Ever since I announced to my friends and family that I wanted to cave dive, I have struggled to explain why they are such an interesting place to dive.
Then one day, on the way to work, I thought out loud, "Why don't I just make a video of it?" It didn't matter that I didn't own an underwater housing for my camera, I set my mind to it and the rest is well, a big drain on my bank account.
Therefore, my my first underwater video project wasn't a nice 30 foot reef dive in Cozumel or maybe a relaxing dive in Hawaii but trying to film in a cave dive in Florida.
Here is the setup for the video, my friends and I went to Florida for Memorial day weekend in 2003 for some cave diving. For those of you who haven't been to North Central Florida, it's rural but it's full of underwater springs and rivers, a perfect place for the traveling cave diver to attempt to shoot underwater video. What I didn't realize is that the dark walls of the cave sucked up light and I didn't own any video lights at the time, so parts of it are dark and grainy.
On a cave dive in Florida you decompress on 100% Oxygen (O2) on the exit, which is what we are doing in some of the shots, inside the cave. Breathing 100% O2 allows for a very fast decompression, but most dive computers aren't able to adjust for this.
1. Bill, this is an excellent video: it shows people what greatness they can achieve if they bring their cameras with them underwater. Very nice. Also, I think the video is interesting to watch -- I never would've considered that a 7 minute video about cave diving could be funny. But it is!
More importantly, it's an excellent example of cave diving. I think it shows what divers are likely to see/experience, and how *tight* some of the spaces are. (It sure looked different than my experience in Cayman last week.) I'm not sure I'm interested in trying it, myself, but if I had a buddy who really wanted to go, I think I might ride along.
Nice work!
Posted at 9:40AM on Jun 12th 2006 by Willy