Posted by R Bear on April 26, 2001 at 13:15:48:
Kim and I paddled a canoe up the Chipola River this weekend.
Chipola is a Choctaw Indian word meaning ?sweet water?. When we ran out of gator aid we filled the bottle with spring water from the river. We then taste tested that against the tap water at the bathroom we stopped at after the dive. There was no comparison. The spring water tasted much better. Since I know of about twenty springs that feed the Chipola, I would say that the Choctaw Indians named this river appropriately.
When we were leaving the house, Kim asked me if there was film in the camera. I said I didn?t know but I wasn?t worried about it because there was extra film in the save-a-dive kit. Upon arrival at the site, we discovered that the camera batteries were dead and of course I didn?t have any of THOSE in the save-a-dive kit so we had no camera. I told Kim that would mean we would see lots of alligators. Our experience is that you can have a camera with you or you can see an alligator, but not both. I was right.
There are too many half submerged logs on this section of the Chipola to make using a motor practical but that is fine with me. With no motor I think you get a better interaction with the local Florida wildlife. We had four really good alligator encounters. Additionally we saw two egrets, two herons, a kingfisher, and two ibis. (What is the plural of ibis?)
The biggest gator was about eight feet long. The smallest was a baby about eighteen inches that still had stripes on his tale. Now I have to admit that I thought the baby was cute. But Kim offered up the opinion that a seven-foot adult we saw was cute. I explained to her in great detail just how NOT cute I found a seven foot alligator with a huge mouth full of gnarly teeth to be.
The dive site
When we pulled up to the springs (there are five in about five hundred feet) I wanted to pull up on a nice firm grassy place near the cave and walk to the cave. Little Miss Goody Two Shoes informed me that we were not going to trespass at all. (In Florida it is NOT trespassing to boat a navigable water way.) So instead of pulling the boat up on firm ground downstream from the spring, she had us pull in to the swamp beyond the spring and gear up from a floating canoe.
At first it was kind of pleasant amongst the cypress knobs, but then the mosquitoes descended on us in a swarm. I was wearing nothing but a bathing suit. This meant there was plenty of exposed skin for the little monsters to attack. We didn?t have any bug spray so I did the only thing I could think of to escape the mosquitoes. I put on my drysuit. Although this was the first time I had ever put on a drysuit while in a canoe, it wasn?t as hard as I would have thought. After Kim and I zipped each other in, they swarmed to our heads. So we put on our hoods as well. At that point we were pretty much protected.
Ok, so technically we are floating in about nine inches of water in a cypress swamp. Like any other swamp, you sink about a foot into the mud when you step out of the boat. There is one thing about the swamp adjacent to a Florida blue spring that is much more pleasant than a normal swamp. Instead of some evil smelling stagnant water with a green scum on it, the water is crystal clear spring water. Well that, and the fact that there is a blue, practically glowing, pool beckoning to us from a mere seventy feet away.
There is one last thing about being in the swamp. When I went to get all the tanks out of the canoe I found we had a guest. A snake had fallen in to the boat from the trees. Since he insisted on hiding under my tanks, I had to pitch him out of the boat before I was willing to reach under my tanks to get a hold of them.
The dive
Following the main line into Bozell takes you through two restrictions that are just barely big enough for a diver with back mounted doubles to pass through. Kim and John and I have six Al 80s with the paint scraped off the necks from these two restrictions. With it being that tight for Al 80s, imagine my trepidation at this being our first trip there with LP PST 104s. Happily we no longer have to enter via the main line. We have located a bigger safer entrance, which I call?
The Secret Entrance
Although I am probably the only guy around that calls it The Secret Entrance, I feel that is a good name for it. Of course it has no string in it or leading to it. I have thought of placing string in it, but I haven?t thought of a routing that pleases me. Also seeing as how I know where it is, the line would be for someone else?s benefit, not mine. As proof of its secret nature, I offer the following: 1) It took us eight dives to find and even then we found it from inside the cave. 2) I have a friend who was led through it by a guide, but couldn?t relocate it on a second (non-guided) trip. 3) Kim admitted to me before the dive that she was sure she couldn?t find it.
While traveling through the Secret Entrance, we were faced with a dilemma about where to place our O2. I decided that rather than place it at 20 feet as usual we would place it on the main line at 34 FFW. My reason for this is that was the last place where we could retrieve our O2 irrespective of our exit route.
Just before the cave starts to get deep, the main line goes through a crack that is all but impassable to a diver with back mounted doubles. We got off of the main line and dropped into a pit in the floor that goes to the same place as the main line but it goes there nice and wide.
This put us in the first part of the cave that anyone would think of as big. It is a breakdown room that is 150 feet long. The ceiling is at a fairly constant 55FFW, but the floor drops away to 110 FFW at the far end of the room.
At the bottom of this breakdown pile lies the biggest room I have seen in this cave. It is 200 feet long and about 100 feet wide at the widest point. It is an impressive room, but there are a couple of things I don?t like about the way the line is run in this room. The first thing I don?t like is that the line is on the ceiling as you enter the room. That makes it kind of hard to keep track of. As we entered the room, Kim signaled that she had lost the line. As this has bitten me before I was not surprised to see that the line was directly over her head, and that is precisely why she couldn?t see it.
There are side passages leading out of this room on both sides. But whoever ran the line to these side passages decide to cross the main line with it. This is a no-no in line laying, because it means that if you were blind following the line out of the cave you would get to where the lines are crossed and might make the wrong decision. This bit us HARD on the way out. Of course that comes later in the story.
Between the high current and the depth of 120 FFW, I was really flabbergasted by how fast I used the first 1000-PSI out of my stage bottle. We both dropped our stages at the far end of the big room 110 feet passed where the lines cross.
It seemed like hardly any time passed before we were in territory we had never seen before, but with mostly full doubles. COOL!
Shortly after hitting new territory, the right wall of the cave kept going straight but the line turned to the left. I kept following the wall with the thought that the line was paralleling the wall. I thought that the line was off to my left, but in reality I was getting farther from it all the time. Kim flashed attention and signaled me to rejoin the line. When I realized I had screwed up, I also realized that although I felt clear headed, narcosis was playing a role in my decision-making abilities.
A little farther along we ran into a formation that left us gaping. Generally when the ceiling collapses in a cave, it breaks and forms a boulder field. Here a giant slab of ceiling rock had broken loose and held together as one rock. One end of the slab was down at our level, but the other end was sloping up towards its original position. The result was a huge flat rock solid slope that slanted up and away from us beyond the limit of our lights. Kim rolled onto her left side to view this, and I swam the next forty feet or so completely upside down while looking up this giant impressive slope.
Two hundred feet later Kim balked when the line went into this really tight narrow crevice. We weren?t at thirds yet (or even very close), but we were close enough to thirds that neither of us wanted to push something so tight.
I found myself remembering a conversation I had with a guy about a year and a half ago. He said that the mainline at this cave goes through a tight restriction at 3000 feet. But he also said that the guy who ran the line ran it that way to discourage people from going any farther, because there was a perfectly good route off to the left that joined back on the mainline. Here are my thoughts: 1) we weren?t any 3000 feet, more like 1500. But most people don?t survey, so I think this is the spot. 2) We passed a side passage about 100 feet ago so maybe that was the good way around. 3) He made it sound like the good way wasn?t obvious, so I think we should check out some promising looking leads to the left where there is no line.
We tied off and headed into the leads I had spotted on the left. The first thing I tried was about twenty-four inches wide. I got about twenty feet into it and it was still continuing, but I was knocking a lot of silt off of the walls. Kim didn?t like being silted out this far back any more than she had liked that tight stuff on the main line. She gave two sharp tugs on the line and the dive was then officially called.
I took the survey on the way out. I didn?t really have to kick much because of the current. I was going really slowly, but Kim knew what I was up to and neither of us had hit thirds yet anyway so it was ok. I did a good job on the survey except that I failed to make a note as to the location of the side passage that may bypass that tight crevice.
By the time we got back to our stages the survey had just been a double check on my old survey anyway, so I put away my wet notes to have both hands free to pick up the stage. As we went across the big room, we were both just letting the current sweep us along and not really paying a lot of attention as we clipped our stages on and swapped air sources. Kim stopped suddenly (I guess) and seeing as how I hadn?t been looking in front of myself, I slammed into her (hard). That in turn slammed me into the silt at the bottom of the cave and knocked my rear stage clip out of my hand just as I had been about to finish with it. I had been tooling along directly above the line anyway so I grabbed the line and re-grabbed my rear stage clip to finish that. I knew full well that we had six feet of ceiling above us, but Kim had me pinned to the floor (and the silt) and I couldn?t go forward. This happened right where the side passage line crosses the mainline, but instead of being perpendicular to each other (like on the way in) they were almost parallel. I knew that the line I was on didn?t lead out, but I really didn?t know which of the other lines did. I still couldn?t GO forward, but I slid my hand forward along the lines looking for the line that had the out pointing line arrow. Kim reached down and squeezed my upper arm. I have no idea what that meant but I maintained a death grip on the out pointing line arrow. I was stuck like that for ten or twenty ??? seconds before the down pressure stopped and I was free. I wanted to check on Kim?s status, and I decided the best way to do that would be to shoot forward out of the silt into clear water where I could look back and take in the whole scene of the incident at a glance.
The glance was completely horrible.
Kim was just hanging there? DEAD !?!
I couldn?t believe it.
But I did believe it.
Was this going to be a body recovery dive?
Her feet were slightly in front of her upright body.
I told myself that meant absolutely nothing.
Her fins were drooping slightly down like nobody was applying any muscle force to them.
Worst of all, her light was just dangling from the end of its cord inches from the mud on the floor.
How could this be?
There is NO WAY that she was without air long enough for this.
Could I just shove a reg in her mouth, hit the purge button and undo this?
Was that squeeze on the upper arm the last communication I was ever to receive from my wife? What did that squeeze mean?
As I was thinking these thoughts, I was swimming rapidly towards Kim and I was taking in every detail with my heart in my throat.
When I was about one foot away, I realized that she was not totally motionless. Her left hand was moving very slightly as she clipped her stage to her left hip. Then she picked up her light and indicated that she was ready to go.
Ok, so it turns out this whole dead wife thing was an overreaction on my part. What actually happened was she caught her stage on the crossed lines as she swept across them. That is why they were pulled parallel to each other and that is why she was stopped and why she was held down and holding me down. When she freed the stage (which was hindered by me slamming into her) she went to the ceiling and I shot forward. As she put it, she just wanted to chill for a minute while she hooked up her hip clip on the stage and gathered her composure.
Seems kind of reasonable huh?
I wasn?t in a reasonable mood though.
You know how powerful emotions are all messed up? For example women cry at weddings because they are happy. Well, I was sooo glad that Kim wasn?t dead that I wanted to KILL her.
I was thinking something like, ?You dumb @#%$! Inside a cave at 120 FFW is no place for a coffee break!? I stuck an UP thumb right in her mask and gave her a shove in the right direction. Basically I got upset and wanted to take it out on Kim.
The rest of the dive was without incident.
We played around in some of the shallow passages around 20 feet, so the deco number will seem out of proportion to the actual bottom time.
Stats: 60 minutes @ 120 followed by 40 minutes deco/ screwing around
DSAO
Ron