Florida New Year's 2026: Eagles Nest Downstream, Again

On Tuesday, we went back to Eagles Nest, to do the dive we originally planned for Saturday.  Today was the first morning that it got cold... it was in the low 40s in the morning, and we got going a little later to account for the cold.  When we got to the site, we were the only people there, though as we were getting geared up, another pair of divers showed up, who were going upstream.  One of them mentioned a kind of saltwater fish (a snapper I think?) that was hanging out in the basin, near the warm water vents.

We dropped down and after dropping my O2 bottle at 20 feet, I started to feel water pouring into my left shoulder.  Okay, pouring might be a strong word, but I was getting wet, and it was coming from my left shoulder.  I followed Rob down through the shaft into the entrance room, dropped my 70 foot bottle on the line, and then caught up with Rob at the bottom of the line.  I told him that I had a leak and might have to call it early.  We got going, and it seemed like water wasn't pouring in anymore, or at least it stopped bothering me as much.

The path to the T was pretty uneventful from that point.  Once we were there, we dropped our bottles but kept our scooters and headed to the left.  Very shortly after the T, there is a restriction, which was worse than I remember (but still not really bad).  I think it was worse than I remember because the one other time I did this dive, I thought it was going to be really small, and it was not.  So I remembered it being no big deal, and thus was surprised that it was a little deal :). After that restriction, the tunnel goes deeper, and it gets pretty deep (maybe 280 feet?) and there is a low-ish but not too low and wide passage for a couple hundred feet.  Then there is a chute up into a big room, which sort of reminds me of the chute up to the eye at Ginnie.  Except it's much wider and there are lots of paths up it to choose from.

Once we were at the top of the chute, we were in a huge room.  The line splits into 4 paths that go to various areas of the room.  The line straight ahead then hits another T, and those lines go to other sections on the far side of the room.  We only had about 10 minutes to spend in the room, so we went right at the first T, and then came back and took the straight path, and at the next T, we went to the right (which really goes straight).  The room is huge, and the floor is strewn with boulders.  It would be cool to bring some of those giant photo/video lights and a few divers to spread out across the room with them.

On the way out, when I came down the chute, I found a really easy to pass through path down, off to the right, where I could just sort of slide down sideways.  When I got to the bottom, I was like... where the heck is the line?  I knew I had gone off to the right from the line, but was expecting it to be like 3 feet from me.  Actually it was probably more like 8 feet from me.  Oops.  The ride out was otherwise uneventful.

As we were approaching the up line in the cavern, I saw that the other two divers were also heading up the line.  They were clearly doing a shorter deco than we were, as by the time we were at like 110 or 120 feet, I could see their lights pointing down at us, and looked up to see them almost at the top of the room.

We had a long boring deco, as usual.  Around 40 feet, I did see the snapper that that other diver had told me about.  They definitely looked more interesting than the usual fish in the basin.  They had a kind of glowing blue line on their faces next to their mouths.  And they were cowering around the vents where warm water was coming up out of the cave.  By the 20 foot stop, I really had to pee.  We tried to play some wordle in my wetnotes, but I gave up after a couple rounds as I couldn't really think.  I was also quite cold because I was totally soaked at this point.

When we finally finished up the dive, I was indeed totally soaked.  I guess those 4 leaks we patched last night didn't quite do it :(. We did a more "proper" leak test back at EE that evening, and did indeed find a bad aquaseal spot that could explain the leak in the shoulder area.  Would I be dry tomorrow?  You'll have to read on to find out...