Category — Taj Mahal
Old Friend Revisited. TaJ Ma Ha.
The no cave diving streak is officially over. For the second day in a row I went cave diving! I wasn’t sure where to dive, then I spoke to Nando and Patrick and found out they would be at Taj. That was all the convincing I needed. As independent as I would like to believe I am, I do really enjoy the social nature of diving. Just being at the same Cenote with friends, even if I am not diving with them, is good enough for me.
The plan was to revisit an area of Taj Ma Ha that I hadn’t been to in 3-4 months. This time in sidemount with the idea of looking for sidemount sized passage. I went down stream on the white line. The white line runs from Cenote Taj Ma Ha to Cenote Scarada. The swim time for that traverse is about 30 minutes. I think the average depth is about 25 feet.
In any event, I swam to the double arrows and jumped to the right. This jump is just a minute or two short of Cenote Scarada. A minute or so after the jump, I came to another line arrow. I tied my reel in and started to poke around looking for the jump. My first attempt netted me a dead end with zero visibility that required me to navigate turned 90′. Once I backed out of that mess, I found the jump. It isn’t really in a logical place compared to the arrow. The jump is beyond the arrow to the left. There isn’t a straight shot from the arrow to the jump, I guess they want to hide the jump a little. The end of the line has a big red arrow and is hard to miss once you see it.
That line is the sidemount passage I was looking for. It could be done in backmount, but it would be a big mess. The cave is complete swiss cheese and there is a lot of really fine white silt and little bits of cave falling down everywhere. Just my percolation made a real mess of the first part of the passage. The passage continues to twist and turn and takes you up through a lot more swiss cheese. It was a lot of fun to dive. The line continued where I turned. Not sure if I am going to go back, it seems really unstable back there. All that swiss cheese rock just gives me the jitters.
I am grateful for the explorers that came before me, however, sometimes the line I find is in the weirdest/worst places. It is almost like they weren’t thinking when they ran it. This line was particularly bad. I can’t really imagine how they surveyed it.
During most my training with Steve he has stressed one major topic: “line laying and placement”. We spend a lot of time discussing how and where to place the line, what type of tie-offs to use and why. The idea is that a well placed line will be enjoyable and efficient to survey as well swim. He told me that the more line I put in and the more I look at line, I will start to notice good line and poorly laid line. Well, he is right. I saw some poorly laid line today. It wasn’t dangerous, but it wasn’t the cleanest either. End of rant.
After I turned the first part of the dive, I spent some time exploring the rest of the area. The line I originally jumped onto looped back the same starting point. There is another line arrow out there, but I couldn’t find the jump.
Sometimes I think, “Nahhh… don’t go to Taj. It is so boring.” Then I go and find out there was another section I hadn’t been too. It is amazing how mch diving can be done at one site and still not see all of it, or experience all of its personalities.
July 19, 2008 5 Comments