Anke's
Adventures (How does she do it!)
So,
I thought - let's have a go at this cave diving thing in the USA to
improve my diving skills a bit. I left the UK on Friday 6th April
2001 at 08:00 with KLM to attempt to complete two diving courses with
Global Underwater Explorers (GUE) in Florida - the first course was
an Introduction to Cave diving (GUE Cave Level 1), the other a more
advanced Sea diving course using trimix and multiple stages (GUE Tech
Level 2).
My outbound flight from Manchester to Amsterdam was delayed by one
hour which ment that I missed my connection to Miami and thus arrived
in Miami ten hours later than planned. Having spent the afternoon
in Schipol Airport, I managed to get on a NorthWest flight to Detroid
at 16:00 from Amsterdam, but then had an uncertain connection from
Detroid to Miami due to leave at 21:30 local time. In the end I managed
to get a seat and arrived in Miami just after midnight - with no hotel
booked and in no fit state to drive a car anywhere. After some gentle
persuasion the lady from NorthWest/KLM agreed to provide me with a
hotel room for the night, so all worked out in the end. The hotel
was right next door to Dollar's Car hire depot where I was able to
collect my car the next morning and set of for High Springs in the
North of Florida (http://www.highsprings.com).
The car was a silver four door Grand AM SE 2.4 l petrol automatic
with cruise control. I booked it with Choice Air in Blackpool (http://www.choiceair.co.uk)
for £380 including all tax, insurance, tank of fuel and additional
drivers. It did about 400 Miles to a tank. Petrol cost between $1.49
- $1.69 per US gallon, so about four times less than in the UK. Exchange
rate was $1.4 per Pound Stirling.
I arrived at my Motel - the High Springs Country Inn (http://www.hscinn.com)
around 19:00 on the Saturday and booked into my room. The owners Bob
and Sheila were very friendly and helpful. I got a room with double
bed and shower for $39/night. It was clean and well appointed with
fridge, microwave, air conditioning, fan and the all important coffee
machine. Divers often stayed here and the Motel offered plenty of
hooks for drying gear on the patio, and a rinsing off area outside.
On Saturday I drove to Jacksonville airport (approx 90 minutes drive
north east from High Springs) to collect my buddy for the week, Steve
White. His flight was a couple of hours delayed so I didn't have to
be there before 11:00. In the afternoon we called at the Extreme-Exposure
shop to check in for our course. We had to fill in a multitude of
forms and waivers, pay the balance for the course and were then told
to return for 09:00 the next morning.
We arrived on Monday morning as agreed to meet our instructor, Tamara
Kendal. Whilst waiting for our tanks to be filled we had a DIR kit
rigging session and had our setups disected. Luckily we only required
minor changes. The tanks we used for the week were twin 104 cubicfeet
sets - approx 15 litre per tank, charged to 240 Bar.
We did two to three dives a day for Cave 1 with a couple of hours
theory either in the morning before the dives if we stayed local,
or in the afternoon if we went further away. Due to heavy rainfalls
in previous weeks only Ginnie Springs and Manatee Springs were divable.
We were lucky with the weather - it was hot and sunny the first week,
a tad too humid for me at times, but bearable.
Ginnie Springs is a 20 minute drive from High Springs. It is a private
property covering two cave systems (Ginnie and Devils) along the densely
wooded Sante Fe River. Entrance is $20 per diver per day [!!] and
is open to divers and campers alike - campers seemed to be the majority
of visitors. Canoes and tubes were available for hire to get people
about on the river. There were also numerous recreational scuba divers
as well as other cave divers about. Facilities include a dive shop
and compressor, toilet and shower blocks, Picnic/BBQ and volleyball
areas, and lot of benches for getting kitted up on, etc. http://www.ginniesprings.com
)
The first day (Monday 9th April) was spent in the Cavern area of Ginnie
to check out our trim, buoyancy, frog kick, flutter kick and line
laying skills. Mix was 32% all week. We did three short dives approx
15 min each. On the first Tamara demonstrated line laying and checked
our kick and buoyancy drills - Tamara was quite glad to deal with
divers that could do the kicks already. On the second and third dive
Steve and I each took turns at line laying in and out of the cavern.
I wasn't very good at that. Max depth was around 12m.
The Spring is a beautiful rocky pool of crystal clear water surrounded
by big trees on one side, car park and Volley ball area on the other
and a leads down short run to the River. The cave entrance is blocked
off by a heavy grill to stop rec divers going in and so provides a
save cavern for them to explore. There is a heavy flow coming out
of the cave opening
After
these dives we went back to the EE shop to get fills for the next
day. A good description of Ginnie Springs Cavern can be found at:
http://gue.com/sites/srb/ginnie/index.html
The second day (Tuesday 10th April) started with lectures in the morning,
followed by lunch at 'Subways' - a fast food baguette shop - to become
a regular haunt, not because of the quality of the food (which was
Ok, but uninspiring), but because it was the only available option
- the Pizza place next door was closed at lunchtime (...) and the
restaurant/cafe took too long.
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