Christophe Le Malliot, France, Aug 05

The Cave Dive

John Kendal and I arrive at the Ressel, one of Europe’s most well known caves and start analysing our gas, we then start building our equipment and give it a thorough checking over prior to carrying it down to the waters edge.

The air temp is a sticky 36 degrees and the water a steady 12 so we wade in without kit in order to cool down. Once cool, we whip out our wet notes and go through the dive plan.

Roadside at Ressel


Once we’ve ran through this we don our equipment and return to the water for our pre-dive checks, bubble check, equipment check, valve drill, S-drill then ascend from the 1.2m pool we commonly carry these drills out at. We review the dive plan again and work out our 3rds/ 6th’s and 35bar allowed for penetration and swim towards the entrance of the cave.

Waterside at Ressel


We okay each other and begin the descent. I unclip the primary reel and make the primary tie-off to a tree branch then the secondary to a rock in the cave, soon the gold line is upon us and I tie off to it, John checking my work as we go. Check gas, time and do a flow check on the fly and were on our way into this beautiful cave.

The Cistern at Laundenouse


We reach the first T in around 8 minutes, which normally takes us 12 so were doing pretty well. I drop a cookie on the exit side of the T then signal to John who is already removing a clothes peg from his pig tail to re-confirm the exit. We take the right side of the T and progress into the cave. We start up the slope and see team two who are exiting so we move over to allow them to pass without hassle. It appeared they were dealing with a failure or 6!

We ascended the slope which soon levelled off and dropped into a large chamber. The HID’s illuminating the walls, ceiling and floor. We dropped down almost like free falling down into this chamber and I remembered thinking to myself that this was like being what I imagined a space walk to be like. We soon hit 16m where the cave started to ascend again to around 14m and again revealed a deeper chamber at the drop off much like the first one but bigger.

I reached the edge of the drop off which was at 19m and had 1-2 bar left before I hit my 35 bar limit. The depth limitation for the dive was also 20m so I signalled the thumb to John who returned the signal and we began to exit with John out in front and me in 2nd.

The penetration went well with good progress being made from previous dives (270m penetration), but we knew the exit was Chris’s part of the dive.

Soon after we turned the dive my primary light failed so I deployed and activated my backup. John had already noticed the lack of light and turned to see if I was ok. We re-positioned on the fly and carried on with the exit with me now in front.
John’s primary failed and I turned around to see his backup come on so we continued out of the cave. I saw Johns light disappear so I tuned to see him deploy his second backup light, so we re-positioned and moved out.

Suddenly my right post started spewing bubbles, so I referenced the line, stabilised my position, signalled John and shut down my right post. John arrived as I was shutting down the post when I lost my back up. I continued with the shutdown, deployed my last backup and I communicated to John that he needed to check my right post. John tried to fix this 3 times, but told me it was well and truly humped so I moved into position 1 and we carried on with the exit.

Next Chris appears at my side telling me I’m OOA, so I turn around signalling to John that I’m OOA, he deploys his longhose and we move into touch contact and continue on the line with the exit. After the remainder of our light failures, we’re exiting the cave in touch contact with no lights what’s so ever. We pass our reel and make our way to the daylight zone where we need to carry out min deco 2@6, 1@3 so we shake out as best as we can in the limited space available at Ressel. John is then entrapped in the line so I give him the hold signal and try to untangle him, which is luckily successful. I am then asked for my mask which I dually hand over to Chris. John hands me his back up which I don then am immediately asked for yet again. John guides me through deco and we eventually surface erupting in laughter!

After all this and we aint dead, yee haa!

Chris de-briefs us on the surface and we have a general chat then prepare to go back in, this time with John as Captain.

All the dives on the course followed pretty much the same structure with different sequencing and failures so everyone involved had their fair share of captain/#2 and armchair positions….This was my dive :D

The Structure

Chris’s team (Us) were up at 0630hrs daily to start lectures at 0700 outside on the pick nick table whilst Danny’s team had the cosy luxury of the kitchen complete with filter coffee and warm croissants :D

After lessons and or line work in the park we would set-off for our respective caves to put into practice the theory and demo’s we covered in the morning.

There were times we weren’t getting to bed until gone midnight, but mostly 2100hrs at night would see us sat down in the kitchen as one big (tired) group sharing stories, pasta and bread.

The Contestants

Team 1 Christophe Le Malliot:-

Rick Huggins, DIR-F, (UK)
John Kendal, Tech-1, (UK)
Patrick Prasse, Tech-1, (DE)

Team 2 Danny Riordan:-

Sawyer Kjell, DIR-F, (NO)
Didrick Veng, Tech-1, (NO)
Harald Stene, Tech-1, (NO)

The Course

As with most GUE courses, the layout follows the building block approach where skills learnt in day 1 are carried on throughout the course but merely added to so that everything is covered and well practiced.

Before every dive, gas was analysed, pre-dive checks were carried out in 1.2m water in your respective team triangle and two dives were done per twinset.

We lost 1/3rd of the students on the course, both Tech 1 divers on day 3. Didrick from team two threw in his towel as he realised his skills were not up to scratch and that he was only holding back his two buddies. This decision IMO took big cahoonas, hat’s off to that man.

We lost Patrick from our team who had problems with the cave environment, which again took muchos manhood to face up to.

The accommodation was set in a really nice quiet location giving all the piece and quiet we needed with excellent facilities for line work and it even had a river for the swim test. Set not far from the town of Carjarc, I would definitely come back here again. Bread and croissants were provided daily and the British owners were a very nice couple …of blokes :D

Changes to Cave 1 limitations.

Since JJ, Chris, David and Danny arrived in France there have been a few changes to the limitations cave 1 level divers can now dive to. We are now allowed to navigate one T or one Gap and a penetration of 35bar as long as you have at least 120bar in a set of 2x12ltrs.

Day 1:

Lectures: Cave 1 limitations, Gas Planning, Equipment Failures, Re-positioning the team, Communications, Accident analysis.
Demos: None
Dives: 2
Cave: Ressel
Failures: Lights

Day 2:

Lectures: Geology, hydrology, Hazards, Lost Diver Protocol, valve failures
Demos: Lost diver, touch contact
Dives: 2
Cave: Ressel
Failures: Lights, valve failures

Day 3:

Lectures: Stress, Protocol, Awareness, emergency scenarios
Demos: OOA on the line
Dives: 4
Cave: Laundenous
Failures: Lights, valve failures, OOA

Day 4:

Lectures: Lost line procedure
Demos: Lost line
Dives: 4
Cave: Ressel
Failures: Lights, valve failures, OOA, lost line

Day 5:

Lectures: Geology, hydrology, Hazards, Lost Diver Protocol, valve failures
Demos: None
Dives: 2
Cave: Cabouy
Failures: Lights, valve failures, OOA, lost line, lost buddy

The Instructor

Chris is truly a great instructor. From day 1 he made it clear that this game isn’t for everyone and that he doesn’t hand out cards willy nilly. I felt as if he was constantly quizzing us and trying to work out if I was genuinely interested in caves, diving, GUE and DIR. No matter how many questions were asked he always answered them fully and in depth. He is very passionate about both his caves and his diving, his attention to detail still amazes me and his almost perfectionism gives me a bar to aim towards.

He has a good sense of humour and even understands the British humour (especially when I used his best red wine to make a Bolognese sauce).

You can see more of what him and Danny do here http://www.dir-mexico.com and he promised he’d be along to keep and eye on me, John, Andy and the sad puppies!

Conclusion

This course isn’t for everyone but if you have even the slightest interest in caves and or want to continue you experience with GUE you won’t be disappointed.

If you would like any further information that I may have forgotten, please contact me and I’ll try help out.