Hello my friends,

Guess what? I went diving this WE!

But that was an exceptional WE. New stuff: swam to the Hinkel and dived Cow Springs.

On friday night I warmed up on my own with my buddy bottle. I did a circuit: Bone room, Big Room, Roller Coaster, Bats, Hill 400 and back. This was a cool dive: 60 minutes at max 100 feet. I don't like to push on the first dive, especially when I'm on my own.

On Saturday we Swam the Hinkel on back gas + 1 stage with Chris Johnson. He is a very safe diver and this was his 3rd swim to the Hinkel. We dropped our stage after the Roller Coaster and swam the rest to 3100 feet +, were the little personage is, after the plaque. I had 200 psi before thirds -- the daily swimming work out paid off. The flow was rather high according to Chris. It took us 55 minutes to get there. 30 minutes to make it back. This is slow compare to some people who get there in 35 minutes.

Cow is cool. It's tight to start with with vertical shafts down to 60 feet.

I starts sandy then goes to silt and clay. It's like there are several caves into one. There is a big rope that one can use to pull on. At the end of this rope, after the massive clay bank, about 1000 feet from the entrance, there is another tight vertical drop to 110 feet. It get silty and goes on quite a bit. We took a left at the first T (right after the drop), right at the second T (maybe 400 feet away) and followed a while longer until I called thirds. There were no distances written on the arrows, but we must have done a good 2000 feet I think. Great dive. A lot to see and quite a bit of flow. A bit more than Ginnie, I think. During deco we went downstream all the way to the point where it gets too tight for back mount. It's a good place to tune one's technique.

I had a great WE. I hope that that you did too.

Take care.

Herve.