From teaching Trimix to several Cave courses and exploring with a crocodile…
It is amazing how fast the time is passing when you enjoy yourself!
The September was starting off with Mark who had a return visit to do his Advanced Recreational Trimix class. After spending a considerable amount of time in the class room to cover ratio deco, dive planning and other theory topics it was finally time to dive.
We dove the deep plateau off Xpu Ha and had planed to dive the drop off (Cantil) on the next day.
The ocean was quite ruff that day and so we had this huge change of atmosphere from really windy and wavy on the surface to quiet and calm once we were under water. The deep plateau is a really amazing place full of life and colours and also ideal as a training site for this level of training.
Unfortunately though the wind was too strong the next day and so the harbour was closed and we could not make it to the Cantil. After making some minor changes to our plan we decided to dive a deep sinkhole south of Tulum instead . It was Marks first dive in such an environment with a deep shaft, a hydrogen sulfate layer and the total darkness underneath it. It was definitely a unique experience for him that he will not forget any time soon. I was super stoked as well coming back to this beautiful lagoon after not having been there in a year. It was really a cool course with some nice dives and good discussions in the classroom.
The very next day I started a cave course with two divers from Finland, Joonas and Santeri. They are from Tampere from where we received already a lot of students and are always happy to welcome them because they have a very high skill level in general and are super nice people to hang out with!!!
In the same time Nando was staring a course with Andrew form the States and Jonno from the UK.
It is definitely cool to teach side by side and get to spend some lunch brakes together talking about a million different things and simply enjoying some good time in the jungle with people from different backgrounds and walks of life!
Unfortunately Santeri got sick after the third day and had to take a two day break. This gave me the possibility though to check out some new Cenotes and go exploring a little =)
Thanks to the help of Solomon a dear friend of mine I got the access to some super nice virgin Cenotes just south of Playa del Carmen. In fact the Cenotes are almost exactly downstream of Lilo Ha (named after my mom) which is right beside the highway.
I only had about 50 minutes time to dive and after successfully suppressing the fear of the crocodile that was taking a sunbath right at the waters edge, I managed to squeeze two hundred feet of line in and survey it. Generally it is very small and crumbly but has good flow. In this short distance I also already passed another entrance heading north direction highway. It is definitely worth it to go back there once I have a bit more time. For the moment the tiny system is called Sistema Lorenzo, like my tiny nephew =)
After that Santeri was back in shape and we continued where we had stopped. We had two days left to finish the Intro to Cave part where we focused on line laying, team awareness, all the emergency drills as well as lost line and lost diver scenarios. Today then was already the second day of the Full Cave part where we worked some more on negotiating restrictions in zero visibility and did some more navigation in the cave.
Now only one last day with the same performance and we will have two more cave divers from Finland! It has been really cool so far seeing the two progress day after day.
Right after that I start another Cave course with three new victims =) and Nando will move on to teach Tec Cave and an Advanced Nitrox Instructor course.
So as you can see we are busy busy busy, as always!
Happy diving,
Patrick