Day 5
Day 5
We went to Taj Mahal today, for what would hopefully be our last day on the course.
I became a real cave diver at the moment I had to pee in the jungle, being careful not to fall down a shaft!
Taj is a beautiful site, the breakdown area is very shallow - barely enough water to stride into. S drills would be carried out from 12 meters distant, Valve drills would be carried out in 1 meter of water. Doesn’t get much harder than this so we were chuffed to get it all spot on.
First dive. Chris pointed out that this was dive 13 - for those who were suspicous. Al ran the reel in to the main line and we headed in past some beautiful formations.
The halocline was very evident but beautiful nevertheless and the brown stalagtites hanging needle thin against the white limestone was awesome.
18 minutes in my primary light failed. No really - it actually did - not Chris this time! But he soon turned this to his advantage. One by one our lights failed, then Fraser had a right manifold failure which meant, shortly afterwards he ran out of gas. Al donated and we continued our exit.
By this time we were down to two back up lights, mine and Al’s, then Al lost his and I passed mine down the line to him so that, as tail diver he would be able to signal. Then this last light went as well and we were in touch contact on the line.
We made good progress until Al had a erroneous right post failure and had to pass Fraser off to me before he could shut down. It turned out Al had had a left post failure but as he still could not donate we continued our exit with Fraser on my gas.
We got to the exit, and lost masks, but to be honest we weren’t bothered - Al and Fraser deployed backup masks but I didn’t bother, we were at three meters so I linked arms with the boys and thumbed it. We were out.
Chris professed that he was happy with our exit so invited us to change our sets and go back in to the cave for a ‘Graduation dive’.
Fraser led in and we went for our longest penetration to date - upstream past the most beautiful formations yet. The passage went up steeply as shallow as 1.5 meters and down again, with pencil thin formations and bright white rock which has been carved away by the salt water at the level of the halocline.
We had travelled for 27 minutes when Fraser thumbed the dive. We were all waiting for something to go wrong, but nothing did!
We cruised out of the cave as GUE Cave 1 divers subject to our final exam which, I’m pleased to say we did OK with too.
