This article was written by fellow Shedd diver John Andre.  John is a certified divemaster and cave diver.  Here is his experience diving the caves (Cenote dive sites) in Cancun Mexico.

Recently, I took a trip to Cancun and as part of the multitude of activities you can do in Cancun, there are a host of Cenote dive sites within a few hours of the major resort areas.  A Cenote is a fresh water well that were used by the Mayan people as water sources for drinking and for numerous religious practices.  Most of the Cenotres are also the opening to huge networks of underwater cave systems.  So I had a local dive shop pick me up at my resort one day and we headed south toward the Chac Mool Cenote in Playa Del Carmen. 

Topside the jungle is so thick that you understand why this Cenote site was only found recently.  The entrance is a small sliver of water under a rock overhang that you would never find it in a million years if you tried to but you could easily stumble into if you were not cautious of your footing.  The opening is narrower and shorter than a pool you would see at your local park district.  Once you slip into the warm fresh water you see the shallow pool begin to slop down to about 40 feet and it’s filled with cave guidelines and the occasional dive group.  Sometimes you see technical cave divers with doubles, stage bottles, and huge HID canister lights and other times you see recreational divers with single tanks being guided through the dive. 

This particular Cenote is perfect for recreational divers to do a Cavern Dive, a dive where the way out to the surface is always close by.  We did two dives that day.  Both were about 40 – 50 feet deep and about 45 minutes each.  One would think that the lack of coral, fish, or a wreck would make for a boring dive but a Cenote’s beauty is in the simple rock formations and the silence.  Complete and utter silence and stillness!  No crackling of reef critters, so swaying tidal surge, no currents, no movement even in areas where you have nearby sea water mixing with the fresh water in a halocline that looks like a mirage, and oh yeah I forgot to mention the water is 100% crystal clear.  What you get in return is calm and time to look at rock formations hanging from the ceiling or jutting up from the floor, huge caverns that can make your dive light look like a match in the night before turning into a tight and narrow cave filled with fingerlike stalactites and stalagmites making you feel like you are in an Iron Maiden.   

On the first dive I saw blocks and boulders lying on the floor of the cave and above on the ceiling the fresh cut scars where those slabs of limestone used to be.  During the surface interval I asked our divemaster about them.  He said that during the 2005 hurricane season the fresh water levels in the Cenote dropped so far that many of the caves were drained and that the removal of the water in the caves fractured the rocks and that’s when the sections of the ceiling crashed down.  Some of those sections were bigger than a two story house.  On the second dive when everyone was more comfortable exploring the caverns we took a long leg straight into the cave and the way out was about 150 feet away.  The large sun lit opening was a speck in the distance.  Now I’m a technical diver with Great Lakes wreck and decompression diving experience and I know that cave diving requires much more training than those disciplines but somehow I felt safer there looking deeper into the cave then the times I was penetrating a wreck.  The complete calmness, the lack of current, the constant water temperature, no boat topside to worry about unmooring from the buoy, and a lack of whole host of other variables I worry about when doing any open water diving made me focus completely on that cavern dive and my surroundings and enjoy the dive immensely.  So if you are in the Yucatan Peninsula area of Mexico, find a good dive shop that takes small groups on guided cavern dives.  It’s a whole different world down there that’s pretty easy to explore as a cavern dive.