Dive Profiles
Going thru my logs, I thought I'd share a couple of dive profiles from my last trip. The first one was done during my trimix diving training. This was done, drifting, north of Playa del Carmen. We had a bull shark for company... I'll have to recompute this dive at some stage as I believe the actual dive profile was a bit too aggressive for comfort.




And this one is from carwash, the dive described previously. As you can see this is a roller coaster. Note how symmetrical the profile is, as it's usual the case when you go and come back the same way ;). The marker at 72 minutes is from surfacing at Luke's hope cenote to check up on the wild life.

Car wash... again.

I love this place... I reported before about this cenote and it has not changed... The emerald basin is still there hiding the mistery. This was the first day that I had for leisure dives.

This is the pictorial record:

Going In, Pietro unreeling...

Stop

Pietro coming out of the first major restriction off the main tunnel

Myself, floating in the room of tears...

Deep into additional restrictions on the way to the Lotus Room

Even deeper inside

Returning, myself reeling in a jump line...

The emerald basin in view, 1:30H into the dive

Pietro recovering the main reel

... and in the basin, soaking up the light

I'll do one more post about this trip sometime soon, reporting on the longest dive of them all... 5 hours in Nohoch nah Chich, from the entrance past the dinner hole on the mainline, with some side exploring on return. It's taken a long time to blog this trip, but better later than never. I'm dying to return, it's the call of the labyrinth, but don't know when I'll manage.

After flying in for the third time in a year it still does not feel like home... I think it's too postcardish for that.

Cancun from above

The weather was beautiful in Cancun, but when we got to playa they just had a flash flood.
Luckily the good weather held out for the duration of our stay. Not that it matters a lot, underwater, in a cave!

I usually stay in Playa, it's close to the diving shop and it makes the logistics much easier. However, this time, we felt like staying at a resort out of town.

The mayan coast

After all it was August, vacation month, par excellence. We chose Puerto Aventuras some 20 kms south, right in the heart of Cenote Country (Ponderosa, the main training cenote was only a throw away, on the land side of the highway).

I recommend the place, we stayed at the Omni, and even got a decent price on expedia.
Nice beach, clean, comfortable. Our room faced the marina where tourists swim with dolphins all day long...



The first 10 days I spent doing tech training, in the open ocean and in caves. All went smoothly, although trying to clip two tanks in a dinghy in choppy seas is no mean feat.

The last open water dive was all the way down to 80 meters (267 ft) on Trimix 15% O2 41% He, travel mix 50% O2, 100% O2 deco gas. Bottom time 12 minutes, total run time 100 minutes. The havoc that the last hurricane wrecked on the reef is all the more clear when you see the mega sponges, still intact, at depths immune to these catastrophic events.

Most of the caves in this region are pretty shallow, so to do technical cave training we're limited for choice. We dove Vaca Ha, a tanic, no visibility bathtub size entrance, Tortugas, the same (the line comes all the way to the surface) and the entrance is single file for a certain distance. Mayan blue, that I already knew from my previous trip, was also deep enough. They all go down to about 30 meters, and you spend a significant part of a 2 hour dive decompressing.

These dives were done on Nitrox 37% O2 for the backgas and the main stage tank, and 100% O2, for deco on a 5L tank. You leave the O2 tank on the line, very close to the entrance at a depth of 3 to 5 meters. You have to trust that no one messes with it, other wise you're in deep... In Tortuga and Vaca Ha there was no one else, so not much risk of anything happening.

Tortuga is a great dive, an underwater canyon taller than wider, with a very pronounced thermocline slicing the canyon in half, shimmering under the intense focus of our lights. Quite a sight.