Riviere Sous Marine du Bestouan Cassis, Bouch-du-Rhone Location From Cassis, follow the signs for Les Calanques

and go towards the beach of Le Bestouan. Park in the large public car park. Carry equipment from the car park to the beach via the tunnel going under the road. Walk to the far end of the beach where there is a rocky headland projecting out into the water. Enter the sea here and follow the rocks around the headland, past a small light tower and into a bay. On the shore facing you is a cliff with houses perched on top. Follow the line of houses until you can see a balcony built out over the sea, about 100m to the right of the start of the cliff. It is easier to find the right balcony by following the base of the cliff and looking up. The correct balcony bridges a gap in the rock with two steel beams and its underside is made of red brick. The cave entrance is about 1m below the surface of the water immediately below this. Description There are a number of small caves but the right one is the only one with line starting at the outside. From the narrow entrance, the cave leads on through small passage for about 10m where it hits the top of a shaft. The shaft drops to around 15m where the passage gets much bigger and continues fairly shallow for around 300m until another shaft drops to 27m. It stays at this depth for 150m or so and then begins to rise up again to shallow depths. After a bit over 1400m it gets even shallower at 2m and it may be necessary to carry out decompression stops due to the distance in order to pass this section of cave. It then undulates gently, gradually reaching 29m over the next 600m distance. After 2460m a junction is reached. The shallow route leads up to a gallery and another sump with a terminal depth of 18m at around 3000m from base. The deep route leads through a U-shaped section, maximum depth 22m which rises up to another junction at approximately 18m. One passage is short and blind, the other continues to Marc Douchets limit of 20m at 2965m from base. NB. Be careful of the weather when entering the sea as the waves can make the swim to the entrance difficult, even dangerous. As the entrance is so shallow, it is

-2m Sea -27m -29m

-18m

-20m

affected by surge and the halocline makes it almost impossible to follow the line. Also, if using scooters, do not use them until beyond the yellow beach patrol markers as it is illegal to use any propellor vehicles within this section.

C ave Diving G uide to France

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