After leaving Eurotek I headed straight for the airport and got on a transatlantic flight. I was headed for the Bahamas and Cristina Zenato. The funny thing about this trip was that the trip over the Atlantic went without a kink but the short flight from Florida to Grand Bahama that should take 50 minutes instead took me almost 30 hours. The joy was overwhelming.
Anyhow, a delay like this can be dealt with if you only have enough audiobooks and coffee and I finally arrived on the island and there Cristina Zenato came to greet me at the airport. Cristina is well known for diving with sharks but she is also one of only two cave diving instructors in the Bahamas. Having met Cristina before and also knowing other scholars that has been here to visit I was thrilled about the opportunity to come and visit. The Bahamian Islands are full of underground passages and this was to be my training ground for learning to cave dive.
Why would any sane person do such a thing?
Being underground and underwater were surfacing is not an option in the event of a problem. For me it was a natural step I think since I am very much intrigued by the impact cavediving has on diving in general and also seeing how my skillset could fit in this delicate and demanding environment. Seeing the pictures of beautiful ornate caves with clear water and hearing from friends about their fantastic experiences didn’t hurt either.
Cristina was a good choice for me as an instructor and she made sure to take her time with theory but without spending to much time in the classroom, instead she kept dealing out information as we went along and mixed it in with the practical diving. No one can learn diving from a book and experience is not measured by number of posts on internet forums.
The course progresses in steps that builds the experience of the diver slowly and also builds confidence in the skills gained. In the beginning we stayed in the lightzone where the way out could be easily located by the shine of the sun but soon we swimmed further into the caves and left the light behind to rely on the guideline to find our way out. Always having a continuous guideline to the exit is one of the main rules of cavediving and a lot of time is spent looking at how to use this line in different navigational scenarios. Many frequently dived caves have very ordered lines put in but in the more remote and less dived caves on grand bahama you can find yourself swimming along the original exploratory line right from the entrance and many sections of the caves have lots of little lines going of in different directions. Perfect training ground for navigation were each directional change has to be clearly marked so there is no doubt on what line leads out. Actually one of the most psychologically demanding exercises we did was the loss of line. In a lights out, no vision scenario Cristina swirled me around until I didn’t know up from down and she put me down away from the line in a large room. Now, had this been anything else than a training scenario with an instructor looking at every move it would have been a very shitty situation to be in. Now I found it a good learning experience as it took me a long time to find my way back to that line and start on my way out and after this I was even more paranoid about keeping the line close at all times.
As the course progressed we started to get some unsettling weather reports. The hurricane season should have been over but it seemed like no one had told Sandy this. Soon we found ourselves in a very windy environment were diving was strictly of the agenda, even going outside was a bit to hazardous at times. On an island were the highest point is something like ten meters above the ocean flooding can soon become a problem in these circumstances. Well, a few days without power or water sort of made the cave course complete with the primitive living conditions.
After the wind had subsided we found ourselves being blocked from reaching several of the caves on the island, even after we had started wielding the chainsaw and going cross country. A pickup truck can only take so much water.
Lucky for us the neighboring island Abaco still had access to the caves there so we packed our gear and flew over. On Abaco lives the second cave instructor in the Bahamas, Brian Kakuk and it was with him as a guide we explored some of the caves here. Even thou the distance between the two islands is not that great the character of the caves were very different. Here the systems were even larger and with more formations, I can say for sure that I would not have been able to handle those dives at the beginning of the course. Everywhere you looked there was another crystal formation dating thousands of years and if you don’t look carefully where your fins are at every moment you are going to destroy something. On grand bahama we dived with backmounted cylinders but here with Brian we switched over to sidemount which suited me just fine and actually made some of the passages easier. We visited some stunning rooms with names like Crystal Palace, the Madroom, Badlands, Frozen rain room and even made the swim to Fangorn forest. I wish I had more pictures to share with you all but in all honesty some of these places even pictures cant do justice. Anyhow, I had enough to concentrate on without adding a camera to the taskloading, not to mention that I didn’t want another piece of equipment with me that could potentially bang into the delicate crystals. You will just have to believe me when I say these were some of the most beautiful things I have ever seen.
As we concluded the course and left Abaco I knew for a fact that I was hooked, caves is something I will definitely have to come back to in the future.
Before leaving the Bahamas, me and Cristina decided to go for at least one dive in the ocean to visit the sharks. Changing cavegear for chainmail we landed firmly on the sandy bottom and before long the sharks Cristina know so well arrived all around us. She had brought some snack for them and it was an interesting experience seeing these feared creatures being so calm about the whole thing even thou fish was handed out right there. Mind you, there were sharks high and low but there was never a frightening moment. Seeing Cristina going from one day being perfectly balanced far into a cave system and the next day dressed in chainmail sitting firmly on the bottom clearly show to me that there are different styles of diving for different situations and she has mastered the diversity. To sit there on the bottom with a shark seemingly asleep in my lap (Cristinas work, not mine) I could only feel joy about some of the things I have seen and thank Cristina for showing me sides of diving I have never experienced before. Its not without a twinge of sadness that I left the island but knowing that I am carrying on my trip of adventures helps.
If you read this and think that maybe next year it should be you writing these blogs, this is the time to get your application together!
