Cannonball Cave

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I shined my light all around me and it was immediately obvious that this was a HUGE cave, and a very beautiful one! I was reminded of the way one of the Apollo astronauts described the moon as “Magnificent Desolation!” The ceiling at this location tends to be very plain and dark, like the night sky without many stars, and the floor was a rolling blanket of fine silt with odd, rocky projections shooting up out of it, very “Moonlike” at first, at least to my eyes. This is one of the most subjective things about cave diving I suppose. Two divers can see the same cave on the same dive and leave with two totally different impressions of it. It’s like music I think, and the impressions a diver experiences on a particular dive seems to be more a matter of the diver’s own personality and imagination. Every cave is something different for every diver.

The features of the cave continued to change dramatically as we progressed up the line, with the formations becoming larger, more pronounced and chaotic, with stranger shapes appearing here and there. I saw the skeletal remains of a turtle on the floor, laid out like some fossil being painstakingly excavated from the earth. I took pictures of everything I could, but some things were just beyond the limits of the equipment and the skill of the operator. I did the best I could and hoped for good results.

I always get a charge out of watching the other cave divers on the teams I’ve been on as they glide weightlessly through the caves. I know that is how I appear to them as well and it is an extraordinary sight to see! I enjoyed watching Doug hover over the alien-looking formations, his HID beam sweeping methodically across them. It emphasized to me where I was and what I was doing. It was an image that science-fiction writers would love to be able to capture and place in the minds of their readers. But this was real, and I knew that if one of us got sloppy for just a moment and dropped a fin into that fine clay sediment, it could mean real trouble real quick. As a note of caution, Cannonball is a VERY silty cave and divers need to be spot-on with regard to their buoyancy.

"Try to tell your buddy that you saw the Extra Longnose Unicorn Fish when he’s convinced it was just the Longnose one. Did someone bring a ruler?"

We cruised along slowly, passing the distance arrows and taking mental notes of where we were, and occasionally when Doug would draw a circle around something he recognized with his light, I would go over, marvel at it, and take more pictures. I had never before been so glad that I switched to digital photography! If I had still been using my film camera I would have burned up all my film before I even got a third of the way into this place! The lights kept sweeping, the laser kept lasing, the strobes kept firing, and I was one happy camper!

Eventually we came to a chamber that had an ENORMOUS natural bridge running right across the center of the room, with the line running directly across it. What an amazing sight! I tried to photograph it completely in one frame, but it was just too big. I lingered there for a while, taking it all in and shooting more images of some of it’s smaller features. I could have stayed right there until time to leave and been perfectly happy, but I’m glad we moved on because what lay beyond it dwarfed the bridge on a scale that was simply breathtaking.

We had arrived at “The Pit”. Sometimes called the “Drop-off”, and it was less a feature of the cave and more of an absence of it. I’ll try to explain. The floor of the cave up to this point had averaged about 60’ deep, but at this point, in this one room, the floor literally fell away vertically down to a depth of some 240’, where it tapers off and goes down even farther. I believe this cave has been explored at least down to 350’ and appears to continue through several restrictions well beyond that depth. Hovering over that black abyss while shining my light down into it gave me the impression I was being sucked into a black hole. I suspect that if a diver ever gets carried away and forgets to watch his depth while doing this on MOD 110’, that might be essentially what happens! I still can’t get over the sight of it, and probably never will.