This BM explores diving in the jungles of the Costa maya Mexico.
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Scuba diving has been a passion since high school. In the summer of 1980, I lived on the Greek Island of Zakynthos for 2 ½ months. During that time, we spent several hours a day scuba diving and snorkeling in search of sunken treasure. We had discovered a shipwreck just off the coast. Located in approximately 20 feet of water, our search never discovered treasure as defined by gold, silver and jewels. But we did find a large number of historical artifacts including pottery, a small cannon and other handheld weapons. It was very exciting, and what I later learned, very illegal in Greece to remove ancient artifacts from their original site.
In all the areas of diving I have been lucky enough to experience ( including but not limited to the Hawaiian Islands, Wisconsin and Illinois Quarries, multiple areas of the Caribbean Sea, Cozumel, Cayman Islands and various places off the coast of the Costa Maya, and the Ionian Sea surrounding the island of Zakynthos) the diving that was most impactful for me, was cenote diving in the middle of the jungles of the Costa Maya, Mexico. Cenotes are defined as any underground space with water that contains an opening to the outside. Over the millennium cenotes were formed in a number of different ways. Walking through the jungle and coming to an opening in the jungle canopy, exposing a cave opening or a pool of water under which the cave opening is located, is a very cool way of entering into a scuba experience. What separates cenotes diving from cave diving is that you are always in a chamber where you can see sunlight from the entrance. You are never in a cave that is pitch dark.
There are so many unique experiences with Cenote diving. The cenote chambers we explored were of a variety of sizes. Some were quite large, but regardless of size, they all had beautiful stalactites and stalagmites formations, and they all had a halocline layer. The halocline is where salt water and fresh water meet. The layer often blurs the diver’s vision as you move up or down through it. But once through the layer the water was clear, with essentially no movement. In fact, I clearly remember the sensation when within a cavern approximately 60 in depth, I had equalized my buoyancy at the midway point of the chamber (~ 30’ above the floor) and clearly felt like I was flying. A fantastic experience that I still carry with me to this day.
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