Here we go, an article and a video about my best cave diving experience ever. We always wonder or find on internet what are the “10 best cave diving destinations” or the “best dive sites”. Well, for now I found mine, and it is in none of those recommended places.
For a matter of conservation, accessibility and trust, we won’t say where this was taken but god those caves were mind blowing!
For the ones who’ve been there and recognizes either of the divers or the location, I’m sure you will understand why.
Not only the caves were amazing, but the whole thing was actually an awesome adventure.
The dive site is only accessible by boat and we found a dive shop that were willing to take us there.
We got dropped by the cliff and needed to bring all our gear to the rocks. We have several bags for our gear, dry containers for the dry gear (drysuit, undergaments etc), tanks, O2 and climbing gear.
The first diver goes in the water with one bag, manages to climb a ledge, and waits for receiving the gear.
Another team goes in the water to bring all the gear tied together, juggling between positively and negatively buoyant pieces of equipment, we manage to bring everything to the shore.
To climb the rocks, we need to be very careful as everything is very very sharp like razor blades and it’s full of see urchins on the floor.
Once all the gear is on the rocks, we need to walk around and make our way to the cavern. We reach this massive chamber and make our way to the back of the room.
Once we get there, we already are tired but we knew it was just the beginning. The best is yet to come…
We get changed, open our dry bags, put some clothes on, eat an hard boiled egg while we’re at it and get all the climbing gear out.
Here we are, at the end of the daylight zone, looking at the exit, ready to climb.
The cave goes up so we need to install a rope and slide all the gear up on it. Not so complicated but still need to be done. We attach all the tanks, bags and everything too heavy to carry by hand and we don’t want to take the risk on slipping or falling in here.
Once all the gear is above in that little tunnel, we need to carry through a restriction and then falls again into a small vertical shaft.
There we go again, get the ropes, grigris and let’s climb down!
After a few hours of exhausting gear transportation, we finally make it to the water.
We are a good bit inside the cave with our headlamps or small torches and need to get changed to our dry gear… while being in the mud. I wanted a bit of challenge… there we go! If only I knew this was also going to be my best cave diving experience ever… I would have been even more motivated!
There we are, in the water, with our dirty drysuit after sliding down a mud slope before reaching the water. We’re all so excited and we just can’t hide it!
We start in a big chamber going down a siphon and going up again in an air pocket. We follow the tunnel and things start to get more and more decorated. Thousands of delicate stalactites hanging from the ceiling creating wonderful doorways towards the cave.
Passing that door, the cave gets bigger and bigger and extremely decorated all around when we can see at the end of it a massive column! Are we dreaming? No, that’s it, the biggest column I’ve ever seen! From top to bottom, 17m (56ft) high! This column is so decorated, it looks like a massive piano organ! Amazing.
All around the cave we find some very very delicate formations, cristalised, other thin stalagmites with big bellies and thin again, how the hell did that happen? Speleothems going sideways as we’re used to see in Mexico too but some even went back up! Wait what? how?! So amazing!
The cave on some part was cristalised, delicate with such thin formations, we’re thinking that some of the caves here should actually be forbidden from open circuit divers as the bubbles have too much of an impact on the environment. Ups, here we are, being super happy but also knowing we have an impact on the cave. Tough dilemma, exploration vs conservation but the delicacy and beautie of those formations were just hynotising. Some of them were even transparent!
Anyway, I think it’s time for you to see by yourself…
Enjoy the ride 😉
JC.
