Tom Falardeau
September 2nd, 2007, 08:35 PM
Call me Ishmael. Some years ago- never mind how long precisely- having little or no money in my purse (thanks to all the dive gear purchase), and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would dive about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off- then, I account it high time to get to a dive site as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the cave dive. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the cave dive with me. (With all apologies to Herman Melville)
Feeling quite Ishmael-ish, three-quarters of the Ottawa Cave Rats (Jim being detained by family engagements ? go figure) piled into Marc?s big blue truck ? not quite as sexy as my big blue truck, but quite serviceable ? and headed ?up the line? to one of the least dove caves in umm?. well, whatever.
It was a perfect day for the social end of summer, Labour Day weekend, where we celebrate work by sitting on our duffs. I should surprise no one if I declare that irony has never stopped me from taking advantage of those statutory holidays our hard-fighting union forebears gave to us. Shame that we seem to be sliding back into pre-1900s industrial conditions for the service industry ? but little thought did I give to the coffee jockeys, cashiers and other exploited non-divers on this fine late summer day. However, that?s neither here nor there. Being part of the exploiting class, it is a moot point for me or the other Rats. :D
The drive up the Valley was splendid as usual, with signs of the impending harvest clear upon the fields of green marking the fertile plain of what was once the Champlain Sea. Even the mighty maple was announcing, with a clarion call of red, the arrival of the Equinox. (And if that sounds like pompous prose, you?ve obviously never read anything by Marcel Proust or St?phane Dion, though C?line Dion?s songs come close).
We arrived at our magic corner of the river, to find the water level had dropped yet another foot since our last visit. Considering how shallow our beloved cave ran, it would become a damp sump at this rate (bear with me ? we all discovered the shallowness of low water some distance in). In no time at all ? for me that is ? I waited for my comrades Marc and Marie with zen-like patience for some time, we were off. Once again, my fellow rats offered me the lead position, meaning I would have the best visibility. Very noble of them, as I reminded Marc when he complained about the visibility post-dive
My intent was to push on to Pool #7 to experience the ?big? cave in that area. Owing to various damage done to my psyche by medical and medicinal (chief among them gin) causes, I zigged when I should have zagged past Pool #2 and approached Pool #3 from an unexpected direction, puzzling me to no end until I saw Marie arrive via the usual route. This, if nothing else, was a good reminder that placing markers at the t-junctions was a really good idea, no matter how well we were starting to know the cave. Finally realizing that I had inadvertently proved the circuit between Pool #2 and Pool #3, I carried on down the mainline past familiar landmarks, such as the deep sump that marks the start of Sawatsky?s Delight, the place were Jim hooked a new jump into the mainline to explore an unmarked side passage, the double arrow jump to the Terrible Tummy line (a bit of cave passing under someone?s septic field, no doubt, judging by the effect diving it had on stomach troubles), and the t-junction dividing the line between the run up to Pool #4 and the one going to Pool #6 and 7. One of the sections along that line shallows out quite a bit, and my last dive took me up to a depth of 4-5 feet, with my not touching the ceiling. Today, my computer registered 0 feet, and the bottom timer 2 feet, meaning with the low waters in the river, the top of the cave was at nominal water level. Very interesting to experience.
Since our fortuitous meeting at Pool #3, Marie had been paralleling my route, but I took the left branch and she the right, and our ways diverged into the darkness. Along the way, I met many large fish, carp and bass, and was startled by one of them eating a small catfish about 3-4 inches long. Two gulps and voila! Lunch taken care of. That particular fish hung around for a while, hunting in the foreshortened beam of my 21w HID.
The cave after the split takes on different characteristics and to my surprise, both the floor and the ceiling vanished into darkness, reminding me more of the Florida caves where we cut our teeth on cave diving. By Pool #7, my dive had lasted almost an hour and I decided to turn. Our dive plan had called for each of us to conduct a 90 minute dive (independently of course), and I figured that it was time to go. On the way out, I met both Marc and Marie, as we explored the various permutations of line in that section of the cave. Navigation in Gervais Cave is a quantum leap more difficult than navigation in the more popular Florida Caves, and progressive penetration is a good thing to practice, along with memorizing which line goes where, notwithstanding the temporary non-directional markers we might leave, or the few permanent markers in place. It will be less of a confusion once we re-line the cave, hopefully with a donation of gold kernmantle line from the NSS-CDS. One of our projects for the end of this year is to place a new NSS-CDS Grim Reaper sign at the entrance of Gervais Cave, to replace the one Jim retrieved for the Cave Museum (it was the oldest NSS-CDS warning sign in use at the time). The relining is a project for next year.
We noticed that the cave accumulated silt and gunk over the summer, as the flow dropped and the Ottawa carried more debris. From the almost pristine cave of May, freshly reamed out by the floods of spring, we have now progressed to a nasty, silty place where just the percolation from our bubbles hitting the ceiling will produce silt clouds to make even the most hardened Florida cave diver cry. Just looking at the silt, almost literally, could cloud up the already limited visibility.
Not one to stand on ceremony, once I?d done with my dive and reached the first t-junction to recover my final clothespin, I turned off all my lights and did the last few hundred feet of exit with no lights at all, my hand gliding on the line. Considering where the line was laid, in places that make perfect line traps, it was inevitable that I would kick up clouds of silt, thereby providing my two comrades with their own chance of a low visibility exit. They did thank me profusely for the extra training I provided.
It always amazes me how far one can see a sinkhole or the exit with lights out. Where the red glow can come upon you unexpectedly when you're tracking the old line with your canister light, a lights out exit will have you drift into an eerie light well before you expect it. In fact, the brief run of cave between Pool #1 and the exit, dark with a light in hand, is a drift from glow to glow with no lights at all - no darkness to a dark-adapted eye. Very cool.
The whole total darkness experience is actually very soothing, almost womb-like in its enveloping calm (if you get nervous in the dark, it?ll be anything but calm ? although if that?s the case, caves might not be for you). It's part of the major attraction of cave diving. You either get it or you don't, sort of like Andrew Warhol's "art".
I emerged from the cave 92 minutes after entering and headed for the beach, to be joined minutes later by my comrades.
The return home was without events of note, once I?d convinced Marc to change his satellite radio channel: Celine Dion coming on the heels of Barry Manilow was a bit too much to stomach.
All in all, an uneventful yet passionately exciting cave dive in the Ottawa River. The feeling of solitude in the darkness is what keeps me going back into the caves, and is what makes caves so much more interesting than the usual wreck dives.
By the way, the Ottawa River Rats have decided on a logo:
A smirking rat in a helmet and sidemount rig, with the notation:
Doing
It in the
River
T-shirts to come :D
Feeling quite Ishmael-ish, three-quarters of the Ottawa Cave Rats (Jim being detained by family engagements ? go figure) piled into Marc?s big blue truck ? not quite as sexy as my big blue truck, but quite serviceable ? and headed ?up the line? to one of the least dove caves in umm?. well, whatever.
It was a perfect day for the social end of summer, Labour Day weekend, where we celebrate work by sitting on our duffs. I should surprise no one if I declare that irony has never stopped me from taking advantage of those statutory holidays our hard-fighting union forebears gave to us. Shame that we seem to be sliding back into pre-1900s industrial conditions for the service industry ? but little thought did I give to the coffee jockeys, cashiers and other exploited non-divers on this fine late summer day. However, that?s neither here nor there. Being part of the exploiting class, it is a moot point for me or the other Rats. :D
The drive up the Valley was splendid as usual, with signs of the impending harvest clear upon the fields of green marking the fertile plain of what was once the Champlain Sea. Even the mighty maple was announcing, with a clarion call of red, the arrival of the Equinox. (And if that sounds like pompous prose, you?ve obviously never read anything by Marcel Proust or St?phane Dion, though C?line Dion?s songs come close).
We arrived at our magic corner of the river, to find the water level had dropped yet another foot since our last visit. Considering how shallow our beloved cave ran, it would become a damp sump at this rate (bear with me ? we all discovered the shallowness of low water some distance in). In no time at all ? for me that is ? I waited for my comrades Marc and Marie with zen-like patience for some time, we were off. Once again, my fellow rats offered me the lead position, meaning I would have the best visibility. Very noble of them, as I reminded Marc when he complained about the visibility post-dive
My intent was to push on to Pool #7 to experience the ?big? cave in that area. Owing to various damage done to my psyche by medical and medicinal (chief among them gin) causes, I zigged when I should have zagged past Pool #2 and approached Pool #3 from an unexpected direction, puzzling me to no end until I saw Marie arrive via the usual route. This, if nothing else, was a good reminder that placing markers at the t-junctions was a really good idea, no matter how well we were starting to know the cave. Finally realizing that I had inadvertently proved the circuit between Pool #2 and Pool #3, I carried on down the mainline past familiar landmarks, such as the deep sump that marks the start of Sawatsky?s Delight, the place were Jim hooked a new jump into the mainline to explore an unmarked side passage, the double arrow jump to the Terrible Tummy line (a bit of cave passing under someone?s septic field, no doubt, judging by the effect diving it had on stomach troubles), and the t-junction dividing the line between the run up to Pool #4 and the one going to Pool #6 and 7. One of the sections along that line shallows out quite a bit, and my last dive took me up to a depth of 4-5 feet, with my not touching the ceiling. Today, my computer registered 0 feet, and the bottom timer 2 feet, meaning with the low waters in the river, the top of the cave was at nominal water level. Very interesting to experience.
Since our fortuitous meeting at Pool #3, Marie had been paralleling my route, but I took the left branch and she the right, and our ways diverged into the darkness. Along the way, I met many large fish, carp and bass, and was startled by one of them eating a small catfish about 3-4 inches long. Two gulps and voila! Lunch taken care of. That particular fish hung around for a while, hunting in the foreshortened beam of my 21w HID.
The cave after the split takes on different characteristics and to my surprise, both the floor and the ceiling vanished into darkness, reminding me more of the Florida caves where we cut our teeth on cave diving. By Pool #7, my dive had lasted almost an hour and I decided to turn. Our dive plan had called for each of us to conduct a 90 minute dive (independently of course), and I figured that it was time to go. On the way out, I met both Marc and Marie, as we explored the various permutations of line in that section of the cave. Navigation in Gervais Cave is a quantum leap more difficult than navigation in the more popular Florida Caves, and progressive penetration is a good thing to practice, along with memorizing which line goes where, notwithstanding the temporary non-directional markers we might leave, or the few permanent markers in place. It will be less of a confusion once we re-line the cave, hopefully with a donation of gold kernmantle line from the NSS-CDS. One of our projects for the end of this year is to place a new NSS-CDS Grim Reaper sign at the entrance of Gervais Cave, to replace the one Jim retrieved for the Cave Museum (it was the oldest NSS-CDS warning sign in use at the time). The relining is a project for next year.
We noticed that the cave accumulated silt and gunk over the summer, as the flow dropped and the Ottawa carried more debris. From the almost pristine cave of May, freshly reamed out by the floods of spring, we have now progressed to a nasty, silty place where just the percolation from our bubbles hitting the ceiling will produce silt clouds to make even the most hardened Florida cave diver cry. Just looking at the silt, almost literally, could cloud up the already limited visibility.
Not one to stand on ceremony, once I?d done with my dive and reached the first t-junction to recover my final clothespin, I turned off all my lights and did the last few hundred feet of exit with no lights at all, my hand gliding on the line. Considering where the line was laid, in places that make perfect line traps, it was inevitable that I would kick up clouds of silt, thereby providing my two comrades with their own chance of a low visibility exit. They did thank me profusely for the extra training I provided.
It always amazes me how far one can see a sinkhole or the exit with lights out. Where the red glow can come upon you unexpectedly when you're tracking the old line with your canister light, a lights out exit will have you drift into an eerie light well before you expect it. In fact, the brief run of cave between Pool #1 and the exit, dark with a light in hand, is a drift from glow to glow with no lights at all - no darkness to a dark-adapted eye. Very cool.
The whole total darkness experience is actually very soothing, almost womb-like in its enveloping calm (if you get nervous in the dark, it?ll be anything but calm ? although if that?s the case, caves might not be for you). It's part of the major attraction of cave diving. You either get it or you don't, sort of like Andrew Warhol's "art".
I emerged from the cave 92 minutes after entering and headed for the beach, to be joined minutes later by my comrades.
The return home was without events of note, once I?d convinced Marc to change his satellite radio channel: Celine Dion coming on the heels of Barry Manilow was a bit too much to stomach.
All in all, an uneventful yet passionately exciting cave dive in the Ottawa River. The feeling of solitude in the darkness is what keeps me going back into the caves, and is what makes caves so much more interesting than the usual wreck dives.
By the way, the Ottawa River Rats have decided on a logo:
A smirking rat in a helmet and sidemount rig, with the notation:
Doing
It in the
River
T-shirts to come :D