Short Trip to Florida (A Little Differently)

Part of the new wall decoration at EE

We had grandiose plans for another long (10 days?) trip to Florida this winter, but by mid-February, plans for that had failed to materialize, and our schedule was getting full.  Since we also wanted to go to Mexico before it gets too hot, we decided to go with a shorter trip to Florida and a week in Mexico (still to come!).  In the end, this probably worked out better, since pretty much everything was flooded while we were there, except for the old standby, Ginnie.  We considered going up to the Mill Pond for a couple of days, but when we called Cave Adventurers to get a report, they said that JB was sort of milky (but okay) but that Hole in the Wall was "not so good" (and we would probably not want to dive it).  Luckily it's not hard to find 4 or 5 days worth of dives at Ginnie :)

Since I will probably forget to mention it in any of the days' dive reports, I wanted to mention that EE has some new murals on the wall in their classroom.  Maps of various caves are drawn directly onto the walls.  They are awesome!  A lot of the maps are easier to read than the old maps that they had hanging in there.  So in addition to being a really cool idea, and really beautiful to look at, they are super useful!

At Rob's suggestion, I am going to post the dives as the reports are finished.  And I will update this post as I add dive reports.  Rob had another good suggestion which I will be using for this batch of posts.  (Two good ideas at once from Rob?  We are clearly in for a long dry-spell to make up for that.)  Drawing maps of our dives is getting harder and harder as there is not always one map available that shows our entire route.  But I have a laminated poster of Ginnie hanging in my office, so I can draw the route on there and just snap a picture.  The downside of this technique is that I only have a few (not very awesome) colors of dry erase markers in my office, so the maps are much less pretty.  I wonder if a trip to Office Depot could solve this problem.

Anyhoo, without further ado...

Main Land and the River Intrusion Tunnel
Sherwood Split, Double Domes
Indian Springs by Braille
Scraper Restriction, Insulation Rooms, Bone Room
Sweet Surprise

More to come.

Edit: That's all folks.  It was a great trip, even though we were "stuck at Ginnie" for almost all of it.  The two dives that were new to me (Sherwood Split and Sweet Surprise) were great, and I can't wait to go back to both of those areas.  Also, after 4 days (almost) in a row of scootering at Ginnie, by the end I finally felt like I could do so competently without being afraid of the Lips, which was nice.  Of course I'm sure the next time I go back, I will feel like it's back to square one!