How many things can go wrong on one cave dive?
I have never had as much trouble in one dive as what I had on Thursday, May 9.
Some of my coworkers think I must be confusing my dates seeing as how I was in a cave-in at Blue Spring on May 4. Never the less, I am confident that May 9 is the day I want to talk about.
Before I tell my story, I'd just like to admit that I really don't feel like it would do me any good to buy a lottery ticket just now. I'm not feeling terribly lucky...
Should I start at the part where the cave was really low and silty, or should I start with the fact that Kim had a leak in her dry suit.
Well the two things are inextricably linked you see, but I guess my theme is actually things that go wrong, so...
Kim had a leak in her drysuit that was causing it to slowly fill with air.
I of course was blissfully unaware of same.
The tunnel was very low. At two points, it was so low that even though I slid my tanks along the ceiling, my front was still dragging through the silt on the floor. There was a layer of silt on the floor that was about eight inches deep of nearly liquid silt. It offered no resistance to my hand. If the dive hadn't gone so poorly I wouldn't be apprised of the following information, but under the eight inches there was a proper sandy bottom.
I really wish I didn't know that.
At any rate, I stirred up some silt in the tunnel in both of the negative clearance regions, and in a few minimal clearance regions as well. In all cases I looked back once clear and verified that I could still see Kim's light, so I figured it couldn't have been TOO bad.
HA!
You see, Kim had exacerbated all of my messes. But that is to be expected since the second diver can't read the cave as well as the first due to degraded vis from silt. As previously mentioned, I didn't know about the drysuit problem.
Kim's drysuit was filling with air ever so slowly and screwing up her trim. She told me after that she had disconnected the drysuit inflator after the third time she had made a mess. The point is that there were about twice as many silty places as I thought there were.
There was zero flow and hundreds of feet of silted out tunnel between us and the entrance to the cave.
Anyhow...
Right at maximum penetration, I went through a really nasty low place and really screwed up the vis good. Yea, I forgot about this one a minute ago. This time when I looked back I couldn't see Kim. I had messed up the vis something fierce.
I had popped out of the low area though and I was in a nice clean room about twenty feet long and four feet high.
Hmm, I knew I hadn't hit thirds yet but I was thinking this might be a good place to turn the dive.
So I checked my SPG...
I had started the dive with 2900 so I was expecting something like 2100 to 2200 PSI. Now I want you to really get in the moment.
Whatever it took me to get to HERE, it will take more to get HOME because of the silt out. Right?
Imagine my surprise to read 1400 on the gage.
Less than half!
Ok, I know that can't be right. So I take a suck on my backup regulator and watch my SPG drop to zero. Whew. Just what I thought.
I had rolled my left post off while bumping along the ceiling.
So I reclipped my SPG and started turning on my left post as Kim enters the room in a massive cloud of silt. I gave her an UP thumb and she turned and headed right back into the zero vis passage she had just left.
And the line disappeared.
The silt just jumped up and engulfed it.
No problem, I am on the ceiling of the tallest room I have seen in the last 1000 feet.
I can see all the way along the ceiling to the end of the room and I can see that the billowing silt cloud hadn't gone that far yet. So rather than flail for the line where I last saw it, I just went forward about fifteen feet and grabbed the line where there was still clear water. I then followed Kim into the silt cloud.
BUMMER.
Anyone want to raise their hand and guess what question was BURNING in my mind?
I am in a silted out tunnel perhaps some 1600 PSI from safety. I haven't caught up to my buddy yet and the last time I looked at my SPG it said 1400 PSI.
But it was wrong.
Right?
I proved that already.
Right?
Crap.
So let's recap.
The dive is almost exactly half over. We have already had:
1) The most silted tunnel I have ever seen.
2) A drysuit problem (that I don't know about yet.)
3) A left post roll off.
4) And I seem to have broken thirds. Well actually halves.
Kind of annoying, Huh?
Nothing eventful happened in the next couple of minutes. So I could just go on with my story chronologically. The thing is that in real time the next couple of minutes seemed to stretch forever and be QUITE eventful.
I wonder if I am going to make it out?
Oh yes, that's right the 1400 reading was an error.
No problem then. Carry on.
I wonder if I am going to make it out?
Shoot that does seem to be a point, now doesn't it?
And so on it went. I was trying to convince my self my air (EANX 32 actually) was adequate, but there was a part of me that just wasn't sure.
I was probably silted out for a minute or two, but it felt like considerably longer than the duration of the entire dive.
I hit clear water where I could read my SPG.
1900
My heart started beating again all by itself.
A little later we were in another silted out region and the line went under a rock that was only six inches from the floor. I could feel openings to the right and the left of the rock. I chose left. My tanks ground to a halt on the ceiling as my chest ground to a halt in the sand bottom under the eight inches of liquid like silt. I backed up and went around the rock to the right instead.
Then back into clear water.
Then back into silty water.
Then I caught just a glimpse of my lovely wife in spite of being all silted out.
What came next was the worst part of the dive.
You see...
This glimpse was actually just a fin tip as it went by my face headed down.
Whew! Feeling lucky there! If I had been just a little slower I wouldn't know where she was. Had I been a touch faster I'd have been kicked in the head. Yes sir! Mr. Lucky I'll just slow up a bit to let her get a little distance and...
As the fin completed it's downward beat it kicked the line right out of my hand.
Do you understand the importance of that sentence?
The line is your only way out of a silt-out.
Now I was in a silt-out without a line.
This is a situation you should never be in and I had never been in this situation before. It had happened to Kim once. In her case she was off the line when she unexpectedly silted out. What kind of moron lets the line escape their grasp when they are already silted out though?
I felt really stupid.
Geez, Ron! DO YOU THINK YOU MIGHT SHOULD'VE HELD ONTO THAT?
I felt the entire perimeter of the tunnel I was in without moving my body and with my tanks firmly pressed (big breath) to the ceiling.
It wasn't that bad.
The tunnel was too small to turn around in.
(That's good.)
But for some reason I didn't feel the line.
(That's bad.)
I knew that if I went forward I would definitely be heading in the right direction,
(That's good.)
until I ran out of this tunnel into a wider one.
(That's bad.)
I remembered passing a big rock just two feet back, so I went directly to it and tied off my safety reel. I could actually reach it without moving, so there was no guesswork.
The classic search at this point is to do a star pattern.
This star pattern search is taught at every stage of cave training. I had successfully completed the drill in every class I took. The thing is that we practice this drill at the end of a dive sometimes, and I have also failed it. The star pattern search is the best thing you have in zero vis. But it is not fool proof. Now with nearly 200 cave dives under my belt since I had first been introduced to this drill, I had to do it for real for the first time.
I skipped the classic. I didn't have a whole host of ways I could go in this tiny tunnel. Basically I could go forward or backward.
I went forward.
I only went about twenty feet forward and then everything happened at once.
I could see light.
I could see Kim.
I could see the passage.
And the line was right in front of me.
Kim was facing my way instead of out of the cave. Obviously she had been moments away from coming back into the silt to get me. How odd? When Kim was silted out and off the line I DID go and get her. It never even occurred to me that she was probably out in the passage poised to return the favor. It is not that I thought she would leave me. I know better. I simply hadn't figured her into my escape plan one way or another.
Kim asked if I was OK and I said NO. I showed her my reel and told her to HOLD. I thought about cutting the line, but decided not to leave a possible entanglement hazard in the cave. I went back in and untied my line and came back to Kim for the exit.
My instincts had been right, but I had followed my training just in case they were wrong.
It turns out my safety reel didn't help me get out, but had I screwed up (again) I would have been glad I had tied it off.
As I finish this, my heart rate is coming back down.
How's yours?
You know what?
I actually enjoyed this dive.
Although there were times that definitely sucked.
Seems like this story has a moral.
I can't decide what though.
If I am in a bad mood than the moral is obviously, Stay out of caves because things can and will go wrong.
If I am a little more upbeat (which I usually am) then I am tempted to say. Through training and experience caving problems can be rapidly overcome
Not sure.
Got a vote?
One other thing.
Want to hear about the cave-in on May 4th or do I have you all cave creeped out enough for right now.
Hope you enjoyed reading this. I kind of relived it while writing it.
Ron
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The Maiden voyage of the Cave Bear
I've done enough cave diving to know what I want in a cave diving boat. First, as odd as this sounds, it should barely be big enough. Kim wanted enough boat for all of our family and friends, but I wanted one that would barely hold my wife, our gear, and me. The reason is simple. You may have to portage the stupid thing passed logs and shallow places. Next it should track. A Jon boat will spin just as easily as go straight, but a boat with a keel will track straight. Next it needs a motor because I don't want to paddle everywhere. Therefore a canoe is out. Finally I know I don't always have a boat ramp, so I want to be able to throw it in the back of the truck.
The folk's down at Vortex Spring's custom built me what I believe is pretty nearly the perfect cave diving vessel. It is a 16-foot ganoe that separates into two halves. For those of you who don't know, a ganoe is a canoe with a flat place and a mounting board on the back for a motor. It tracks like a canoe and fits in the back of my truck. As a side bonus, I can load my dive gear into one half and when I chain the 2nd half over the top, my dive gear is secure from tampering or theft.
Ok, I hate it when guys go into great gory detail about changing out some part in their car that no one has ever heard of and I know you don't want to hear about my boat all day.
But I've got to talk about the boat trip.
This is a pleasant but often overlooked benefit of diving caves on a river. This is where you really get to interact with Florida's wild life. Deer, fish, gators, and the birds. My God, the birds. Florida has so many birds with long necks and long legs that it is seriously difficult to keep track of them all. Herons, Ibis, Storks, Cranes just to name a few and you always see plenty of them on a boat trip in a Florida river.
Ok, I know a bunch of you are reading this because you want to hear about the cave-in, so I'll get to it shortly.
The cave we were intent on diving was Blue Spring. Well there are over twenty springs in Florida named Blue Spring, but this is one of only two with that name on the Chocktawhatchee River. This is the one that is farther north.
Well the first thing we noticed at the spring was that the spring boil was popping out of the basin by as much as five inches. Some flow!
The next thing we noticed was that in spite of the fact that there had been no mosquitoes on the boat trip up the river; there were enough at the spring to carry off a small child.
The last thing is that there is nowhere to pull the boat up and nowhere to gear up. The banks where steep and muddy and the bottom had thick squishy silt that was difficult to stand in.
Kim and I fussed at each other about how to proceed and where to leave the boat. We each fell in the mud and laughed at each other. We sprayed each other with bug spray and still got eaten alive. We struggled into our drysuits as an act of self-preservation and we both had a drysuit full of mud and mosquitoes. We left the boat floating mid spring run tied to a tree. We put on our doubles by standing in the water and leaning them against the muddy bank.
We were both, hot, wet, muddy both inside and out, stung, and just generally the sorriest looking pair you ever did see. But you know what? If you had offered to take me away from there, there is NO WAY that I would have taken you up on the offer.
The entrance to this cave is a vertical shaft that goes 28 feet straight down. The shaft starts at 7 FFW and bottoms out at 35 FFW. For all but the last few feet it is between two and a half and three feet in diameter undulating narrower and wider. These undulations make excellent hand and foot holds regularly spaced just like a ladder.
The flow from this cave is not even close to being the highest in the state, but the FLOW RATE is. Basically a pretty decent flow combined with tiny little passages makes this cave spew water like a fire hose. The reader will note that a fire hose moves practically zero water compared to a river, but it moves it much faster.
To get down this fire hose shaft, we both let all the air out of our wings. This made us about twenty pounds negative. Kim tried first, but she just couldn't get in. I told her I would go first and she could hold onto my legs.
I started pulling my way down the shaft hand over hand. Being negative must have helped but it didn't feel that way. At first Kim held on, but her grip must have slipped. Well I couldn't turn around in the shaft, so I went to the bottom at 35 FFW to turn around and come back up the shaft to help Kim.
At the top of the shaft, Kim's waist was right at 7 FFW. So she was half in the shaft and half in the basin. She was holding on to some sticks that were poking out of the mud bank in the basin and I think this is probably the key to what happened next.
As I looked up from about four feet down the shaft, I saw a wall of silt come down and black out my vision.
It took you longer to read that than it took to happen, so perhaps your brain is ahead of where mine was at the time.
I was thinking that I would be helping Kim in a silt out. No biggy, I have been in plenty of silt outs.
Here is the thing. A diver who is twenty pounds negative can't go down this shaft without considerable effort. How could silty water go down the shaft against the up rushing clear water? The answer is that it couldn't. What I mistook for a little silt was actually the front end of a mudslide that was caving in to the shaft.
When the mud hit me, it immediately started pushing me down the shaft.
Incredible as this sounds now, I STILL did not perceive any danger.
I thought that it was cool that I was going down since down is the direction I wanted to go all along.
When the mud had slid along the entire length of my body and had driven me three feet down the shaft I finally realized what was going on.
You won't believe HOW I realized it though.
Through the drysuit and the undergarment, part of my leg could feel the flow rate in part of the shaft increase markedly. It seemed to approximately double. I realized that the only way to double the flow rate would be to HALF BLOCK the shaft. That is when I realized that if whatever was driving me down the shaft was substantial enough to half block the shaft then I was actually caught in an avalanche.
Things started really clicking in my brain. The reason I know I had been knocked three feet is because my right hand had been on a rock at my thigh that I was using to hold myself down. Now that same hand was on the same rock but it was right in front of my mask. I had a fifty-watt bulb in my hand two inches from my mask and I couldn't see even the tiniest hint of a glow. So I guess it was really the flow rate change by my leg combined with not seeing my light that let me know I was in a plug of mud that had slid off the bank and was now heading down the shaft.
The reader may find it amazing that my brain worked so slowly in this cave-in, but keep in mind that this cave-in takes much longer to tell than it took to do. I can't tell you exactly, but I have probably just described less than a second of the event.
Now don't ask me how I knew this, but the mud was flowing around me as it was driving me down. The mud was a viscous liquid. It had no rocks or pebbles in it. It had all been thrown there from inside the cave. For instance, when the mud hit my shoulders it didn't hurt me or jar me. Picture a glass of water with an ice cube floating in it. Now pour chocolate syrup on the ice cube. The syrup will push the cube down some, but it will also split around the cube and head to the bottom of the glass. The mud was acting this way too. It makes me think that if I didn't have a completely empty wing this next part probably would have gone easier for me.
Once I realized what was going on, I knew I had a mission. My mission was to fight the mudflow as hard as I could. When the mud hit the bottom of the cave and made a pile, I wanted to be above the pile or near the top of the pile and not completely buried at the bottom of the pile.
So my hand is on the original rock at about face level. I tried to hold on with my right hand and I reached for my auto inflator with my left. I think I touched the auto inflator before my right hand was ripped from the rock above me, but I don't think I actually managed to put any air in my wing. At that point I used both hands as I frantically tried to slow my descent. In spite of being completely in the pitch dark, it was easy to find hand holds. But I couldn't hold on. My hands got ripped from rock after rock as the mud drove me inexorably deeper and the drysuit squeeze increased because there was no free hand left to add air to the suit.
I cut and abraded my hands while I was fighting to hold myself up. But I didn't notice at all. In fact after the dive I couldn't remember HOW I cut my hands. In hindsight, I'm pretty sure that was how.
It seemed like I was losing my grip on rock after rock. Going deeper the whole time and then suddenly I was right at the top of the shaft. Logically if I was losing ground the whole time then I should have eventually come to the BOTTOM of the shaft not the top. More on that later...
I knew I was at the top of the shaft because I was no longer constrained by that narrow tunnel. I also slammed into Kim on the way up.
I knew that I had escaped the worst of it, but I was still struggling to go up and felt that the cave-in was still trying to pull me down.
Just then Kim started tugging on my regulators. First she pulled on the long hose, and then she pulled on my necklaced safe second. Was she in need of air? Where the heck is her FACE? How do you share air with someone's leg in a total silt out? The better question is WHY would you share air in 7 feet of water.
I decide to not even try to share air but instead to travel seven feet straight up to the infinite supply. I grabbed Kim HARD with my right arm and jammed air into my BC with my left hand. In a few seconds we fought our way to the top.
I noticed two things right away. One of those things was normal. The other thing was so bizarre that my mind rejected it completely and focused on the normal thing.
The normal thing was that Kim's reg was free flowing like it was on full purge. Not surprising in light of what had just happened. I turned off her post for her and started to look at the bizarre thing.
At the risk of dating myself...
On the TV show Hee Haw, Grandpa Jones would always tell some tale about something weird that one of his redneck cousins had done. He would invariably end these not-quite-believable tales with the statement, Truth is stranger than fiction. Truth is stranger than fiction is exactly what I was thinking as I surveyed my wife and myself. I don't think I could have ever made this up.
APPARANTLY, while I was underwater fighting a losing battle against a mudslide, there were some industrious little dudes up in the basin erecting a birdcage around Kim and me. I'm thinking shoemaker's elves here. There was a very rough hemispherical structure of sticks built around us. It had horizontal crosspieces and vertical ribs also. The sticks were tied to each other with fishing line and they were tied to us with fishing line as well.
Here is what I think happened. I think the sticks were all buried in the mud bank and numerous fishermen had lost their line when the line got wrapped around those sticks. I think that the mud flowed down the shaft, but the sticks were stopped by Kim and me and washed clean. Any arm movement that either one of us made would also move several sticks which were also tied to our hoses. It was obvious that the birdcage had pulled the hoses and not Kim.
Oh, and about the fact that I was losing ground right up until the moment when I found myself at the top of the shaft? I think that at some point the mudslide was over. When that happened I was pushed to the top of the shaft perhaps partly because I was pulling on rocks, but mostly by the flow. The resistance I felt to going up once I was out of the shaft was mostly due to the fact that I had no air in my wing (nor Kim in hers) and I was no longer in a tube (the flow could fan out) and partly due to the sticks and fishing line on us.
Kim and I spent the next five or ten minutes picking sticks and fishing line off of each other's equipment. The spring puked chocolate milk out the whole time. Kim didn't want to go back in because of the possibility of another cave in. I reasoned that the cave-in was over and either the cave was sealed to us (and we'd go home) or it wasn't and we'd go diving. Kim agreed. The spring eventually ran clear again and we went in.
Kim made it in fine this time. Guess what? There was ZERO evidence that the cave-in had happened. NO MUD at the bottom of the shaft. It had all been blown into suspension and out the spring run into the river. I don't know if it made a small pile that got stirred up and blown away or if it never even made it down the shaft. Either way, my fears of being buried alive turned out to be unfounded.
WOW!
I spent a lot of emotional energy writing that. It really makes the rest of the dive seem inconsequential, you know?
I was taking map data, so I can certainly bore you with a very accurate description of the cave.
As an example it turns out that the main passage of the cave runs directly beneath the spring run and terminates right at the end of the spring run. That must be a coincidence, but it implies a link that it bothers me to think about. Like the spring run SANK into the ground above the cave instead of being eroded away by the flow. I can't put my finger on it but there is something unsettling about it.
There was one other kind of interesting incident.
There is a restriction in the cave that (by my calculation) jacks the flow rate up to seven knots. This is an incredible flow rate. By way of comparison, the worst part of the Devil's system at Ginnie is mostly about 1 knot with places where it spikes up to about two. The highest flow at Manatee is right at the headspring and that peaks at about 2.5.
It was difficult for her, but Kim managed to go through. The problem came when she went to get out.
The flow sucked her into the hole before she was ready. Consequently her safety reel got caught in the mainline and twisted her so she wasn't square with the hole. Now the hole has her mashed up against it so she can't get through and the flow had her pinned there like a bug on a windshield.
She was on the in side of the restriction and I was on the out side. So I decided to push her farther into the cave so she could dislodge her reel and square herself up. (She could and DID reach her reel. She just couldn't dislodge it.)
I pulled my way into the restriction and put my shoulder on her and started to push.
She screamed.
I would have bet you I couldn't hear that over the roar of the cave. On the other hand her regulator was right in my ear and I heard it quite well. I didn't know if I had hurt her or if she was just venting some frustration, but I quit pushing immediately and just let the cave suck me back about six feet.
And I watched her squirm to no avail.
Actually there was humor there if you would just look for it. She looked kind of like a mime in a fake glass box. If you saw a video of it you would probably think that it was obvious she was trying to go forward and wonder why she didn't just do it already.
I held out my Z knife. Our unspoken communication was that she could always just cut the line. I could read on her face that she just wasn't desperate enough for that yet.
Mean time it has become apparent to me that she probably won't be able to get loose on her own so I decide to try and push her with my shoulder again. I had enough hand and foot holds that I was sure I could just push her into the cave as far as needed.
I was wrong.
I pushed her about a foot and then it was like I hit a brick wall. I think I must have had her tanks pushed up into the ceiling or something.
So I have this one-foot gap. She still can't get herself loose, and I can't get around her to help her from behind. But before she had the entire hole completely blocked. Now I can reach an arm passed the restriction. I can't quite reach the line on her reel, but I can reach the reel itself. So I just unclipped it from her hip and left it dangling on the main line.
I pulled her down so she was square with the hole and we both got spit through it and went tumbling out the other end where it widened out.
After that, I swam (well pulled actually) back through the restriction and removed Kim's reel from the main line. Then we exited the cave.
On the way home we decided to just drift and be very quiet. It paid off in spades. We observed a herd of deer frolicking and playing and they had no idea that we were there.
I like my new boat.
But I don't think I'll be back to Blue Spring Cave any time soon.
While I still have y'alls attention, I'd like to sincerely thank everyone for the positive responses to my recent post about how many things that can go wrong on one cave dive.
Thanks,
Truly,
Ron
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