Day 43 - Cavern certified OR How to dive with a shovel

Playa at 7AM is beautiful. Nobody in the streets but occasional local early-riser at the obligatory Sunday morning cochinita pibil stand. Tourists are still asleep, and restaurants seem to be asleep with them. No buzz. No noise. A different place. I have breakfast, check out of my hotel, and back to the dive shop for Day Two of my cavern course.

Today, we are training in a beautiful cenote named Eden, the first cavern I have ever dove in, the so-called reason for this whole course. More drills in the open water. More drills in the cavern. Taking in the constructive critique of my instructor, I'm getting better and better at everything. The only little issue I still have is the light. You have to use the light to illuminate your way and communicate with your dive buddy at all times. The problem is that it is not easy to run the reel and hold the light in the same hand. My hand is just not big enough to handle it. So my light is kind of dangling from my chest illuminating the floor of the cavern. Roman - my German instructor with the same, very distict, "personality" accent, in both English and Spanish - tells me that I have to figure it out. Of course, I can always get a wrist-mount cave light like a big girl, but for now I have to make do with what I have. So I try to master this skill now. On the last dive I'm the leader of our buddy-team. I have to talk through the gear matching and dive plan prior to our descent. I have to run the reel and make sure my buddy-team is OK at all times. I have to be the donor during air sharing in "low visibility conditions". I have to assist my buddy during the emergency ascent, and go back underwater to retrieve the reel right after it. We start the dive. Everything is going perfectly. I'm super proud of myself. The cavern is gorgeous. I didn't forget to do one little thing, and my dive light is in my hand, horizontal, illuminating our way in. In my head, I'm already going over the air sharing process that is soon to come, in order not to forget any little detail (the procedure is a little different from the open water diving, so it's tough to get out of your habits). Finally, Roman signals me that he is "out of air". I get close to him, take out my regulator, and... drop the stupid light into the cavern silt! When I dive with this light in the open water, I have a little strap for it, so it always stays wrapped around my wrist. But this strap was removed as part of my equipment modification at the beginning of this course as a potential hazard of entanglement. And of course, my body didn't get a chance to get used to it yet. Anyway, the light slowly falls out of my clumsy hands, and quite literally in front of our eyes gets swallowed deeper and deeper into the silty cavern floor, now dimly shining onto the ceiling from under the mud and rock formations. After this useful lesson on the importance of redundancy in cavern diving, I retrieve my secondary light, and we proceed with our dive plan.

Upon surfacing, Roman tells me that we are going to change tanks and do a light recovery dive, because he has a feeling we might be able to get it back if we only have some mechanism to fish it out of the mud under that rocky wall. We do that. The "mechanism" he finds is... a shovel. And here comes a priceless scene: in front of a couple dozen incredulous cenote swimmers (who come here just to enjoy the lake water and turtle and little crocodiles that live in it) and at least ten other no less incredulous fellow divers, we proudly descend to the bottom of the cavern with a huge shovel. Roman tries this and that with the shovel, but nothing is working. So now he gives it to me to hold and tries to go into the tiny narrow passageways in between the rocks. I hover above him with a shovel, very nervous because what he's doing is really scary and I feel like any second now I will have to swim back with the stupid shovel for a rescue mission because he will certainly be trapped in between the rocks. But all turns out well. I mean, Roman stays untrapped, though the light recovery mission fails. It will now burn its batteries out for however long their life is, illuminating the ceiling of Eden. I take comfort in the fact that at least my light didn't go to hell.

Then, the final exam, and I'm officially cavern certified and home-free!

On my way back to Cozumel, while I have to wait for a ferry for an hour once again (this time because I miss the one I wanted to catch by literally one minute - oh well, who cares, I'm on Mexican time, I have it all), all of a sudden I get inspired to scetch (!!!) a sailboat that is anchored right in front of me. What is happning to me? Last time I drew something was in elementary school and I hated it, and now this is how I choose to kill an hour? What? Wow...