Cenote Angelita

Most of this dive is a fall down a bare circular wall. You reach the water by a jungle path of about 45 m and a flight of stairs to a platform, kit up at the tables by the car park and step in from the platform: no jump, no boat. The surface is green and often covered in leaves and pollen, and the top few metres are murky, worse after strong rain, before the water turns clear somewhere between 5 and 8 m.

Then the floor shows up too early. At 27 to 30 m a dense layer spreads across the shaft, and a mound of fallen trees and branches rises from the bottom to about 27 m, with some trunks standing higher. From above the layer reads as a flat fog with a faint glow beneath it. Groups circle the cylinder on a rising multilevel profile, work around the mound and finish with a safety stop at 5 m. The dive runs 35 to 45 minutes, and a shallower second cenote, most often Car Wash, usually follows the same day.

Whether a group goes through the layer depends on the operator. Blue Life treats it as the limit of the dive, and Deep Mexico describes crossing it to stop between 35 and 40 m. Inside, visibility falls to near zero, and below it the water is salt and has no natural light. Estimates of the layer's thickness run from 2 m to about 8 m. Very little lives in the shaft, and the draw is the water and the drowned trees.

Partway down, the shaft grows a false floor: a dense layer lying flat across the water, with the crowns of fallen trees standing up through it. Beneath that floor lie a long bare wall, a forest in the dark and open water above you the whole way.

The dive is open water. The walls are vertical and nothing overhangs the descent, apart from one short swim-through on the wall, which is optional. A cave survey puts the shaft at 59.4 m deep and 59.4 m long, a vertical drop with no horizontal passage.1 That figure dates from 1993, and operators quote the whole shaft anywhere from 55 to 66 m around it.

Angelita belongs after a few easier cenotes. CREER classifies it Level 3, Advanced, and operators state Advanced Open Water as the minimum, with Dive Cenotes Mexico also taking a Deep specialty plus cavern skill.2 Blue Life wants at least one Level 1 and one Level 2 cenote dive logged first, at four divers to a guide.

The turn depth is the conversation to have before kitting up. Blue Life and Dive Cenotes Mexico limit guided dives to 30 m, the same as CREER's general limit. One operator goes deeper, with a published 35 m and a Spanish profile of 7 minutes at 40 m. Ask what the plan is, and run your gas and no-decompression time against that number.

Entry is paid in cash at the family's house beside the cenote, and the gate is open 08:00 to 17:00. Toilets at the car park are ecological. Put the wetsuit on at the car, since the regional standard asks you to leave repellent behind, and clip everything off, because a deep shaft keeps what it is given. Carry a primary light and a back-up for the dark water under the layer; some operators supply torches.