Inland Diving Expedition - 2 RGJ Belize 1973 I ran the Battalion Diving Club during our tour of Belize and was a qualified BSAC (British Sub Aqua Club) and ASADA (Army Sub Aqua Diving Association)Diving Instructor and Diving Marshall. Our Diving Officer was Major Adams. An Army Air Corps Helicopter pilot came to me one day and gave me the coordinates of a manmade spherical pool deep inside secondary jungle. In consultation with Major Adams, it was decided to mount an expedition to find and dive in the pool. This is ancient Maya country and it is known that they offered trinkets to their Gods by dropping them into pools. We decided to see if there were any in this one! We loaded up a couple of Land Rovers and trailers and set off. I won’t go into the trials and tribulations of getting two vehicles through secondary jungle but on the second day we arrived at the location.
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After setting up camp, the first thing we did was to plumb the depths of the pool. It was Sixty feet deep and the water was salty! As the crow flies, we were about seven miles from the coast. Also, about three quarters of the way down there was an obstruction which I later found to be a tree trunk. As dive leader, I took the initial dive along with Arthur “Bogey” Knight as my “Buddy”. I was attached to the surface team by a safety rope and Arthur was attached to me by a 6 foot buddy line. As we knew of the obstruction in the depths and that there was nil visibility after 3 feet, we doubled our diving weights to counteract our buoyancy and enable us to descend. Due to the nil visibility we would not have been able to see our air gauges (they weren’t luminescent) so the surface team had instructions to give us the ascend signal on the safety rope if we were not back inside 30 minutes.