Thursday, November 21, 2019

Peacock Springs

First real cave and holy-crap-it's-cold-this-morning-can-we-please-get-in-the-nice-warm-water!?!?

Cave 1, Day 3

We had planned to stay at the Peacock One Basin all day and do 4 dives alternating between the Olsen and Peanut lines. Super glad we did line drills last night because it would have been heckin' uncomfortable in the cold this morning.

We started off with valve and S-drills in the basin at 5ft (which I've never done before) and that I, quite predictably for me, biffed. I had totally psyched myself out but also exposed a major weakness in my buoyancy game - far too much reliance on breath control. This was something I would have to work on for the entire week. I was also making it excessively hard on my body to reach my valves and stay in trim - Mer and Annika gave me some great advice on how to handle it, which was also something I would have to consciously work on.

I don't remember the specific details of each dive but we had a bunch of light and regulator failures of all varieties. At one point, Bubbles lost all his lights plus a post and came up to me to grab my backup - I mistook him for one of the ninjas and turned off my light (still not sure why I did that??). Aforementioned ninjas used this as an opportunity to put blackout masks on both of us. We did a no viz exit for 24min and covered about 300ft. Stark reminder of how slow an exit like this can be if you're not using good technique.

The lines at Peacock One are both really pretty. The air pockets in the Peanut Tunnel reflect light all over the cave in really cool ways. The Olsen Line is a lot more open, with giant archway-like structures. There was a shelf around 450ft in with a bunch of animal bones.

-> 4h 23min over 4 dives, 69ft on the Olsen line, 55ft on the Peanut line, 69F

Super long dive day ended with frozen pizza at the house. The rental van had also developed a slow leak in one of the tires and customer support was shockingly unhelpful :/

 - U