Cave diving

Cave Dive Training | JONATHAN BIRD'S BLUE WORLD

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• published: 04 Sep 2015
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In the season 5 premiere episode, Jonathan travels to Abaco, Bahamas for an intensive sidemount cave diving class with world famous cave explorer Brian Kakuk. ********************************************************************** If you like Jonathan Bird's Blue World, don't forget to subscribe! You can buy some Blue World T-shirts & Swag! http://www.blueworldtv.com/shop You can join us on Facebook! https://www.facebook.com/BlueWorldTV Twitter https://twitter.com/BlueWorld_TV Instagram @blueworldtv Web: http://www.blueworldTV.com ********************************************************************** I’m deep in a cave. Blindfolded. Being spun around to intentionally make me disoriented. I’m completely lost. And now, I have to find my way out of the cave all by myself—blind. I start by tying off a guideline to a rock by feel alone. Then I grope around in the dark for a while trying to find the main line out of the cave. Eventually, I do find the line, and I tie in. Then I follow that line towards the cave entrance. Full cave certification is kind of like the “black belt” of scuba diving. It’s not easy. The training is intense, designed to test your nerves and your confidence. It has to be, because underwater caves are dangerous. If you get lost and run out of air, you will die. The training is designed to teach divers not to panic, not to get lost, and never to run out of air. I contacted Brian Kakuk, one of the world’s most famous and respected cave explorers--known for his impressive discoveries and passionate efforts to protect some of the world’s most fragile and vulnerable caves. Caves are his passion, but Brian also spent years as a dive safety officer working on big Hollywood film productions, like the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, and many others. Brian is based out of Abaco, an island in the Bahamas known in the cave diving community as the home of the most exquisitely decorated caves in the world. Cave divers need to wear two scuba tanks. Sidemount is a style of diving where the diver wears the scuba tanks on the sides, instead of the back. Buoyancy will become a common theme in my class. Cave divers must exhibit near perfect buoyancy not only to keep from breaking the formations in the cave, but to keep from kicking up silt. Cave diving requires a lot of specialized gear. Even the regulators. You might wonder why we wear helmets. They look goofy but it’s better than whacking your head on a rock ceiling, and it’s a convenient place to mount a backup light or two. When I’m ready, Brian and I do a very careful check of each other. In cave diving, small equipment issues can quickly turn into big problems. So catching anything small now is important. Finally we are ready to submerge, and I have to practice tying off our reel, in what is called the primary tie-off. Then we descend down into the cavern. I continue to make tie-offs where Brian tells me to. He is having me practice on all kinds of different shapes. Finally we make the final tie-off, called a “terminal” tie off right next to the Stop sign. The stop sign signifies the end of the cavern zone: the part of the cave where you can still see light from the opening. I can’t go past this sign at this stage of my training. The first exercise I have to perform is a simulation of a blind navigation in an out of air situation. I am breathing from Brian’s long-hose regulator while following the guideline with my eyes shut, and he is using me as his guide by holding my arm. Then we switch positions and he is the one out of air. Normally this would be done with our lights off in the dark, but we need light for Todd to film it, so I have to promise to keep my eyes shut. We navigate all the way back to entrance. Doing it with my eyes closed builds confidence in the guideline system and it’s my job to practice retrieving the line by spooling it back up. At the cave site, Brian has another guideline exercise for me—finding a lost guideline in the dark. I have to promise to keep my eyes shut again as Brian spins me around so I don’t know where the line is. If I cheat, I’m only cheating myself, because I won’t learn how this is done. My training dives are not all blind exercises though. Throughout the course, as I progress from Intro to Cave Diver to Apprentice Cave Diver, and finally full cave diver, Brian takes me and Todd to see the sights, practice our sidemount skills, and sometimes snake our way through the swiss cheese limestone. Soon we reach our thirds—one third of our air supply, and it’s time to turn around and head back towards the entrance. On the way out, Brian spots a Remipede, a type of rare blind crustacean that only lives in caves. With its two large antennae, this little guy is called the Hammerhead ramipede. We also find a blind Bahamian cavefish—the super-predator in the cave—only a few inches long.