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The Yucatán's Flooded Basement

Neither darkness nor swirling silt nor an alarming accident rate can keep divers from exploring this surreal labyrinth

  • By Michael Agar
  • Smithsonian magazine, April 1998

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    Tying a kont—It's easy right? Once you get past shoelaces when you're a kid, you don't think about it much anymore. Buy try it while floating underwater sometimes, in a cave, loaded with enough gear to sink a raft, which I resemble at the moment, since I'm covered in rubber from the top of my head to the tips of my toes.

    The line I'm tying is a tether to the air-filled world I was designed to live in. I'm floating, looking for a reliable nonskid rock; I have a metal reel full of nylon cord and a 50-watt light in one hand, the button to pump a squirt of air from the tanks on my back into an air bladder in the other. I'm trying to maintain enough buoyancy to effect zero gravity, so that I don't sink into silt and cloud the water or rise to the ceiling and break an elegant limestone straw.

    Tying a kont—It's easy right? Once you get past shoelaces when you're a kid, you don't think about it much anymore. Buy try it while floating underwater sometimes, in a cave, loaded with enough gear to sink a raft, which I resemble at the moment, since I'm covered in rubber from the top of my head to the tips of my toes.

    The line I'm tying is a tether to the air-filled world I was designed to live in. I'm floating, looking for a reliable nonskid rock; I have a metal reel full of nylon cord and a 50-watt light in one hand, the button to pump a squirt of air from the tanks on my back into an air bladder in the other. I'm trying to maintain enough buoyancy to effect zero gravity, so that I don't sink into silt and cloud the water or rise to the ceiling and break an elegant limestone straw.


     
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