at night, showing the mesmerizing galaxy of colours they display under our artificial lights (see pic)

Humpback Whales (two adults and their calf) although they avoided our boat, probably protecting the calf

Tracey found a blennie that wasn't in the books, apparently the Reef folks are just now classifying it. She's excited about the find nonetheless.

For the most part the dive sites had much the same topographical dive profile, same depth profile, and generally the same fish and corals. There were variations in the health of the reef and sizes of fish schools but in truth it was a slight disappointment not to have a bit more variety in the dives. Added to this was the limited visibility, usually about 50-70 feet. However this didn't deter my main activity which was underwater photography. Each site had limitless opportunities at macro and wide-angle, and I made use of both configurations throughout the trip.

For a quick look at (unprocessed) photos from the trip, go here:
My Google/Picasa photo album

I ended the week with 22 dives (total dives to date = 325), approximately 1,100 photos, no sunburn but plenty of smiles. Would I go on this trip again? Probably not, but not because of the boat or the crew. Instead I would choose another destination like maybe Roatan or Caymans. When spending this kind of money on a dive trip I'd like to get a wider range of dive experience. It was great to dive Turks and Caicos once, but I don't feel an urge to return anytime soon.

Did Explorer Ventures live up to their reputation? They sure did! Would I book another liveaboard tour with them in the future? Absolutely.