France 2009
Another trip to France beckoned and I was thoroughly looking forward to some cave diving. We’d arranged to stay in a nice villa only a couple of miles from Resell. The RB’s gave us more flexibility with gas so we had less of a pressing need to be on top of a filling station. The plan was for some bigger dives so the idea was to have a break between diving days.
Diving day 1 was planned to be a run up the mainline, turning right at the deep T and heading on to hopefully find and mark the deep re-join. We got all the kit built and hauled down to the side of the water. I suited up and hauled it all into the river and positioned it so we could easily kit up in the water once wearing the RB’s. Unforunately it was then that issues started to crop up. First a stage reg was found to be leaking and had to be pulled out, taken apart and wound back. Next up we had a faulty HP hose, Clare again got out of the water and sorted it. At this point I am sweating like crazy, the DUI 450 undersuit, xerotherm base layers and dry gloves are cooking me even when in the river water. The air temperature is something like 35 degrees and the river water just wasn’t cool enough.
Thankfully we get it all sorted and then clip off 5 stages and a scooter each. We hit the trigger in the river and I’m looking forward to getting into the cooler cave water when Clare’s scooter packs in. We have to head back and in the end both have to dekit. Out comes the toolkit and the trigger lever had snapped. We fix it and are confident its resolved but then have to go through the labourous process of kitting up again. 2 hours from when we thought we were ready to kit up we get to the cave.
The water is wonderfully cool and the cave is as I remembered it. Vis is very good around 15m but we take it steady not quite trusting Clare’s scooter repair. We drop stages as we go – 100% at the entrance, 50% at 21m and 35/25 at 36m. By the time we are down to two AL80’s and a RB80 I’m almost feeling streamlined.
By the time we reach the deep T we are making slow progress and it’s taken longer than normal. Clare dials up the pitch on her scooter and we start motoring on the shallow path to the right. We head through the switchback and soon we reach, for me, a new part of the cave. The line deteriorates and I find a second line begins. Then a third! Then the line I had been on becomes monofilament fishing line. I’d heard the lines are bad but this wad quite something. The cave itself is great to see – lots of big passage with plenty of features in the limestone. We keep going and I keep an eye on the distance markers. We reach 1400m and I know we’ve overshot the deep re-join especially given the 60m depth we reached. I drop a cookie and we thumb the dive and begin exiting. On the way out I note a section where the cave looks like it continues but I’m not sure. Clare had a couple of issues with her scooter sticking on – not an issue in such a big cave but probably due to the repair just before the dive.
We’re back at the 36m bottle without any dramas and begin the long deco. We discount the entry into the cave but we are still in the water for 4 hours by the time we’ve finished the deco and ascended. We then had the hard slog of getting all the kit back to the car. I have to say I found my physical limit that day. By the time we’d got the 10 stages, 2 rebreathers and scooters up to the car and packed I was exhausted. I honestly don’t think I can manage more gear with just two of us in that heat with that length of dive.
We had a couple of days off diving to relax a bit and decide to have another go. We did decide to make some changes!
First – we would set off for the cave at 7am when it was nice and cool. We had stripped all the gear down and fixed it – Clare’s scooter’s relay had got slightly too sensitive and it took us a while to replicate the failure in the cave (it seemed fine on first inspection) and we can only presume that fixing the trigger shortened the cable by an infinitesimal amount which was on occasion then too short to power off. It was failing one in every twenty or so uses – but clearly that was too many so it needed attention and fine tuning.
Second – we would take the left hand fork for the deeper route in the cave and treat it as a thirds dive (well the RB80 equivalent). This means that we would simply press on until we hit gas – or hit the deep rejoin from the other direction. We were content that we could comfortably ID the route we had taken the day before should we reach that section – it was clear that my marker was much further down the line and we would not be seeing it again this trip.
Finally, we would limit bottom time. The almost four hour dive had been very punishing on us after a difficult set up and we were not up for that again in 10 degree water – not on this trip anyway. It needed to be fun.
And fun it was. No issues, everything working fine, we zipped round the deep circuit in around 45 minutes – about 20 minutes quicker than when Clare did it on OC a couple of years ago.
I was interested to see that the rejoin line was a piece of monofillament fishing line which was running up the side of the main tunnel on the opposite side of the tunnel to the two parallel mainlines (at that point in the cave). I was unsurprised that we had missed from the other way but both of us recognised exactly where we were – and were happy to press on and exit.
We got back to first deco cylinder and as the dive was much shorter we were out of the water 3 hours after we descended. We got all the gear back to the car and then chilled out for the rest of our time. Having some days off and not trying to max out your time is actually very sensible when the dives get very long.
As we left France we were already talking about heated vests and whether we could go a bit further….