Gator Hole 11 Moving Inward to the Next Restriction

Gator Hole Cave. Merritt's Millpond near Marianna FL. 8/2/24.
I had not been to this cave in several years. My buddy had never been. I had no video of the cave and had never dove it with my KISS Sidewinder so the dive seemed like a good idea. We put in at the boat launch across the millpond and used DPVs to get us to the cave with diver flag/float. Hydrilla was pretty tenacious but we made it to the cave.
This is a strictly sidemount cave that is not very deep or very long. I have dove it several times with 8 in steel tanks in open circuit sidemoutn configuration but had not tried it with LP 50's and my Sidewinder. There are several restrictions one has to pass before the depth of the cave drops down and the line Ts. I had to actually dig the first restriction out a bit to pass it. The shallower parts of the cave are sand bottom while the deeper section becomes clay bottom and quite tight just after the T. As it turns out, we never saw the deeper section or the T as my buddy had a regulator start free flowing just after I cleared the last restriction. After the vis cleared I returned to him. This cave does have pretty good flow and good visibility until you stir it up but it clears fairly well with a bit of time.
As usual, these videos are unedited. They are named for the dive site followed by a number indicating the order in which they were filmed and a brief description of what happened on that particular video relative to the dive as a whole. All of the videos can also be found under the playlist that corresponds to the dive site.