Florida New Year's 2026: Emerald Downstream

Kevin was at Emerald a couple weeks earlier and reported very good, clear conditions, so we decided to go there.  Rob brought his camera (which he hasn't brought on a cave trip in ages), so he came up with a spot he wanted to go to take pictures.  He said that there is a jump off to the left into a tunnel that has white walls, after the T to the left.  But he didn't know any more details than that.

When we got to the site, the water was indeed VERY clear in the basin.  When we dropped the line in to stage our bottles, you could see down the line quite a long way.  We loaded up all of our bottles, and then doinked with the remote strobes a bit, to figure out how to mount them (or not).  In the end, Rob managed to rig up a way to mount the strobe on the back of my rig, using a variety of things found in Kevin's van... including a bungee loop, and old scooter O-ring, and one of those velcro straps that is meant to bundle wires together.  It worked pretty well, though.  Kevin decided to just carry his and point the strobe behind him with his hand.  After that was all sorted out, we got geared up and got going.

When we stage our bottles on the line, we put the O2 bottles near the surface, and the 50% bottles a bit below those, and the stage bottles below those.  I was the last one down and I picked up my O2 bottle, and then by 50% bottle, and dropped my O2 bottle at 20 feet, and kept going and couldn't find my stage bottle.  I kept going down the line, to check one last bottle at the bottom of the line, to find it was Kevin's 50% bottle.  So then I had to go all the way back up to 20 feet to find my bottle, doh.  It was right at the bottom of the pile of O2 bottles so I missed it.  Rob and Kevin were waiting for me around 80 feet, looking at me like I was a ding dong (in my head, anyway... apparently Kevin didn't realize why I'd gone back up and thought maybe I was having an ear problem).  And then we were finally off.

In my head, the T is like immediately after you get into the cave, but in fact it was several minutes in.  I started to worry I had passed over the T without seeing it!  But alas, it was there, just further into the cave than I remembered.  We went left.  The viz was pretty good, and it was an enjoyable dive.  The line seemed much darker than I remember it though, so I felt like it took a lot of concentration to keep track of where it was.  There are spots where the line gets a bit strange, or there are two lines running at the same time, would be nice to clean it up someday.

So we were going and going and going, and Rob checked out a few possible jumps, but never found the one he was looking for.  But eventually we found a spot for some photos on the mainline.  I got the sensor for the remote strobe out, which Rob had done a pretty good job of tying up in a knot, but I managed to untangle it.  Kevin got his strobe and sensor out too, and Rob lined us up for a couple of shots.  Of course my sensor wasn't working.  After a bit of futzing and attempting to get it to work, I was excused from the photo lineup :(  So I hung back and watched Rob take pictures of Kevin, and attempted to shimmy into the picture next to Kevin a couple times.

Eventually Rob wrapped up the photo shoot, and I told him we should turn it and not try to find that jump any longer.  It's a good thing that I did, because Rob found the jump he was looking for on the way out, quite a bit further back from where we turned.  Next time.

When we got back to the basin, we posed for more pictures in the cavern zone.  It turns out that Kevin's strobe sensor was also flaky, so the pictures from the basin were the only ones that were keepers.

When we got to 40 feet, Kevin and I poked our heads into the upstream tunnel, and made it to the sign.  From there, we could look back out at the cavern and see Rob hanging behind the down line, and leaves falling through the water all around him.  Would have made a nice picture!

When we were at 20 feet (for a LONG time), another team showed up and was staging gear in the water, and then brought some bottles down to 20 feet, and then finally got going right as we started our ascent from 10 feet.