Projects > Source de Vis 2007 (October)

Time to come back

Latest update: October 31, 2007

By Markus Schieritz

It was just four weeks ago that we added 300 m of line in the Source de Viz but with the good cave conditions we decided to come back as early as possible. On the drive down to the Viz, the rain didn’t stop and we were already thinking that this weekend was not the best choice. But close to our destination the rain stopped and there were only some clouds in the sky left. Anne-Marie and JP made a quick check of the cave conditions and told us that the water level was lower than last time and that the visibility was great. So we could move on with our plan to explore the cave that weekend.

The next day was for transporting the stuff to the cave and do all set-up dives. You can read more about this in the setup report and the surface manager reports.

On Saturday, we got up at 6 am and had breakfast. After we arrived at the cave, the rebreather frames were transported to the water and Reinhard and I started gearing up in the cave pool. It is a very small area so only one person at the time can get into the rebreather harness. We left the surface at around 9 am and started our journey.
After the usual check of the equipment, we passed the restriction and went down the slope where our gear had been placed the day before. Again, it was placed perfectly by the set-up divers and it took us only a few minutes to clip it on. We hit the trigger of our scooter for the first time and went down the huge shaft to store the deep deco gas and the heating tubes at 54m. Everything went without a hurry because time was not running and we didn’t want to get in any stress. After that was done we hit the trigger of our scooters again and started our way into the cave.

After about 650m, we made a gas switch because the cave goes shallower than 40m. Roughly 500 m later, we switched back to the deep gas. At minute 110, we reached the point where we started to add line during our previous dive. We followed the shaft up to 40 m (coming from 105 m) and had to switch gas again. Five minutes later we reached the end of our own line which was in 36m. We tied in a new reel and started exploring the virgin cave.
For the exploration, I handed the backup scooters over to Reinhard and started laying line. After just a few minutes on the trigger, we had to change gas again because the cave dropped under the 40m range. We switched to our deep gas and followed the slope that goes down to a 90m range. In this area the cave is very huge and there are pebbles all over the ground. At the bottom, there was a small horizontal crack which looked like the continuation.

The cave went smaller and smaller and was very silty. The depth was around 90 – 95m. Only a few meters further down in this crack, I tied up the line again while Reinhard was looking for the continuation. There is only a very tiny split that goes vertical. Because of the bad visibility we decided to hit the door for this time.
On the way out Reinhard surveyed the line we had laid and we enjoyed our ride out. After 230 minutes we reached the fist deco gas at 54m and started our decompression. At 39m, the first support team met us and we handed over all the equipment that was not needed any more. The rest of the deco went without any problems and we hit the water level after 420 minutes of total dive time. Again, it was a great project with a perfect team that made it happen.