Cave Diving, Books, & Interviews

[who_is_page]

Job-hunting is going weirdly, where I'm getting a LOT of interviews and call-backs but keep being just-not-enough. Man, if I'm sick of second-best rejection letters now, just imagine how I'm gonna feel in three more months. I had maybe my 9th(?) interview today; it's for a part time position at a tattoo shop, wish me luck.

In the meantime, I've been writing more. I'm on an underwater cave hyperfixation kick, so I published the short horror story TERRITORIAL on itch.io for $2; I've been wanting to write more fiction set in my home state of Florida, so maybe I'll publish a few more short story minizine and compile them into something larger later. I make no promises though, I'm at the mercy of my muse right now. (She's currently decided she only wants to help write between the hours of 7pm - 7am, so needless to say, my sleep schedule is wrecked. Also why I'm writing this at 2:30AM.)

I read Into The Plant: My Life as a Cave Diver by Jill Heinerth, among a lot of other research I've done about "cave country" and what cave diving entails (shoutout especially to the dedicated forums and organizations on the sport tbh). While I know immediately that I am not going to be working towards the sport myself for a multitude of reasons, it feels... really, really weird to see certain things that I experienced in my childhood around the outdoors, caves, and deep water echoed pretty often in the background of cave diver's stories. Almost like looking through the glass at what could've been. It's a very peculiar feeling to have.

Life has been weird lately, but I have a cat snuggling me, so everything is good.

Comments

[elinox]

I'm a diver and while I've looked into cave diving, particularly in the cenotes in Mexico, it's not something I think I'd enjoy. I think I'd feel too claustrophobic with all that rock surrounding me.

[who_is_page]

After the research I've done, even if I completely understand the pull of cave diving as a sport, I wouldn't recommend getting a cave cert to any diver without an ironclad will when it comes to fear management...and even then, given its fatalities (to the point where people who practice it are typically disqualified from life insurance policies), I still probably wouldn't recommend it. There's just so much that can go wrong in an overhead environment filled with silt, even with redundancies for every piece of gear, extra tanks, a guideline, and a buddy. For all that I've seen people insist that cave diving is safe as long as you do everything right, accidents still happen and this is something where there aren't rescues, just body recoveries.

With that said, I've heard on the scuba forums that a number of the really gorgeous cenotes only require a cavern cert at most rather than a full cave cert, so it might be looking into if you ever decide it's worth it? Some of the OWD ones barely have any overhead at all so they might not trigger your claustrophobia, but I understand where you're coming from.