Saw the damnedest thing yesterday at Nohoch.
Nohoch, historically, has been a hard no-training cave. I am, as an instructor, not allowed to do any sort of high-impact skills there with students. That is: anything where a student or students would have planned gas shares or contact with the line for extended periods such as to simulate a loss of visibility.
There are a handful of caves where the local community has agreed this is allowed. "Sacrificial caves" is a term that is generally frowned upon; but if we're honest with ourselves that's what they are. They are the caves we bang into because they can take it.
Nohoch has never been one of them. Primarily because it can't take it. Heavily decorated with fine, lacey structures that took thousands of years to create. It's like swimming through a wedding cake. One of those wedding cakes decorated by someone wearing a high toque and the wild-eyed expression of an old-testament prophet. It is beyond pretty in there.
Not a place to be bashing around, learning, in unfamiliar gear.
Yesterday I saw a cavern guide giving a Sidemount briefing to two of their four cavern guidees.
Oh! Did I not mention there's a cavern line there now?
I can't honestly say I object completely to the cavern line. I objectedED to it. When it was discussed. When it was happening.
Now it's happenED. A big fucking hole got excavated and it's not going to heal itself.
I'm going to bitch about it a bunch. But I'm probably going to take divers there eventually. We all are. All of us who bitched about it.
Because it is a damn pretty cave. And I hope that we're honest with ourselves about the cavern divers we bring there, filtering only the divers we trust are capable of controlling their trim and buoyancy enough that they will not inadvertently damage the environment.
I hope that we are capable of telling some divers, "No, you aren't prepared for a dive like that."
And I am sure some of us are.
I did not anticipate that it would escalate to becoming a place to let people try sidemount for their first time during a cavern tour.
But... people.
Then there's the way the mainline is run. Used to go through the huge area where the new cavern tour line is.
As one of the most popular diving caves in the area EVERYONE goes there. Including lots of newer and Intro-level divers who may not have the buoyancy/trim/control that they're trying to work up to just yet. So having a mainline running through a huge section of cave for the first few hundred feet made a lot of sense.
One of our group yesterday took a picture of a window the line is run through inside of 100 feet of the entrance. I'll be taking a picture of that window every time I go there over the next year. I'm going to go ahead and guess now that the picture is going to look very, very, very different over time.
Damnedest thing. Nohoch. One of the crown jewels of cave diving in the area.
Tarnished to fuck.
{Edited to add referenced picture. Diver with their shit together for scale.
While your eye obviously drifts to the beauty of the ceiling, I'd also have you notice the floor. Which is currently unblemished by handprints or two-meter twin gouges through the silt where people who wear their sidemounted pressure gauges lollipopped because they're easier to see that way were a little closer to the floor than they thought they were.)
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