Akumal Cave Project 2004 - 15th March Update
Posted By Grant Graves on 15 March 2004
Monday 15th March 2004
Links: Check out photos from the expedition here! | Read more on the expedition
The best laid plans of mice and men….
Well, sometimes you win some and sometimes you lose some.
Karl and I are prepared to make a four-cylinder dive to Cenote Coati Mundi (Named after a lovely little raccoon like animal native to these parts. Of course, this particular one tried to eat the shorts of a previous expedition member.) underwater while Terrence and Renee chop and cut their way to it over land (The same cenote they tried to find yesterday). Karl is carrying a canister with a small GPS and radio in it. Good plan. Too bad it did not happen. We found out that there is line in the system that was not yet placed on the map. So, what should have been a simple swim turned into an exercise of following good cave diving training.
One of the interesting things that happens on expedition is you become attached to outcomes. You tell yourself to let it go and not to have any, but it is natural that you develop expectations. Part of doing well when you are seeking to find answers to questions posed by the cave is to rely on your training and experience. Today, Karl did just that. We went in with an agenda to meet Terrence and Renee at the cenote, so we could help them cut to it. When we were at the end of our available gas to continue moving forward in the cave, Karl turned the dive. It is a simple process of giving the command signal of a thumb’s up. I had only one answer, the matching signal.
We could have easily been pushed to see if we could go just a bit further. However, that would have been a mistake. Because we were not where we believed we should have been. It is not uncommon for ongoing expeditions to have many new areas of cave working at once. We happened to find a piece of cave that has surveyed line in it that had not been tied into the map yet. This sent Karl and I off to portions of the cave well away from Coati Mundi. As we turned the dive, I had begun to realize that things were not adding up, but if we had not stuck to our training and went just a little further we very well could have been in trouble.
Lessons learned come in so many ways. Even as experienced cave divers, there is always a line between making a goal and having the discipline to turn for home when the time calls for it. Sometimes the turn for home is by design, sometimes that turn is because your training demands it, sometimes it is really difficult because you are in big cave with the line going, and sometimes it is simply because something does not feel right. We turned because our training demanded it. We realize that goals and gains are not made in one day. Sometimes, they can take decades. Besides, often when dives do not go as planned other things are learned.
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