In the last week of our time in Mexico, I took GUE Underwater Cave Survey with Fred Devos (Zero Gravity), and teammate JY—a mix of classroom work, field drills, and real world work continuing the resurvey of Nai Tucha (Tux Kupaxa).

Spending over 10 hours in the same area opens your eyes to how much is really there, how much you usually miss, and how much you will always find, no matter how many times you’ve been there.

Like taking Cave 1 and 2, Underwater Cave Survey opened my eyes anew.

📸 Photos: Copyright © 2023, Fred Devos.

After Christmas In Austin we braved Southwest Airlines and headed to Mexico—AUS✈️CUN was one of the few flights largely unaffected by the whole mess. Our last trip was late 2019, immediately before… everything.

The Yucatán Peninsula is a huge limestone karst formed millions of years ago and shaped by everything from ice age and glacial melt to meteor impact¹. It’s jungle landscape marked by thousands of cenotes, doorways into another realm, many of them woven into the life and mythology of the Maya.

Once dry, the cave systems are full of beautiful speleological decorations, the remains of ancient mega fauna, fire pits and artefacts from another lifetime, and sometimes the people that may have inhabited them.

We spent two weeks diving and exploring this beautiful world.

I have far too much video to sort though—I’ll post some short clips in the future—perhaps some photos will help explain the draw.

The first rule of cave diving is to always have a continuous guideline to the open water².

Once inside, it’s dark, eery, and beautiful. The lights you have with you the only source of illumination.

One of the most beautiful sites in caves close to the sea is the halocline, an area where the inland fresh water mixes with salt water from the ocean—beautiful and sometimes frustrating when you’re in the rocking chair.

As always, I’m counting the days until we head back to the Mayan Underworld.

An article I wrote (with fellow GUE diver Nathalie Udo) about our experience with TSRCP in the Philippines has finally been published in the latest issue (12.3) of GUE’s Quest Magazine (available with GUE membership).

In 2011 I’ll be returning to The Thresher Shark Research & Conservation Project for a six month stint as Science Officer. Helping out on an important scientific and community project with some of the greatest people I’ve had the pleasure to meet and work with.

I spent the best three months of my life there in 2009. Diving every day, researching sharks and mantas, and helping a small island community—through the research and its application to conservation and within the local dive tourism industry, but also directly within the community, where the project provides jobs, helped construct housing and where TSRCP volunteers teach marine biology and conservation at the local school.

Life on the island was confronting at first. About 2 km square consisting of a couple of small villages and a few dive resorts (largely foreign owned, but where the island community gets 80% of its income), there is no permanent electricity and no fresh water. The island is powered by petrol generators prone to breakdown and drinking water is imported daily. A simple, largely subsistence lifestyle. I grew to love the island and its people.

History

TSRCP was started in 2005 by research scientists Simon P. Oliver and Alison J. Beckett to create a baseline of Monad Shoal in the Philippines—primarily concerned with Pelagic Thresher Shark (Alopias pelagicus) cleaning activity as well as the shoal’s coral coverage and general health.

Monad Shoal is about 8 km east of the southern beach of Malapascua Island in the Visayan Sea—an open water seamount with a relatively square dive profile around 21–24m that plunges to 250m, presenting a unique opportunity to observe and record these rarely studied oceanic sharks.

Both threshers and Manta Rays (Manta birostris) frequent the site, as well as a myriad of other pelagic and reef fish. Particularly the various species of cleaner fish that draw the oceanic wildlife to the shoal.

TSRCP is a significant source of environmental, ecological and behavioural research for Pelagic Thresher Sharks, providing research, education and conservation locally, regionally and internationally.

GUE Relationship

Through volunteer divers (including myself) TSRCP became aware of Global Underwater Explorers, a non-profit diver training agency focussed on research, conservation and exploration, whose training methods and techniques are uniquely suited to scientific research diving. In 2009 TSRCP became a GUE affiliated project and now provides all volunteer divers with basic training aimed at perfecting the buoyancy, trim and propulsion techniques necessary for a successful research diver.

Join Us

I encourage any divers out there to volunteer with the The Thresher Shark Research & Conservation Project. My three months there were amazing—peaceful, eye opening and life changing. The most fulfilling ‘work’ I’ve ever done. I can’t wait to be back in 2011.