Ginnie Springs: Hill 400 Line

Saturday morning, we met at EE for some final debrief. At the end of every class, David makes you answer a bunch of questions (in writing) about your strengths and weaknesses, and your GUEness. In addition to making us write the answers, he made up for not making us do introductions on day 1, by making us go around and talk about our strengths and weaknesses. Blech. Once the driving of hot pokers under our nails was finished, the three of us got lunch at the Station Bakery (yum) and then Rob and I headed to Ginnie for a dive. David seemed to think it was odd that we were going to Ginnie. I think he thinks my disdain for Ginnie is greater than it is. I don't really mind it when it's just us, I just hate having to deal with the flow while I am being judged :) Ginnie was quite crowded, but not with divers. There were a zillion people tubing there though (it was 80+ degrees after all).

Rob wanted to go up the Hill 400 line, which was arbitrary but fine with me. I had to lead the dive. Rob was stripped of his dive leading authority in the class debrief :) Luckily the reel was still in. Woohoo. We brought stage bottles and planned to drop them at the jump. I hadn't really studied the map very carefully, so I figured we'd just head up that line and see what was there. I put the jump in, we dropped our bottles right there, and we were off. The tunnel is a little smaller than the main line tunnel, but still pretty big. The flow was not that bad in there, but it was still a bit of a huff swimming through there. Eventually at maybe 900 feet or so, we came up a big hill and it got quite a bit shallower -- I'm guessing this is the reason for the name of the line. We passed a bunch of tunnels with jumps, some of which we peered down, but I figured since I hadn't seen this tunnel yet, I might as well stick with it. At some point, I was thinking I would turn the dive, and then decided to wait until we hit the next marker, since there was a little curve ahead in the tunnel, and I at least wanted to see what was beyond it. We came around that turn and found some paper bats on the line. The night before, we were talking to Zev at dinner, and I overhead him tell Rob that we should go see "the bats". Ahh, this must be the bats.

We turned the dive there, and headed back with the flow, ahhh. On the way out, we could at some point see a parallel line running to our right, which we could periodically see when there were breaks in the wall on that side. Since we were making very good time/gas on the exit, when we hit a jump, I suggested we got up there and take a look. I was thinking this would jump to the parallel line, but right after putting in the jump spool and swimming like 10 feet, I saw another jump, which was obviously going to the parallel line. I didn't feel like getting another spool out (or retrieving one from Rob, since I was out of jump spools at that point), so I figured we'd just stay on the line we were on. A few kicks later I realized that we were going with the flow, and it was rather strong. I turned around, signaled to Rob that we should go back. I wanted to go back to that other jump (which Rob was like one kick beyond at this point), so I tried to signal him to just move back a bit so I could put the jump in. He didn't understand what I was saying, so I just turned it and we headed out. It was quite nice to exit the cave without a single failure! And I even managed to cleanup the reel without making a complete mess of the line in the flow :)

We settled down on the rocks at 20 feet to do a little deco. Rob whipped out his wetnotes and wanted to play Beto's dot game. This is some silly deco game that is one notch up from tic-tac-toe in terms of the strategy required to play it. Unfortunately, that puts it a bit over my head in the strategy department. I wrote Rob a note saying I have no strategy and then basically just played randomly. Luckily our deco was over before the game finished :)

After we packed up and left Ginnie, we headed to EE to get tanks filled for the next day. We were planning to go to Peacock, though we hadn't decided where to go. We figured we could look at the map at EE to decide. We took a look at it and then showed Doug where we had been so far (which was essentially Orange Grove to Challenge, and Peacock to Olson via both the Pothole and Peanut lines) and asked what he suggested we do. So he suggested the Grand Traverse. Sounds fun :) After chatting for the while, we headed out and decide to mull our options overnight. Oh, while we were at EE, we also looked at the map of Devils, to see where exactly we had been. I couldn't believe we swam all that way to get where we ended up -- the Roller Coaster line would have taken us there much faster. Oh well, another day...