One year and a few months later I returned. Not a lot of time to blog so my trip is now 6 days old...




My very last dive, prior to this trip, was the one I logged below. It's amazing how much one forgets in 14 months. For the first few dives you are back to square one. Or zero. It's a conundrum difficult to break for someone living in Lisbon, short of hitting the swimming pool with doubles, stages and reels and frightening the swimmers out of the water.

I suspect that when my guide first saw me underwater, he sincerely wondered whether I had had any training whatsoever and I wasn't trying to fast track from the reefs of playa del carmen straight into cave diving.


I did not yet dare taking the camera with me. Took it easy in Chikin Ha, a cenote close to Playa, on the first day and in Taj Mahal on the second, where we went all the way to the chinese gardens, thru some restrictions right at the halocline depth. Difficult to negotiate your way around tight places when you cannot see anything!

The chinese garden in Taj Mahal is a wide open room, densely decorated, with very white speleothems and walls.

The fauna of these caves are a subject in itself. I confess I go most for the feeling of adventure, of swimming thru tunnels and rooms, and not so much for the animal life. It's quite the opposite in open waters, where fauna and flora are the highlights.

But I understand that the subject may be fascinating for some people. The first fact is that you don't get to see a lot. The caves are low energy places so they do not sustain much life. As you go from the lighted entrance to the penumbra to the dark recesses of the caves, life gets sparser, and the animals go from tetras (small carnivore fish that fill the open waters in significant numbers), to the white shrimps, and finally to the stygobiotic species, blind, white, no eyes, crustaceans and fish. Of these, some are reasonably rare but others you get to see in every dive.

The latter are threatened and risk extinction. Cave divers are a contributing fact. When we enter the caves with our lights on, tetras in significant numbers follow us and have a banquet on the sparse population of stygobiotic animals. You can actually see the tetras gulping them up. Even if we enter with our lights off, they have so much adapted that they follow us anyway. Sometimes you are over a thousand meters inside and they are still there. I feel like killing them. Impossible task.

This is obviously not the only impact we force upon the caves... the clearing for access generated the green algae bloom in Carwash that is so visually appealing appealing when you start your dive. Artificial lights in Dos Ojos for snorkelers, did the same. Close to major population centers, Cenotes are not really divable any longer. And the list goes on. It's a difficult line to draw.

Anyway, by the third day I was feeling somewhat more in control, and decided to make a change in diving configuration that reset all I had learned during the previous days. A drysuit.

The first thing I found is that a drysuit is a misnomer. It's only dry before immersion. Ok, not a lot of water gets in, but if one in 10 dives is totally dry, one in 10 is totally wet, and the remainder are somewhere in between. Then managing the air bubble inside the suit is a skill that must be acquired. It would be easy in open water, but in a cave with limited headroom, it becomes a little complicated. So on my first dive, I had a lot of air in my feet (the boots are way too big and I did not have any insulation on my feet) that controlling the fins was becoming a cumbersome task.

So I wrapped duct tape around my ankles after refusing to pay 120 bucks to our dear DIR friends from Zero Gravity for a pair of gaiters. They are basically a piece of elastic band with Velcro that wraps around your ankles and helps managing the amount of air that gets to the lower extremities. Not sure if duct tape is DIR or do it wrong, but it worked. I mean, sort of. I was so paranoid in not letting a lot of swooshing air into the suit that I ended up pinching myself behind the knees hard enough to park the suit in the closet for the rest of the vacation while the skin chaff heals... So 2 days of dry suit diving was all I managed.

One of the dry (ok, semi dry) dives was in the river run in Pondrosa. This is a fantastic dive. It's called the river run because the fresh water lens flows fast over the salt water. You can go upstream, below the halocline, in still water, and then return riding the river downstream a couple of meters higher up. The halocline is so clearly marked that the fresh water generates chop action when going round speleothems. The illusion of flying over a river is absolute. It's a wonderful dive, not to be missed. Nowhere else is the halocline so clearly marked.

Still plenty to come. I hope, because my ears are hurting.