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Published: December 9th 2007
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Obfuscator writes: With the news that the launch had been delayed until Saturday, we had to decide how to spend Friday. Now, though this is annoying, I should add that we've determined that there is a real upshot. Every day the launch scrubs is another day we need to spend in sunny, warm Florida, rather than traveling back into the North and the cold. Shucks.
We had heard a while back from our mom that there was a place around Jacksonville that had caves that you could dive, even without a cave diving certification. Warm, fresh water diving? In caves? Where do you sign up, right? Of course, there are always snags. For one thing, since I hadn't anticipated diving at all on this trip, I didn't have my certification card with me. The people at the diving place (Ginnie Springs) tried to look me up in the PADI database, but couldn't find me. I'm not sure if it's because of poor search skills, or perhaps more likely, because I was certified 13 years ago, and have never needed to get a card reissued. Luckily, mom was able to find my card in my gear at home and fax a
copy of it to them, so everything worked out.
We rented full gear from them, since we obviously were not packed at all for diving, and the rates were not too bad for all that. They also sold a reusable underwater camera for about $25. It's basically just a cheap 35mm camera stuck into a polyurethane case that protects it down to 30 meters. It's cool though, since you can open the case, and open the camera, and use it again and again, unlike all those disposable ones. Since we would have otherwise been really short on pictures from this interesting day, I bought the camera, and an extra roll of film.
Ginnie Springs actually has several caves and several springs, but there's only one that you can take a light into if you're only open water certified. All the others, you could enter, but only without lights, which would just be a little bit of insanity. We took our gear and dove the large main spring where we could take a light, and it was really pretty awesome. They have a guide rope in it, so even if you get somewhat disoriented, you should be able to
get out. It has a big main room, that descends toward a metal grate that they have put across the rest of the cave. This is a major piece of safety equipment, since it keeps silly people from trying to swim further than they really should. Honestly, even if we had been so stupid, I doubt we could have gone far up that tunnel though. The other reason the grate is there is that the current coming from the spring is really strong. Just kicking your way up to the grate is rather challenging.
There's also a side chamber from the main cavern. It's pretty neat, because the way it connects, you swim into a little side tunnel, and then turn almost 90 degrees, straight up, and there's a small gallery from which you can look back into the main cavern. You couldn't swim with your gear through this small gallery opening, so you have to go back the way you came, but it's pretty nifty.
Outside the cave, there's a lovely turquoise pool with some pretty fish, and then the stream flows out to join up with the Santa Fe River. We still had air for a
while when we got out of the cave, so we dove around there for a while, watching the fish. We also saw a neat little fresh water turtle and some flounder in the river. The water throughout this area is incredibly clear, so unless you kick up a lot of silt, visibility is excellent.
When we started getting low on air, we ended our dive, and set our equipment to dry for a while. Since we had rented plenty of gear though, we took advantage of it to keep snorkeling. We puttered around Ginnie Springs for a while longer, before walking to the Devil's Eye and Devil's something or other, which was the other main spring and cave system. We had the option of getting more air and doing another dive, but we wanted to snorkel them first to see if they would be worth diving. We ended up snorkeling there until about 4:30 PM, it was so much fun. We opted not to get more air and dive any more. Had we carried cave certification, it would easily have been worth it, but since we didn't, we couldn't bring lights in with us. Without lights, we weren't going
to be willing to go very far into the caves, and we could see just about as much diving down from our snorkeling, so we saved some cash and time, and stuck to that.
Ginnie Springs is definitely a neat place to stop if you are into diving, and especially if you have a cave certification. The rental rates are fairly reasonable, but if you carry your own gear, it'll be a pretty cheap place to see some cool sights.
We left there late in the afternoon, and drove back to Orlando, to put ourselves in position for another run at the Shuttle Launch on Saturday. Imagine our frustration when we learned at about 10:00 PM, that the launch had again been delayed, this time until Sunday afternoon!
Trip so far
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Michelle
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One would think that shuttle launches would be fairly on schedule....
So if you two are detained for much longer are you going to go to Disneyworld?