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Dive Reports Dive Report - Madison Blue Spring update
Dive Reports Dive Report - Madison Blue Spring update | Dive Report - Madison Blue Spring update |
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| Written by Administrator | |
| Monday, 29 October 2007 | |
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Madison Blue Spring 4/13/10- Madison has been open to diving for a couple of weeks now. Visibility is reported to be in the 50 foot range. Flow is reported to be very significant. There's not much swimming to be done in Madison. Remember, Madison is a state park, so no scooter diving allowed. This means it's all pulling. 5/1/08 - We still haven't made it back to Madison Blue Spring since our last trip there, but from reports we've seen on the Internet, it is open to diving once again. Flow is up and lots of sections of the main line are buried under the sand. There are also side passages that are not safe to dive at this point due to the changes the recent flooding caused. We hope to get out there soon to see the changes for ourselves. In the meantime, if you head over to Madison, be conservative and use caution. 3/1/08 - Madison Blue Spring has been closed to diving for a few months now. The river level has risen and there is river water intrusion into the basin and cave. Last report from someone who was able to dive it was tannic water back to about 700'. Since that report the river level went up even more. Park rangers are not allowing diving until the basin clears up again. We'll keep an eye on reports and let you know when that happens. 10/28/2007 - We got up early and headed over to Madison Blue Spring for our first dives there. Actually, we left about 45 minutes later than we planned, which would put us there around 9:30 EST (we had a time change to go through). The concern was being allowed to dive. Madison has a 12 diver limit. We really didn't know why, but we were soon to find out. We pulled into the state park entrance a couple minutes past 9:30 and saw several vehicles in the parking lot. We were a little concerned, but the first thing we asked the park ranger was if they had reached the limit already. Fortunately, they hadn't. There were 2 cavern classes, which he wasn't counting, and 2 cave divers going in at Martz Sink. We parked the van, signed in, and geared up. As we were gearing up several other divers showed up and the cave quickly reached its limit. We dropped under water and quickly found a tie off just outside of the Rabbit Hole. For those of you unfamiliar with Madison Blue, there's a main cavern entrance and a much smaller entrance. Most of the flow comes out of the main entrance making that entrance rather difficult to swim into. The Rabbit Hole doesn't have that much flow and is a much easier entrance. However, it is a restriction. We entered the Rabbit Hole, made our secondary tie off, reeled to the main line and tied on there. For our first dive we took the Godzilla jump and head back that way. At the Banana Room we took the jump towards the Century Tunnel and swam out to where the jump line ends. We then headed back and continued down the first jump line to the Godzilla Room. We met up with a team of 3 coming out of the Godzilla Room and, unfortunately, quite a bit of silt. We decided to turn around here and head back. We explored a couple more side passages on the way back, including one small sidemount passage off the main passage. Visibility was unlimited in the main passage. The side passages didn't provide us with as much visibility. We were the third team in and a couple other teams had entered after us. There was quite a bit of percolation in some of the side passages we took, but that didn't have too much of an effect on visibility. By the time we started heading back, visibility had cut down quite a bit due to all the teams in those passages. Most of the passages are on the small side. They are all passable in backmount, but you have to have pretty decent buoyancy control to get through some of them without touching the cave. We quickly understood why there's a limit to the number of divers in Madison. For our second dive we headed back towards Rocky Horror. We got back to the Mount Offshoot and took the jump. We ended up having to turn the dive right before Potter's Delight due to some gear issues, but we still had a good dive. We'll see Rocky Horror next time for sure. Half Hitch is a fun little area to manuveur. Not knowing what to expect on the way in, it was a little tricky to get through, but the way back was quite easy and fun. We could have spent several minutes there just going back and forth through the opening. Visibility was also much better in this part of the cave. We didn't see any other teams in this section. We had a couple of great dives. Water temperature was 69 degrees with air temp slightly cooler. Our average depth during both dives was about 50 ffw. We never even went into deco for the first dive. We had a great time and will definitely be back to Madison. |
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| Last Updated ( Tuesday, 13 April 2010 ) |
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