Cannonball Cave

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I arrived at the Cannonball Cave dive site just before 9:00 am and met Doug Rorex at the boat ramp. We exchanged greetings and I introduced my family; my wife Becky and my two tricycle motors Hannah and Joshua. We all spent a little while visiting with each other and getting aquainted. Becky was feeling pretty sick and cranky from a little dose of what may have been food poisoning, but she still managed to be pleasant and refrained herself from mauling any of us for pestering her. No one ever said cave diving was a spectator sport!

After we assembled our dive gear and loaded it into Doug’s boat, we began with the cleanup activities. All five of us tag-teamed the hill above the spring and the shoreline. We picked up about half a bag of loose trash of various sorts, but the area was actually fairly clean when we got there. Doug said the place was trashed pretty badly last year at the previous annual cleanup and that about 3 bags of trash were collected, including an old oil filter that was still leaking oil into the lake. Maybe peoples’ attitudes about keeping these places clean are changing for the better. We can only hope so!

When it became pretty obvious that Doug and I would be the only two divers to show up, we decided to go ahead and put a dive plan together. Having dived Cannonball many times before, Doug had a good general plan already in mind. My backgas was EANx32 and had a MOD of 110’, so we had to stay within that range, but this wasn’t really a limiting factor since there was a lot of cave to be seen well above that depth. In fact, it was decided that we needed stages just so we could spend enough time seeing and photographing everything along the way.

"Good grief, he wasn’t kidding! It was like diving in a giant cup of coffee!"

We spent some time studying the map of the cave and some photos he had taken on previous dives and I soon understood that there was a lot to see along the way and I didn’t want to be in a hurry to see so much before hitting turnaround on my light doubles. We planned for about P-900’ to “The Pit”, nice and slow with lots of stops to marvel and take pictures, and a max depth of around 60,’ until we got there.

We boated around to the shore just above the spring to avoid wearing our gear down that extremely steep hill above the spring. I promise to anyone considering walking down that slope in full cave gear that if you fall you will most likely end up in the hospital or worse! Don’t say I didn’t warn you! If you have access to a boat, do yourself a favor and use it.

After suiting up we hit the water and talked a little more about the dive plan. Doug knew that we would be in zero vis until we got near the mouth of the cave about 30’ down into the lake, so he suggested we do our bubble checks down there just before going in where the visibility would be much better. We got on the down line and submerged.

Good grief, he wasn’t kidding! It was like diving in a giant cup of coffee! I pressed my computer screen against my mask lens and still couldn’t read the display. I made sure I kept a good hold on the line and felt it slipping upward through my fingers to get an idea of how fast I was descending. It got totally dark within a few seconds and my light was useless. A few moments later we broke into clear, cold water, and there was the cave mouth right below me.

We checked each other over for leaks before heading in, but in all honesty I was too busy trying to brace myself against the cold outflow and letting my eyes adjust to the dark to do as good a job checking things out as I should have. Doug headed into the long, low restriction and after giving him a moment or two to get a comfortable distance ahead of me I started into the cave. The flow wasn’t too bad, but crawling through there with my feet against the ceiling and my chest bumping the gravel floor while lugging a stage and a sizeable camera rig was something of an ordeal. I felt like I had a Buick on one side of my body and a live octopus on the other! Just after passing through the restriction into the cave, we stopped together and I made sure to give Doug’s gear a little more deliberate attention. I could see no gas leaks or other signs of trouble. I even took time to take a picture back through the restriction, but it was a wasted effort because we had mucked it up pretty badly squeezing in. It was unavoidable I guess, but we turned back around and began heading up the mainline.