steve2281
August 11th, 2006, 09:17 PM
Circumstances prevented us from joining a small group at Cannonball. We settled for Mine Lamotte. We planned to make a couple dives down the Hall Rd and add to our simple line map.
Before I parked the van, I could tell that we would not make entry into the Bat cave by a surface swim. The water level was down about 3' from our last visit leaving dry rocks and slime in our path. We entered through the main entrance and made the 500' swim over to the Bat cave. Upon surfacing in the air over water tunnel, we found that it would take a 200' crawl over rocks (and bat dodo) to get to the Hall Rd line. We retreated and decided to dive in the old section.
We did both dives in the area of the old elevator. The highlight of the day was the vis in the big rooms on the way to the elevator. I'm gonna call it 40', but if I had a bigger light, I'd probably call it 60'. These are the biggest rooms in the mine; our lights would shine wall to wall and ceiling to floor while swimming through the center of the huge rooms.
The elevator is one of the most interesting areas of the mine containing timbers, machinery, cart tracks, ect. The lines in this area are still the exploratory lines. We tried to make sense of the lines compared to a copy of the old section map (didn't do very good at that, lot of line back there). Dive one was turned when we ran out of markers; dive two was turned on thirds at almost the same spot.
Dive one: 58', 61min, penetration 1000', vis 10-40', temp 48*
Dive two: 60', 48min, penetration 1000', vis and temp same.
Before I parked the van, I could tell that we would not make entry into the Bat cave by a surface swim. The water level was down about 3' from our last visit leaving dry rocks and slime in our path. We entered through the main entrance and made the 500' swim over to the Bat cave. Upon surfacing in the air over water tunnel, we found that it would take a 200' crawl over rocks (and bat dodo) to get to the Hall Rd line. We retreated and decided to dive in the old section.
We did both dives in the area of the old elevator. The highlight of the day was the vis in the big rooms on the way to the elevator. I'm gonna call it 40', but if I had a bigger light, I'd probably call it 60'. These are the biggest rooms in the mine; our lights would shine wall to wall and ceiling to floor while swimming through the center of the huge rooms.
The elevator is one of the most interesting areas of the mine containing timbers, machinery, cart tracks, ect. The lines in this area are still the exploratory lines. We tried to make sense of the lines compared to a copy of the old section map (didn't do very good at that, lot of line back there). Dive one was turned when we ran out of markers; dive two was turned on thirds at almost the same spot.
Dive one: 58', 61min, penetration 1000', vis 10-40', temp 48*
Dive two: 60', 48min, penetration 1000', vis and temp same.