Projects > Gourneyras 2004 (July)
Push Dive
Latest update: July 12, 2005
This is at the top of the cable car. The team loaded the container and attaches one more heavy bag to it.
Thursday: Traveling
Reinhard called me on the phone on Thursday around noon from the highway and told me that he had a flat tire. "Jeez," I thought, "this is not a good sign for a fun weekend." Christian arrived at three and we unloaded some stuff from my car in order to get the habitat into it. Reinhard arrived at four - one hour late - and we directly loaded most stuff into my car and some of the bulky parts into Christian's Espace.
I handed one of the Walkie-Talkies over to Christian and we drove to the highway. My navigation-system directly re-routed us to the smaller streets because of a major traffic jam. "Oh no.... we are running late," I thought.
Friday: Preparing
After a long drive we arrived at 2:30 in the morning. Directly after us, Brus, Ralph and Marcel arrived. We decided not to unload the car immediately, but sleep under the stars instead. Reinhard convinced me that it would not rain tonight... and guess what happened.
In the morning it was dry again and the weather was nice. The cable-car crew had already set up everything and so we unloaded and started preparing the rebreathers. For the first time, I almost forgot to insert a part into the rebreather, but since we check each other, Reinhard immediately noticed it. "I should have stayed home." I thought. We went down to the cave pool and prepared the double-RB80. While we did that Silvia and Viktor started their dive.
The road is our campsite. For breakfast and for diner we get the chairs and tables out and make ourselves confortable. Very relaxing after a day of work.
Reinhard and I started the BBQ and Vincent Prié arrived. He is a French guy living nearby and working on caves mollusks. We invited him for dinner, but sadly he did not have time, but we still sat and chatted for a while. Viktor and Silvia surfaced and gave us the report about visibility and line conditions. Their report sounded really promising. We went to sleep in the van around ten o'clock, since we had to get up at six the next morning. It is always hard to leave this bunch of nice people from all different countries to go to bed early.
Saturday: The push dive
We got up at six o'clock and prepared the usual noodles with sauce. This time we had chosen macaroni with Bolognese. After the usual drink with magnesium, calcium, and an Imodium tablet we started to walk down the trail to the cave entrance. Viktor and Silvia helped us gearing up. As usual, we tested all rebreather parts and measured the impedance of the heating shirt at the connectors.
All systems were green and so we took off. We were accompanied by the photo team down to 21 meters, where we left the trimix 50/25 stage behind and switched to a 100 meter stage with trimix 16/75. We had a look where the stages at 36 meters were placed and directly dropped for the 45 meters depot. We picked up another 100m stage, a 36m stage (in case the cave would get shallow) and left behind the small 14 cu ft argon tank, which we had used to descend. We picked up three scooters each, plugged in our argon and, after a look back, we hit the trigger.
With the assistance of Silvia, Reinhard tests the impedance of his heating shirt before the push dive.
After around 300m, we dropped our deep deco gas, a trimix 25/40 in a small 40 cu ft cylinder. We enjoyed the ride through beautiful scenery and went through the first 100m point and up again to around 80m. There we deposited the first scooter and took off again. We were now following our own line, which is marked every 20 m, and so we had a good feeling, because we knew the line would be the only one and a good reference. As soon as we reached the next shallow point around 50 m, we stopped again and dropped the first stage and switched on the 50 W HID scooter nose cone light and the 50W HID and camera on the other scooter. I went over to Reinhard and turned on the new infrared mini camera and the infrared light. The mini camera is positioned at the head of the diver and shows the diver's perspective.
I went to the second rebreather for a quick check and back to the first one since the dive would only be a few hours bottom time anyway. We subsequently scootered to our old end of the line and tied off with the new reel. Swimming up a vertical chimney, it got smaller and smaller, so this could not be the main tunnel. We searched this room full of massive boulders, but could not find a way through. Should this be the end after laying 60m of line? We discussed the search pattern using wetnotes and took off again.
Nice view from down below. Reinhard and Micha are swimming down to the 21 meter stop where they will switch gas and continue down.
I stayed at the main line while Reinhard went upwards in a big room from 80 m to around 30 m and searched for tunnels while maintaining light contact. There were some tunnels, but they were too small to be the main tunnel and too small to swim further into.
It was now 120 Minutes in the dive. "With that kind of luck we had today, we should head for the door," I thought. Anyway, the visibility was great and it looked just too cool to have the full illumination going with the two 50W HID video lights.
Continuing the search, we scootered back and tried every promising tunnel, but could not find anything worth following. Thus we agreed to scooter out with one of us searching on the left and one on the right of the line, but still within contact distance in case we would need each other.
152 minutes into the dive we picked up the stage and realized that we really used up a lot of gas due to the ups and downs. This is something where all rebreathers waste tons of gas. Again it proofed to be a good thing to have untouched double 20 liter tanks on the back.
At 172 minutes, we picked up the deposited scooter and went through the last drop to 100m of depth, exactly 3 hours after we started the dive. At 215 minutes, we plugged in the heating and started the normal decompression, so now the working part of the dive was over.
At 21m of depth, swapping the 21m bottle for an 80m one.
In my wetnotes I just put down one word, "schade", which means "what a pity." The first support-team came down after less than 10 minutes, checked on us and took stages and scooters to the surface. After 405 minutes, we entered the habitat and stayed there until minute 566. This time we only needed 10 minutes to get to the surface since the deco felt really great.
Ok, we had a lot of bad luck this time and could not extend the cave very much. I also forgot to mention that Reinhard's heating shirt had a malfunction due to a broken cable and that we used a lot of argon on the way out. However, we showed that we can reproduce our diving results almost systematically if the conditions allow. Together with all the fun and laughter we had during this weekend together with this nice bunch of people, I would not hesitate to do it again! Furthermore, capturing a life mollusk - very few have been found alive in the world until now - which we spotted during the deco, was a success. So afterwards, we all drove home pretty happy and we even checked out the entrance of another new cave already.