I had the great pleasure of diving on the last day of December 2010, the last day of the year, and what a great dive it was. It was a very nice day, almost no clouds, balmy 27 C or so in the shade. With little regret I was thinking about the people living in snow storms along the U.S. East Coast or Central Europe where at this point a lot of airports, highways, Autobahns & train stations where closed due to the snow and ice. The water temperature in the Cenote was as always 24 C and visibility of over 60 meters.
The day before the last day of 2010 I started diving with Jirky and Kirsty in Cenote Dos Ojos, both are avid Rebreather divers from Finland, using the JJ CCR Rebreather for all their diving they do and thus brought their Rebreathers to Mexico to do guided cavern diving. Besides having fun diving the beautiful Cenotes they were going to decide if they would like to take a CCR cave diver course in the future.
When it came to decide where we are going to dive the last day of the year we decided to go to Cenote Pet Cemetery, part of the Nohoch Nachich cave system. Reason to go there was the high traffic at Dos Ojos as we are in peak season. Pet Cemetery is out of the way, far in the jungle and no snorkelers go there, at least not a lot of them. The Cenote is beautifully located deep within the jungle with high trees all around. The dry section of the Cenote itself is densely vegetated with palm trees. The cave itself is white with lots of Speleothems. A beautiful setting, very calming, very quite.
Cenote Pet Cemetery has its name from cave explorers Mike Madden and Eric Hutchinson who when finding and surfacing in the Cenote for the first time during a cave exploration dive in search for a connection between cave systems Dos Ojos and Nohoch Nachich where looking at all the animal bones laying in the Cenote. Eric told me that Mike said it looked like a Pet Cemetery, thus the name.
When Jirky, Kristy and me rolled up to Pet Cemetery on that last day of 2010 we met Christine and Etienne, both local dive guides, who shared with us the last of the year dive experience.
Slowly we got ready and prepared our Rebreathers. Jirky and Kristy both dived their JJ CCR while I was on my Megalodon CCR. The first dive was done clock wise along the cavern line enjoying this beautiful white and decorated cave. Awesome. No camera was taken on the first dive to go for an orientation to the dive site and enjoy the dive without the burden of taking images.
During the surface interval just before the second dive we decided to bring the camera. Both JJ’s got rigged with slave strobes during the surface interval to lighten up the cave a bit behind the divers to give it more depth. I had two more strobes on my housing to lighten up the front of the divers.
Off we went for our second dive of the day in a counter clockwise direction while I was shooting away, taking photos as we went around the Cavern tour loop. As we terminated the dive I took some half over half under images in the open water area right next to the platform and stairs.
As we packed up our dive gear we truly enjoyed the time together on this last dive of 2010. On the way out of the jungle Jirky and Kirsty started to make plans to return later on in 2011 to take a CCR cave diver training program as they fell in love with the Cenotes and would like to dive more, much more. This great dive and time together with Jirky and Kirsty I will remember for a long time to come.
Matt