Playa Del Carmen Mexico, Cave Divers Paradise.

  The underground rivers beneath the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico provides some of the most spectacular cave diving in the world.  My son, Ray, and I recently spent 4 days exploring just a few of the cavern entrances to this cave system.  In my experience this is some of the most beautiful water in the world and I wanted Ray to see this first hand.

 

 

    I contacted Gabriel Gasca Rubi of Advanced Divers Mexico to schedule a technical cave diving scuba course.   Gabriel suggested the IANTD Essentials course as a good introduction.  The full cave course is demanding and rigorous.  I received my cave diving certification a year and a half ago from Gabriel.  I wanted this trip to be fun for Ray. Perhaps I have planted the seed and he will continue technical training and pursue a cave certification in the future.

 

 

 It was a pleasure to watch his skills improve as the training progressed.  I found it challenging once again finding buoyancy and trim in depths constantly changing between 5 and 40 feet.   Holding neutral buoyancy at 10 feet and performing a valve drill is always a challenge.  It was good some of the training took place in the open water pool of the Cenote Ponderosa.   I found myself on the surface after trying the valve drill in 8 feet of water.  I have been a certified diver for 19 years but the demands of technical diving have brought an entirely new challenge to this activity.

 

 

 

    This is a short video of Ray trying the backwards kick for the first time.  He caught on pretty fast, much faster than I did.

 

  Gabriel is an IANTD instructor.  I do not want to even consider a discussion about which certifying agency is the best.  There are enough divers who like to argue these points.   You will learn from any and will gain as much as you want depending on how badly you wish to learn.  I will say Gabriel is not an instructor who just gives out a card at the completion of a course.  Diving is serious business, 45 min into an over head environment markedly increases the potential danger.  Being unprepared is nothing more than simple ignorance that can and does result in deaths.

 

  It was a pleasure meeting divers from other countries.  Germany, France, Holland, the UK and Canadian divers frequent the caves of the Riviera Maya.  I enjoyed visiting with a team from Toronto Canada.  Both experienced cave divers and were there to train more.  Technical divers seem to always have a desire to improve. I like thinking there is no such thing as a perfect dive, always room to improve.

 

  Ray and I are already planning our next trip to Playa del Carmen.  I asked Ray what he enjoyed best of the experience.  He could not pick one thing specifically, the overall beauty, the challenges of cave diving the incredible cave formations were all things he mentioned and many more.  For myself the answer was simple, I love the beauty of the water.

 

  Here is a video of the last dive on our trip.