Florida New Year's 2026: Eagles Nest Upstream

For our final dive of the trip, we decided to go back to Eagles Nest (again) but this time to go upstream.  It's been a while since I've been upstream there!  It was still kind of chilly in the morning, so we slept in until 8 and then got going.  So we made it to the dive site around 11.  We were the first people there, but very shortly after, another car rolled up with a couple of cavern divers (who we had crossed paths with at checkin).  We staged our gear by the water, and while we were moving it into the water, they headed into the water for their dive.

We finished up getting ready and headed into the cave.  I never saw the cavern divers, though apparently Rob saw their teeny tiny lights over on the wall around 90 feet (which quite frankly, sounds scary to me).  Kevin led the dive, I was #2, and Rob was #3.  We agreed to go slowly on the way in, with the plan to go to the end of the line (around 2200 feet) and then we could crank up the speed on the way out and play around in the big rooms as time allowed.

As we first got going, the viz did not seem that awesome, but it cleared up I think around the time that we were in what I refer to as the "duck under" -- which is actually an extended section of tunnel deeper than the rest of the dive, around 250 feet.  There were sections that were really clear and blue looking, almost like we were under a halocline.  There were also a lot of sections where the water got colder or warmer, which was weird, but probably corresponded with ups and downs in the passage.

We paused a couple of times in the bigger rooms, but mostly kept going straight to the end of the line, as planned.  Actually Kevin stopped and tried to call it about a hundred feet before the end of the line, but Rob insisted on going all. the. way. to the end.  At the end of the line, there was actually a line T'ing off of the mainline, which I presume was running around the left side of the room.  But we didn't follow it.  That end room is not very pretty, so didn't seem like the best place to spend the time that we had.

On the way out, we stopped in pretty much each of the big rooms (I think there were three rooms that we stopped in), and took turns scootering to the other side or top of the room and exploring, while one or two of us stayed on the line.  With such excellent viz, you could generally see the other side of the room pretty much once you headed that way and pointed a light in that direction.  But wow are those rooms big, and tall.  The striations and different colors on the rock are pretty neat.

Before you know it, we were back to the slope up to the cavern, and we went off the trigger and drifted out as we did some deep stops.  The deco was pretty uneventful.  It was a bit shorter than our previous two dives here, as the average depth on the upstream side is probably about 20 feet shallower than the downstream.  How deep was it, you might wonder?  We had an interesting discussion on this topic.  

The previous day, Kevin pointed out that we were running our gauges on saltwater mode (and his was on freshwater), so our gauges read a shallower than his.  Okay, whatever, so I came up with an average depth around 220' on this dive, which was probably closer to 230' on his gauge.  So how should I plan deco?  Rob pointed out that our finely honed deco schedules (from ocean diving) are based on the pressure at N' of seawater, but the fact that it is N' feet of seawater vs. M' of freshwater is irrelevant.  So in other words, if I run my gauge on saltwater mode, I should be good to use the deco rules I use in saltwater with the numbers I see on my gauge. Makes sense, but seems like a good argument to not switch my gauge to freshwater.  So now I have a good excuse other than laziness for why I don't change my gauge when we are cave diving :)

On the way home from the dive, we stopped at the Freezer for some snacks, and then went to Great Outdoors later in the evening.

Epilogue

I had originally brought this drysuit with me to leave at Kevin's as my permanent Florida cave diving suit.  But since it was so (mysteriously) wet, I decided to take it back home with me, so I could get it looked at/debug it myself in the pool.  The next day as we were packing up the suit for the return trip home, we found some bad spots on the zipper.  Sigh.  Well at least that explains why all the aquaseal patches in the world didn't make the suit dry!