Who?: Jack and Jackie Gregory, Georgia, USA
When?: 19 Aug, 2004; 22-30 April, 2006
Crazy Jack’s Most Excellent Bahamas Cave Adventure
In the Bahamas last week (Grand Bahama IS) serving as the loyal, overworked, and hard humping Dive Master for some of my OW buddies on the standard reef and wreck “buy-off” trip. That’s the trip that you just hate going on BUT if you do, you have “bought” your wife’s goodwill to ensure yet another year of her diving with you in the caves. So, the first day while I’m standing around at the LDS we were using (Xanadu), I noticed several of the NACD Stop Signs. On checking further I found out that “Bahama Ben” Cook, who leads OW’s around, is also an NACD Instructor and happens to be the NACD Bahamas Safety Officer.
This is getting interesting because, when it comes to his appointed task, Bahama Ben reports in the NACD hierarchy to our Instructor in Florida (who is the International Safety Officer). Small world and time to tell outlandish untruths and BS tales about the same people we know (sorry Michael).
I am able to find out that yes, there is one helluva big system a little east of the LDS, by the name of Old Freetown System. I, of course, start to immediately wonder if I can scrap together enough “stuff” to safely pull off an nice afternoon trip after Ben gets off (he makes his living dealing with OW divers, so we had to work around that schedule). Come to find out, when I started really looking, about the only thing that I didn’t bring were my regular wings and backplate. Could that be why I needed 3 bags @ 70 lbs each? If I have to do OW, I use my long hose DIN Scubapro’s adapted to yoke. I even had an HID and a couple of safety reels! I have never been in a cave outside of Florida in my life…I had to do this. So, I bubba rigged my OW Transpac and instead of using the 2 stabilizer brackets that you can get for this, I just removed the lumbar pad and in its place put on a full AL backplate from the DS…with nothing running thru it. Ben had an extra set of double AL 80’s, so I was set there. All I needed were a couple of line arrows (that Ben loaned) and this boy was finer than frog hair. Miss Jackie had decided that she wanted to hang on the boat with her girl buddies (which was good because Ben didn’t have anything else to loan out, AND after a week of having to deal with me, was pretty sick of me anyway).
So last Thursday (08/19/04) off I go, with Bahama Ben driving, which is good because I would have surely crashed, still trying to drive on the right, causing an international incident of carnage, not for the cave divers to have to sort out, but for the U.S. Embassy, I’m sure.
Picture, if you will, an absolutely knock-out totally secluded beach on your left running from the surf to the backwoods road that you are driving on (about 150 ft from the surf to the road) and then the vast (and deep) Bahamian jungle on the right next to the road. Ben suddenly stops the rig and says “let’s walk to the site…I have to clear some things out as we go.” The walk is only about 125 level yards to the head pool BUT what he has to “clear-out” is about three to fours huge bright yellow spiders that have taken up residence at face height right on the path. He calls them “Harmless Banana Spiders” but one of them looks the size of a couple of stacked Krispy Creames. Miss Jackie later tells me that she would have kicked my ass if I had made her go. I have seen worse entrances in FL, but none have smelled as bad…not even Telford on a Sunday afternoon. Ben tells me that’s the typical sulfides that you get on the top of these systems. Well, OK, I can deal with the smell, BUT that surface water definitely looked like what you poor out of a bedpan….for sure not your Little Rivers look from the parking lot. We go back and gear up. I walk off the tailgate with my rig on and I SWEAR, I have never felt such light doubles. I now understand why those divers in Mexico don’t have the ACL and Meniscus problems that your good ole standard OMS 112’s on a steel backplate are just waiting to give you back here. And here is what later would become my one and only problem with the dive. Ben and I now make our way back a second time. The Banana Spiders have high tailed it to some other cave system and we are ready to enter the infamous “Mermaid’s Lair.”
We do our pre-dive, primary tie off within a foot of the surface, and then descend into the cavern for S-Drills. This is when my mind is literally blown more than when I was running around doped-up in the mud at Woodstock in 1969….and that was the halocline. Well, until this point I had never been thru one of these. What I will vividly remember for the rest of my life was this experience…Picture a thousand little shiny mirrors, all holding the cavern scene, but pointing in slightly different directions….some brighter than others depending where your light was. This Timothy Leary effect lasted for about 20-30 feet until we hit clear (and I mean GIN CLEAR) 73 degree water below it at about 50 feet. Now, as all y’all know, there are caverns and then there ARE CAVERNS. I had never seen anything like this one. It was so big, that you could have run 20 different time share presentations in the damn thing and never run into anybody.
As we descend, you run into one of those NACD Stop Signs…..something that all of a sudden lets you feel that there are friends out there. The first section kinda reminded me of the chimney at Little Rivers. At the bottom you hit between 70-80 ft and the depth remains at that level, at least as far as I went. But here is what is different. Have you ever seen all those funny looking “3-4 foot things” coming off the ceiling and floor at Little Rivers?? Needless to say, the stalactites, stalagmites, and overall speleothems were unbelievable. When we shined our lights on the cross section of some that had been broken, the most unbelievable and intricate quartz formations could be seen. Ben is still working on getting gold for the mainline in this section so right now double arrows on # 24 are the main way of knowing that you are mainlining because of the many jumps. And this place is Jump City. You want side tunnels that go for hundreds of feet???…then this is the system for you. We had a clay silt floor all the way in up the mainline tunnel which also did a 180 in the first 500 ft, again like the Little Rivers. Big tunnel that narrowed down in a couple of spots. I turned the dive after about 30 minutes because guess what, you remember those light tanks that I mentioned? Well, son, they were too light! Gas Bag that I am, I needed about 4-6 more pounds after they were breathed down a bit. I literally drained every ounce of air that I could out of the Transpac, but it didn’t help much. If I didn’t call the dive, I would probably eventually wind up crashing into some of Ben’s favorite formations on the ceiling and that was the last damn thing this kid was going to do. So, next time I’ll bring the weight and I’ll bet that we will be able to set up a nice traverse between Mermaid’s Lair and what I now know to be the “Owl’s Hole.” (and we did---2 years later!)
So, if any of you find yourself on Grand Bahama, look up Cave Brother Bahama Ben Cook (242-373-2093; BahamaBenCook@hotmail.com; NACD I-137) for the dive of a lifetime. I was really surprised to hear that not many cave divers get over on Grand Bahama…at least ones that he is aware of. I plan to change that.
June 7, 2007 9:10 AM
Crazy Jumpin Jack (and Jackie) said...
If anyone wants a copy of this report with the images that did not post to the blog...just E-Mail me @ jjgregory@mindspring.com...and I'll sends it along. Also, check out this video!!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4LV8cFQC6g
Idiot Jack
June 7, 2007 9:20 AM
