Nohoch Cave, Mexico

Dive Log

Nohoch cave starts with a 45 minute walk out to the cenote.  You hire Mayans to carry your scuba gear out on horseback to the cenote, where they lower them down to you using a rope and pulley.  I had two side mount AL80 tanks, and one stage AL80.  In retrospect, because of the shallow nature of this cave, the stage bottle was not needed.   Turned on time, and followed the line marker to the 5000 foot mark.

Pictures

    Many of the rooms near the cavern zone are heavily decorated with all kinds of formations.  The stalactites covered the ceiling, and the columns spanned from ceiling to floor.  The experience was extremely surreal as one floated among the beauty of this scene.

I then took a close-up picture of the above columns.  Notice the helectites that occur on many of the columns, and how white the formations are.  This adds quite a bit to the beauty of this cave.

Many of the formations were quite large in size.  These stalagmites are coated with a layer of white decorations that were just unbelievable.  Drifting by these formations left one in somewhat of a dreamlike state.  If not for the reality of keeping track of your air, etc., one could lose themselves in this beauty forever.

    We swam among these formations (on the way back out), and I snapped pictures of a lot of them.  If only it were possible to change rolls of film underwater, I would have taken a lot more.  We had been underwater for over two hours, at this point, but it seemed like we had just gotten there.

    This is a close-up of some of the draperies on the ceiling of the cave.  These occurred in many different areas throughout the trip.  Even these had small helectites and other bumps scattered on them.

Here is a close-up of some of the helectites that occurred on the various columns.   I have never seen anything else like it, never mind that they are currently under water.   We passed several columns that were coated in this way.

The rooms are just absolutely beautiful though out the cave.  No matter where you look, you see something you didn't notice before.  This cave is probably one of the most decorated I have ever seen, and is worth the trip.  Over 2 miles of swimming on this one, and the time just flew by.  I am going back to this one in the not to distant future.  It was a great dive.