Carrol Cave 8-5-07

[tncaveres]

Went to Carrol Cave yesterday evening with my neighbor Matt.
It was a little different kind caving for me to say the least. It was all done out of a Kayak s/p? !!!
It was a first for me.
What is so neat about this cave is that it used to be a dry cave. Back in the 70's TVA built a lake right beside it & it in turn flooded the cave.
We found abunch of real old scuba gear inside the entrance . There was a few pieces that were new too.
Usually you can not go very far in this cave right now but the water level for the lake is very low for this time of yr. When the water level is down in the lake the water level for the cave is down too even the though the entrance is out of the water yr round.
We had a good time & seen some pretty cool stuff.
We had a good size Copperhead meet us at the entrance right when we got there. :-[We were able to coax him over to the side & out of our way.
I have an old map of the cave from back before it was flooded. You could see what was on the other side of the sumps by looking at the map.
We did find the 12' pillar that is in a back room. Some of the passages were huge & then some were low & tight.
In this one part of the passage we found abunch of OLD signatures.
The oldest one was by E.A Carrol on May the 23rd 1853!!!!!
The newest one was from 1932.
I will back to this cave again for sure.
I will have pics posted tomorrow.

[tncaveres]

The entrance .
Getting ready to lower the kayaks down.




Mr no shoulders greeting us at the entrance




Some of the old Dive equipment we found inside.

[tncaveres]

[tncaveres]

[L Roebuck]

Nice trip report.

Wow, that's the largest PFD's (Personal Flotation Device) I have ever seen anyone use on a caving trip. ;D ;D

[Mike Green]

Friggin' sweet! Good pics too! Is that the Carols Cave in Knox Co?

[acenthahole]

no specifics here, but is that in knoxville? we tried to find a cave of that name a little late in the day and couldn't find it. looks like ya'll got to it via the lake. if it is the same cave then i'm glad to hear that it is a little more than a nerd hole which is what we were expecting.

[tncaveres]

This is in Coffee county.

[Mike Green]

<sigh> I have visited 120 Knox Co. nerdholes in the past year. I was kinda hoping that there was something cool that I have not been too...

[tncaveres]

Well if you make it down this way sometime let me know. We can hit it any time.

[Brian Roebuck]

That's a cool way to explore a cave. Wetsuits would be OK as well with a decent PFD. I hope nobody planned to cave dive in there!

[tncaveres]

From the looks of it there has been alot of diving going on in there.
There is just to much work put into all that they have done for them not to of.
If you went with just a wet suit & a pfd you would have to do alot of swimming seeing that most of the water looks to be over 20' deep.

[Sharon Faulkner]

Great trip report and photos!

Personally, I'll be glad when snakes start hibernating. Not sure if they are looking for water because it is so dry right now or what, but they are crawling everywhere.