We had booked four dives a day in Playa del Carmen. Two in the morning, two in the afternoon. This allows for the necessary surface intervals — a safety consideration — and other important considerations like lunch. You could get in a few more dives each day if you pressed, but there are things like timing, fatigue and money to afford them all.
But because of the weather — a tropical storm formed up around here and moved off, and is still impacting the local conditions — our dive card is thinning out. We didn’t get any of our tanks yesterday. We moved to Plans B and C. Plan B was today.
We met a couple, who showed up late, and waited for a shuttle driver. That guy showed up, later, and someone loaded up our gear and put it on the van. The van drove and drove, we made small talk with our new friends from northern California and the driver steered in silence. He steered us to … another resort. We picked up another diver, a Canadian. And then we road on a good deal more, in the gray and in the rain.
Finally we came to a gravel road with a chain across it. Carved out of the woods, with old rusting cars and the leavings of other projects scattered here and there. A barefoot woman under an umbrella came out and moved the chain. We drove on. Finally, we came to a little clearing with three buildings. One made of stone, los banos, another of commercial lumber, the kitchen, and another painted up hut. That was the changing room.
People were clumped loosely together and we found two guys around a pickup truck who were in charge of the five of us. Gear, briefings about the dives and so on commenced.
The cenotes are natural pits, sinkholes. Limestone erodes and collapses, exposing deep reserviours of groundwater. The Yucatán Peninsula has thousands of them, most privately owned, and some open to diving, so here we are. You can find features like this in various places around the world, some of the more popular ones are large open-water pools, but most are sheltered sites, like the ones we dove today. Descend down some slippery stairs, it rained the entire time we were there, and then slip into the water.
This is cavern diving, rather than cave diving. It’s a distinction, our guide explained for those that didn’t know, that has to do with distance between access points. Cave diving requires a more special training. Cavern diving is accessible to open water divers. Open water, no ceilings. Cavern diving, some ceilings. Cave dives, no ceilings.
Around here, the aquifer system is such that the caverns provide deep enough access that the fresh water and salt water meet, a halocline, around 25 or 30 feet deep. It changes two things, the temperature of the water, and the visibility. Right in the halocline you get a blurry, swirling effect. It’s as if, for a few minutes, there are hundreds of floaters in your eyes. As if someone moved the antenna and the signal is going fuzzy. It’s like watching a video online in 1997. It’s the change in the salt in the water. But, otherwise, the key feature of cenotes are clear freshwater. Rain water filters slowly through the ground. There’s not a lot of silt and such in the water.
There’s just less to see. We saw rocks! And a few small fish. Somehow some trees had slid into place. The defining feature were stalagmites, which you could see right up close. These fragile limestone formations tell us the caves weren’t always filled with water. They’re drippings, after all.
We weren’t allowed to take our cameras. But the local guy has a photographer and he took this photo and the dive master grabbed it for us.
I’m looking down in the photo. Incidentally, that’s the first time I’ve worn a wetsuit for a dive since 2006, I think.
The Yucatán has few rivers or lakes, so the cenotes make up the drinking water and so, for the history of man, these have been places where settlements were formed. A few decades ago, in fact, researchers diving in some of these cenotes found the oldest evidence of human habitation. The best thing we found was my dive buddy’s mask. She dropped it getting ready for the second dive. The Maya apparently thought cenotes were portals to the next realm. (Some are protected by the UNESCO Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage.) That moment when you dip below the surface, you could see how the imagination would go that way. On our second dive, the water was brown-gravy murky at the entrance point. It only lasted about four feet or so — there’s no current, so if you stir up silt it just … hangs there — but those were a few interesting seconds of a dive.
For different reasons, we came up with the same idea about cenotes diving.
Glad I could do it; don’t need to do it again.
Back at our resort after our two dives, we decided to try the ocean. You’ve never seen a happier girl.
She’s a beach girl.
I like the floating part.
She loves the waves. And they were present and vigorous today.
To be sure, they make photo composition a bit of a challenge.
It is a permanent smile when she’s at the beach.
Here, she seems to be waving at Cozumel, which is just 10 miles over that way. You can see it, when the skies are clear. We could almost see it today. We’ll go over tomorrow.
We spent a long time, and 114 photos, trying to do this right, but it was somehow tricky. The angles, the waves, the sea spray, the timing, and so on and so forth. This one of the better ones.
This is, I think, my favorite one.
That was the 106th photo in the series.
Tomorrow we’ll dive in saltwater, if the weather finally cooperates.
