Exploration news
Links and updates about underwater cave exploration.
Resurvey of Ponderosa
OnlyCenotes · 2026-03-15
Over the past year, a team of 15 divers, Playa Del Carmen Underwater Resurvey and Exploration (PURE), spent countless hours resurveying the Ponderosa system with the goal of creating a community of like minded individuals who appreciate having navigational aids for their diving and put their surveying skills to use. Previous maps of the systems have grown outdated and attempts to resurvey and generate an asset to the community have failed until now. I want to thank Emőke Wagner for organizing and leading the project and Herwig Hoffmann for spending over 37 hours underwater with me and trusting my crazy dive plans. I am pleased to report that Ponderosa now sits 68,208'/20,790m long with a few odds and ends that could be surveyed with a bit of courage and foolishness. This is a significant increase over the last map published which stood at 49,274'/14,931m. In the process, the cave was extended a mere 2,135'/650m. A significant amount of relining was performed. ...
Connection of "Mother of All Cenotes" to "Koox Baal"
Facebook · 2025-06-23
Yesterday, Phillip Lehman, Patrick Widmann, Rosso Rivera, and I successfully connected the "Mother of All Cenotes" system with the "Koox Baal" system. To achieve this, we had to find a navigable passage between the two systems, which are approximately 1.5 km apart as the crow flies. And we did! To bridge the gap and establish the connection, we laid over 8 km of guideline. Yesterday’s dive lasted 425 minutes, during which we used Sidewinder rebreathers, Seacraft scooters, and mnemo mapping tools to navigate and document the newly linked sections. With this connection, the total length of the Koox Baal system has now reached 123 km. This marks a significant milestone in the exploration of the Yucatán’s vast underwater cave networks.