Devil's Den

After the manatees snorkeling we drove 45 miles to the cabin I had reserved at the Devil's Den a popular site for diving in a cavern environment with a depth profile not exceeding 52 feet and with most of the cavern allowing to ascend easily to the surface.
The cabin is perfect for our needs with 2 beds one on the main floor and the other one on the mezzanine. It's got a kitchen with stove and fridge and an outdoor grill for charcoal BBQ, there is a big covered porch perfect for hanging our gear to dry after diving. No internet in the cabin but we have access to a slow one at the dive shop. So we went and did a basic grocery so we can eat most of our meals at the cabin. There is a couple of divers in the cabin next to ours and they are very nice.

There is no fixed time to dive the cavern, we are allowed togo in any time between 9h00 and 17h00 so we have breakfast, do a morning dive, have lunch at the cabin and then do an afternoon dive. They fill up our tanks during the surface interval. We have to put all our gear on except fins and mask at the surface and then enter the cavern going down at least 50 steps and trough an entrance carved in the stone. At the bottom of the stairs there is a platform with stairs that goes down in the water where we can do our final set up. Under the water there is 2 or 3 more platforms, the first one at around 10 feet perfect for assembly of the team and buoyancy adjustment. There is a platform at 17 feet perfect to do our 3 minutes safety stop on the ascent.

So we start our first dive and first circle the cavern to get a better understanding of it's submerged configuration, we look for fossils that are present in that cavern but we can't find any, probably because of our lack of knowledge on what we are looking for. We go trough some passthrough but only the bigger ones because with the camera and flashes it's a bit awkward. So we end up this dive a bit before our air is all used up because Sebastien's is cold and the water being at 69f and he's wearing is shorty, it is understandable. We will go for lunch and he will wear his full wetsuit for the afternoon dive, also I wont bring the camera so that we can explore more of the narrow tunnel passages.

On our afternoon dive as we are getting ready a lone diver ask us if he can buddy with us, we agree and we are 3 to dive. We know that in the cavern there are some dead end tunnels that can be dangerous to dive trough, it was explained in the briefing, the good thing is that they are clearly marked, also before entering a tunnel we close our lights and make sure that there is daylight at the end of it. We go trough some pretty long and narrow ones, the longest I go trough is about 40 feet long and I have to rotate in order to squeeze out of the exit. By the time we surface we both agree that we had enough of cavern penetration and that would not be a diving specialty that we will take.

Tomorrow we go diving another cavern about a mile from here, but that will be another posting.