Ardeche August 2009
On the last weekend in August Tim and I had planned a short trip to the Ardeche. Planned were two dives in the Tannerie to a maximum of the beginning of the shaft after about 700m. This plan was contrary to the usual cavebase big attacks something completely new :-): Only light luggage, no scooter, no gyro, only D12 and one stage per dive !!! Since the cave in the area, which was the basis of the planning, has only single-digit depths, all gases were EAN 36.
Since we now found out that with so little diving equipment you still have a lot of space left in the car, and we didn't want to waste this space, our wives were also allowed to come along. :-)
However, the ladies did not dive, but were content to enjoy the French sun and way of life... Friday directly after arrival we paid a visit to the cave: At the first glance in the direction of Tannerie we immediately noticed that no water came out of the cave. Before that, we had speculated that the hole might be expected without water, since we already knew that from pictures.
After we had parked the car and had walked to the cave, a view arose which frightened us a little - actually no water there! "Oh dear" we thought and climbed into the pool to see how deep the water was. We could hardly believe our eyes: the water level was at least 4m below the pool overflow. We could already see the first bottleneck.
On the last weekend in August Tim and I had planned a short trip to the Ardeche. Planned were two dives in the Tannerie to a maximum of the beginning of the shaft after about 700m. This plan was contrary to the usual cavebase big attacks something completely new :-): Only light luggage, no scooter, no gyro, only D12 and one stage per dive !!! Since the cave in the area, which was the basis of the planning, has only single-digit depths, all gases were EAN 36.
Since we now found out that with so little diving equipment you still have a lot of space left in the car, and we didn't want to waste this space, our wives were also allowed to come along. :-)
However, the ladies did not dive, but were content to enjoy the French sun and way of life... Friday directly after arrival we paid a visit to the cave: At the first glance in the direction of Tannerie we immediately noticed that no water came out of the cave. Before that, we had speculated that the hole might be expected without water, since we already knew that from pictures.
After we had parked the car and had walked to the cave, a view arose which frightened us a little - actually no water there! "Oh dear" we thought and climbed into the pool to see how deep the water was. We could hardly believe our eyes: the water level was at least 4m below the pool overflow. We could already see the first bottleneck.
Right at the entrance, there is also a narrow spot at the Goul du Pont, but it is easy to pass with the D12. Also at this point of the cave the visibility was not better than 4m. We nevertheless leisurely floated up to the shaft at just under 100m and looked at the crystal clear water in the shaft below us full of horniness: The shaft goes down to about 30m, and even here it gets deeper quickly, but unfortunately we only had gas with us to a maximum of 25m!
At the head of the shaft there is another jump into a shallow part of the cave. But since we didn't have a plan of that, we just wanted to look a few meters into the small hole.
Directly at the shaft is a water extraction installed, which pumps the water from the cave into the river, probably only as an attraction for tourists...unfortunately.... The cave had lost another 10cm or so of water from Saturday to Sunday, and the tannerie as much - I wonder if the two cave systems are related?
We took it in our stride that the diving was limited to two short dives in the two caves, and let our wives commiserate with us. Everyone made the best of it and ended the evening with a magnificent picnic on the meadow in front of the caves, which flowed smoothly into a BBQ.
In this spirit,
Your Cavebase