E-mails from the Field
By Jason Richards
We’re on the road again, just crossed the US border on our way back home, after nearly a month of caving in Mexico. Though I can’t give all the details, I wanted to send along the highlights and some thoughts for the wayward Mexican caver.
Thought number one: check your wetsuit for scorpions. Really big scorpions. Because you really don’t want to find out about them after you have the suit on. Trust me on this. Let me just say that I made fast friends with my scorpion buddy while trying to turn my wetsuit right side out after a night of drying on an old hacienda wall. I was told by a local that as long as my tongue didn’t go numb immediately, I would be all right. Since there was some ambiguity on the definition of immediately, I decided to dive anyway, despite my tongue and lips going numb after about an hour or so. There were no ill after-effects, and obviously I lived through the event. Thought number two: long distance travel is definitely getting easier in Mexico. Though the number of road stops has increased (approximately 10 going in each direction) the professionalism has increased by leaps and bounds; the poor military kids have real uniforms and even some new weapons, and seem to be in generally better spirits, which means they are more likely to laugh about your (my) horrific attempts at speaking Spanish, and less likely to make you completely unload the vehicle for an inspection. Over the course of 5000 miles driven in Mexico, we never had to unload truck once for an inspection. We were pulled over frequently to be asked initially for our travel papers. This usually turned into a question and answer session about how deep a river the truck could ford with the snorkel and oversized tires installed. If interacting with local Mexican law enforcement causes you anguish, having a vehicle that looks like it came out of a 4-wheeler magazine won’t help you out.
And the diving? As you might expect, it was fantastic, even by my standards. I have to admit that as many years as I have been going to Mexico and cave diving, I have never before been to Quintana Roo to see any of the tourist cave diving highlights. As Chrissy was taking an impromptu KISS rebreather course so she could do the work dives later in the week, I had the opportunity to dive a couple of the more popular sites. It was interesting to see what was obviously a “cavern” tour of nearly 15 single tank divers swimming along the guideline on what stretched the popular definition of a “cavern dive” beyond the breaking point. I have seen less demanding full cave dives. But to the guide’s credit, he kept all his guppies in a line making for a beautiful tour of the cave for me, hiding in the back on the Death-Box (my home-built breather) with my light shielded. But that was to be the end of the tourist diving.
The next two weeks were spent surveying what can only be described as a declining cave system. Trapped between the coastal highway and the burgeoning hotel and resort business on the coast, the cave system is suffering from the reduction of fresh ground water levels as well as the intentional destruction of the mangrove swamps above. The decline of the cave-adapted animals has been documented over the last 15 years, as well as the steady decline of water clarity and conditions. Thanks to the QRSS (Quintana Roo Speleological Survey), I was able to use high quality survey data to begin my sketching and detailed map of the cave, saving me many days of initial survey work. Chrissy and I managed to sketch and subsequently draft nearly 3000 feet of passage. The team also added nearly 3700 feet of newly surveyed passage, bringing the cave length to over 15,600 feet/4772 meters.
All of that work paid off on the last day, when a landowner asked us to come over and dive a couple of cenotes that he had found on his property. He did not normally allow divers on his property, but had been so impressed with the work that we were doing that he had routes “cleaned” to the cenotes from the nearest roads. The first, and best looking of the three, turned out to be the worst- a nasty silt filled narrow crack following the edge of a breakdown debris pile, but never getting deep enough to reach the normal depths associated with underwater caves in the area. The next entrance was covered in sulphur bacteria, along with the distinct smell. The water had a greenish tint, and we weren’t optimistic. But once in the water, the entrance dropped into a large green room, where I had to search to find the way out through a small breakdown slit. That led to another huge green room, and so on in that fashion, room after room until I exhausted the half full exploration reel. I surveyed out, leaving 500 feet of virgin line, with many huge rooms left to go. The third cave, definitely the least promising from the surface, was only a muddy puddle filled with palm fronds and a hint of clear water. I kneeled down in the mud as Chrissy handed me a tied off reel and nosed towards the clear water. A narrow entrance (I was wearing my sidemount 40s) dropped down the edge of the debris pile created by the huge surface sink into a huge upstream downstream passage nearly 100 feet wide. The only thing I could compare it to would be a large walking dry passage, as there appeared to be a riverbed and a bluff on one side of the room, that had every look of having been formed in dry cave. I picked a direction and headed north traveling up the huge trunk passage. Soon, cuts began appearing in the bluff that led to crystal clear blue water which was a section of maze cave formed at the halocline, slightly deeper than the trunk passage. For lack of anything better, and once again, only having a half full reel, I chose the blue water and began wandering generally east through the maze cave, leaving 6 foot tall by 12 foot wide passages gaping left and right in every direction. Once again, I surveyed out, leaving another 500 feet over virgin line, and loads of opportunity for continued exploration. Our last week was spent in Yucatan, working with the Independent University of Yucatan at Merida, where we have been helping the students there catalog and map cenotes, primarily for their archeological importance. We started at a cenote associated with the ancient Mayan capital of Chichen Itza. Chrissy and I made a detailed map of the cave that can later be used to georeference sections of photo mosaic created by Evan Kovacs from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. In addition, we tacitly posed while sketching for the 3D high definition film footage being made of the work. For the first time, we returned with most of the diving equipment still working, and, of course, the Death-Box worked flawlessly with the exception of my Liquivision X-Link which croaked for some reason in the midde of a dive on the first week. But Liquivision was stunningly responsive and managed to Fedex me a replacement in Mexico in less than a week. Fortunately, it didn’t cancel any of the really critical dives. I was able to verbally abuse all of the Kiss and Megeladon divers with inferior electronics for the last week, after their heaped the abuse on my poor, broken home build the previous week. That is all for this report. I’m told it has been cold in Tennessee for the last month, so perhaps the caves will be clear, and we will be able to continue our exploration!
Jason