| Cave 1 and Cave 2
Dave
That video was shot in Mayan Blue B-tunnel last year in the Naharon system.
GUE has a list of "sacificial" caves which are suitable for lights out kind of drills during cave 1 and cave 2 training. This is more of an issue in Mexico because of the nature of the caves and the damage which can be caused by blind divers bumping and crashing into things! In Florida it's more a matter of silting than damaging the cave. I know that A-tunnel is used for cave 1 and A-tunnel can only be used for cave 2. That's probably because of the size of the cave. In cave 1 the course limits prohibit entering any cave where you can't swim side-by-side. I think B-tunnel is considerably narrower than A-tunnel and you can see in the vid. that there are places in there where you can't swim side-by-side.
I don't actually remember that dive and that is an hours video edited down to a couple of minutes. We weren't very far in (the video lights only burn an hour and we're not carrying stages) but it's fairly typical of Mexico caves although some others have far more delicate decoration.
I've never trained in Mexico. I did all mine in Florida. If I knew then what I know now I'd have done it in Mexico. You get much longer dives in Mexico due to the shallow water but the down-side is that you don't get experience of high flow caves. Basically, if you are trained in Mexico you will get one hell of a shock if you go and dive Ginnie Springs in Florida!
Bit of a long winded kind of answer but basically Mayan Blue B-tunnel is a Cave 2 tunnel but it is typical of some of the cave you will see during a Cave 1 class. If you go to Mexico the GUE instructors there are Chris Le Maillot and Danny Riordan. Don't know Danny so well but Chris is a top bloke and his diving skills are like nothing I've ever seen before - absolutely awesome! Something to aspire to. I will never even come close to the skill level Chris has, but I can keep trying! I have some video of Me and Chris in the water in Nah-Hoch (he's not in that Mayan Blue vid.) and he is awesome! If you want to see an hour of unedited diving in Nah-Hoch I can send you the vid.
BTW, can you copy from VHS to CD-ROM or DVD or whatever? If you can, I'll definitely send you the tape and if you can copy it for me I'd be eternally grateful!!
Hope to see you soon.
Bob
PS - that was a very longwinded answer to a simple question wasn't it?  |