Projects > Source de Vis 2007 (September)

Push Dive

Latest update: October 6, 2007

By Markus Schieritz

It was time again to get things done, so we decided to push the Source de Vis. After the successful dive from last year we thought that this cave had high potential for unexplored tunnels. The setup went without any problems and we could use the rest of the day for relaxing. With the wake up call at 7 am the day started for a new journey. After the usual breakfast we walked to the cave. When entering the cave Reinhard and I started gearing up.

Around 10 am we were ready to rock and left the surface. We easily got through the restriction and went down the slope. At 36m we reached our 3 bottom stages with the deep gas and one stage for the shallow part of the cave. After picking up our stages we went to 38m where our scooters were waiting for us. At 54m we stored our deep deco gas and the heating tubes. Slowly we started to descend to the bottom which was at about 75m in this area. We hit the trigger again and continued our journey.

It took around 20 minutes to bring us to the shallow part. We had to switch to the shallow gas and continued. At 1400m penetration, the cave dropped again to a deep section. After 1800m penetration, we reached the end of the line of Patrick Bolango which is at the bottom of a shaft. Then we directly went on to the line that was added by Micha and Reinhard, one year earlier.

We followed it and after 20 minutes we reached the end of the line, 115 minutes after leaving the surface.

Reinhard took out one of the reels. Finding the connection was not easy and it took some time. In the end, we added 296 m of new line. The main direction was north. We will not provide any more depth details until we will have reached the end of the cave. This decision was made because of the sabotage in May, which could only have been done by other cave divers.

Interesting in this part of the cave is the floor. It looks if the water force used to be high enough that pebbles were pressed into the ground (the ground is hard as concrete). In minute 128, we stopped our journey for the day and started our way back. At minute 230 we reached our first deco gas at 54m. The deco went without any problems. The support divers took all unnecessary gear and we reached the surface after 7 hours.

All together, it was a great success for the team. Again we would like to thank you all very much for the great support during this weekend. This will be not our last dive in this beautiful cave!

Markus