THE DEVIL’S THROAT

No, it’s not just another name for Hillary Clinton’s pie hole. It's a dive site in the Punta Sur area of Cozumel. I was there in 2000 with a dive group from Indy; the dive trip was a gift to myself for having survived the divorce from hell. At the ATA counter getting our seat assignments, the ticket counter gal was a sweetheart and she gave me and the friend I was traveling with, a free upgrade to fly first class. Good way to start the trip! There were about 13 or 14 of is that were doing this dive trip out of Indy and we had planned for 13 dives, one of which would be a night dive, my first one.

We were staying at a fantastic resort called the Allegro. It was an all-inclusive resort, the diving, the food, the entertainment and best of all, the alcohol were all included.
 That’s right, boys and girls, all the free margarita’s and Corona’s you want!
The rooms were in little stand alone Tiki huts and the dock for the dive boats were just a few steps away from the room.

Our group was about as diverse in occupations and dive experience as you could get. The friend I was diving with had been certified just a few months prior and had only done a few fresh water dives max depth maybe 55 feet. I had about 9 or 10 years of diving experience and had logged several dives in the gulf and was pretty comfortable with some of the more challenging dives ahead.

There was a cute little nurse on in our group that had just gotten certified and distracted me a few times and got me chewed out underwater once by the head of the dive group for losing my dive buddy. I accidentally ditched him while trying to help the cute little nurse untangle her hair from her mask strap while still on the dive boat. Hey, it would have been ungentlemanly of me to not help a damsel in distress, especially a really hot nurse.

Cozumel is a beautiful place and a divers dream with lots of great diving just a few minutes boat ride away. Our diving schedule called for daily 2 tank, 2 site dives scheduled each morning; with a 3^rd dive scheduled in the middle of the week as a night dive at Chankanaab. We would be doing some dives that were right at the recreational limit. That's alot to expect from the two novice divers that were with us; luckily we had about 4 dive instructors in our group. The aforementioned cute little nurse had just gotten her C-card and had no open water dive experience other than her training dives.

The schedule worked out great, our dives finishing up early and we were back at the resort around noon. There were many nice restaurants in the resort to chose from, but my favorite meal was lunch after the morning dives next to the pools and beachside at the grill and pool bar. Showering off next to the pool and diving in to wash the ocean water off, then bellying up to the pool bar for a few well deserved margarita's. After a few of those it was only a ten-foot walk to the poolside grill for some great cheeseburgers in paradise.

Then we had the rest of the day to sightsee or just party like hell, I didn’t do a lot of sightseeing.

 Back to the reason we were all there, the diving. All but 2 of the dives we did were drift dives. The first few days we did some nice wall dives then one morning the leader of our dive group said we were going to dive the Devils Throat. Kind of a scary name and a pretty tricky dive even for experienced divers.

 The devils throat is a coral cave dive, the entrance is at 80 feet and winds down a long way and at the exit you punch out of a hole at the edge of a wall that drops about 1000 feet. The exit puts you at 135 feet deep, right at the limit for recreational divers. I only have one picture that I took right at the entrance of the cave.

 I would have taken more but the cheap dive camera I had, stated that max depth was 80 feet and they weren’t bullshitting. When the dive was over the camera case was flooded and it never worked again.

Parts of the coral cave is more like a long tube laying on sand than a cave, with some small openings throughout, just big enough to let a little light in and some divers exhaust air out. In the middle of the cave is a small chamber that used to have a sponge coral attached that was in the shape of a cross. A hole in the side of the chamber lined up to illuminate the cross and the Mexican dive masters from the boat seemed to revere it. I read that heavy currents from a hurricane a few years ago tore the coral cross loose.

 As things lined up, I ended up 2^nd in line just behind one of our Mexican dive master. Nice! I knew he wouldn’t fin up any sediment so I should have great vis in the cave. We made our way into the coral tube, descending as we traveled through it all the while getting darker, till the gauges on my console started to glow. When I got to the coral cross I tried to get a picture of it, that’s when I believed the max depth specs on the cheap camera case, it was already water logged. Too bad, it was a cool thing to see. After seemingly the longest dive of my life, I finally saw the opening of the cave glowing deep dark blue growing larger.

 When I came to the opening I felt like superman jumping out of a window; I just hung there at 135 feet looking straight down the wall into the abyss. I felt incredible and I may have been just a little narced because of the depth. My jaw would have dropped if I wasn’t clenching the regulator with my teeth. It was an amazing sight! My dive buddy had burnt thru his air pretty fast, so we could only hang there at the wall for just a coupe of minutes before we were had to start our ascent. As we headed up, the current was pulling us back over the cave so we got to see it from above as we slowly ascended. It was a beautiful sight with a lot of divers air being exhausted through the perforations in the coral.

When we all got picked up by the boat we all were pumped and shared our experiences of the dive. Later when I was talking to the cute little nurse, she told me how freaked out she was in the cave, she didn’t get the same thrill from the dive that the rest of us did. She felt like she was a bad diver so I tried to console her. I told her that she had been on the most challenging dive she will probably ever be on and even a diver with my vast experience was a little scared too. Yeah, I was working it.

 She felt better about herself as a diver and I felt better about my chances of making inroads with a cute nurse on a dive vacation. I was just a few miles from my seat at the pool bar at the Allegro, but I was a million miles away from my hellish divorce and life was good again.