Post by L Roebuck on May 11, 2006 9:48:14 GMT -5
Water world
Exploring North Florida's subterranean caves is like `traveling through time.'
BY SUSAN COCKING
scocking@MiamiHerald.com
WAKULLA SPRINGS -- Entering the dining room of the Wakulla Springs Lodge last Sunday morning, I was relieved to see Jarrod Jablonski and Casey McKinlay sitting at the breakfast table -- very much alive -- with a handful of companions.
''Hey! It's nice to see you,'' I greeted them. ``You're not dead!''
Jablonski and McKinlay chuckled uncertainly and muttered something along the lines: ``Well, not being dead is not exactly how we measure success, but, uh yes. . . .''
And then, as if to confirm their alive-ness, both ordered a hearty breakfast.
At about 10 p.m. the previous night, the two 37-year-old Gainesville cave divers had emerged after 13 hours underwater, including more than three hours spent 300 feet deep and 11,000 feet underground in Wakulla Springs.
This was not some sort of diving record stunt. Jablonski and Fort Lauderdale's George Irvine already had set the world record for underwater cave penetration at the same site in 2000 with a dive that took them 19,000 feet -- 3 ½ miles -- below the surface.
A RECORD DIVE
Instead, Saturday's dive was a preamble -- after a six-year hiatus -- to exploring the limits of one of the largest and deepest underwater cave systems in the world. A push past the 19,000-foot mark is planned for May 19-21.
''It's not that we're pushing hard for the record. The record occurred,'' McKinlay said. ``Our goal is to map the cave out west and to connect it to one of the neighboring cave systems, Leon Sink.''
Jablonski and McKinlay are two leaders of the all-volunteer Woodville Karst Plain Project (WKPP), a group of highly-skilled technical divers dedicated to exploring, mapping and conserving the vast network of water-filled limestone labyrinths that snake through the subterranean landscape of North Florida.
Since the 1980s, the group has lent its cave-diving know-how to a variety of private, state and local government projects -- the latest, a study to learn whether a sprayfield of treated sewage from Tallahassee to the north is contributing to nitrate loading, a form of pollution, in Wakulla Springs.
The springs spew out between 200 million and 300 million gallons of fresh water per day from beneath the earth's surface, providing drinking water for the region.
But besides science, group members are motivated by a desire to explore where no human has been before; reaching virgin cave passages is a lot like landing on the moon, except you're still on your home planet.
''It's really a magical kind of experience,'' Jablonski said of Saturday's exploration. ``It's a weightless magic carpet ride that's like going through the Grand Canyon. The rock often erodes in ways that make really cool shapes on the walls. You see fossils embedded in the walls. It's very much traveling through time. We feel privileged to be able to be supported by a group of people to do this.''
UNDERWATER HABITAT
Saturday's dive required an underwater and surface support team of more than 20 lugging and swimming literally tons of equipment to and from the cave, keeping track of who was underwater and on land, what gas mixtures divers were breathing and how long they had to decompress before they could return to the surface.
Hunter Swearingen, who runs a Tampa commercial real estate firm in real life, served ashore as manager, unflappably coordinating the operation with laptop and palm pilot from a folding table in the shade beside the spring.
In a scene surreal enough for the cinema, Swearingen had just received a note sent by Jablonski from deep underwater through a chain of support divers asking for someone to call his wife Kelly to let her know he was OK.
With a casual, ''OK, guys, see you tomorrow,'' Jablonski and McKinlay had sunk beneath the surface of the spring at 8:30 that morning, each wearing about 1,000 pounds of equipment.
Dressed in dry suits, each was equipped with a Halcyon semi-closed-circuit rebreather, which recycles a diver's breathing gas; two bailout gas tanks (in case the rebreathers failed); three battery-powered underwater scooters built by Irvine in his garage; two aluminum tanks, underwater lights and other various tools.
While the two explorers retraced the path of earlier expeditions, support divers were leapfrogging extra gas tanks, stationing them at intervals inside the cave's passages. The deepest support divers would later undergo hours of decompression, gradually ascending to prescribed depths to avoid getting ``the bends.''
When Jablonski and McKinlay made their way 11,000 feet inside the cave, they cleaned off guidelines buried in silt and cut and retied flimsy ones. No one had been down that far for more than six years -- due to poor visibility from rainfall -- so there was plenty of housekeeping to do.
PLANNING A RETURN
Heading back out of the cave, they faced a 10-hour decompression obligation before they could breathe fresh air once again.
Those long hours were spent resting in underwater habitats made of upside-down cattle troughs and chemical spill containers fastened to the cave ceiling at 120 feet, 50 feet, 40 feet and 30 feet deep.
Air pumped inside the habitats enabled the divers to shed some of their gear and even snack on food from pressure-proof containers. Support divers swam down and made equipment exchanges.
''It's a very patient process,'' McKinlay said of the long decompression. ``We have notebooks and discuss the dive. We can plan the next dive when we're still suffering through the first one.''
With the next big push scheduled for just more than one week from now, their biggest wish is for dry weather in North Florida.
Said Jablonski: ``If you have 20 feet of visibility and the tunnel is 150 feet wide, you're going to make some wrong choices.''
Miami Herald
Exploring North Florida's subterranean caves is like `traveling through time.'
BY SUSAN COCKING
scocking@MiamiHerald.com
WAKULLA SPRINGS -- Entering the dining room of the Wakulla Springs Lodge last Sunday morning, I was relieved to see Jarrod Jablonski and Casey McKinlay sitting at the breakfast table -- very much alive -- with a handful of companions.
''Hey! It's nice to see you,'' I greeted them. ``You're not dead!''
Jablonski and McKinlay chuckled uncertainly and muttered something along the lines: ``Well, not being dead is not exactly how we measure success, but, uh yes. . . .''
And then, as if to confirm their alive-ness, both ordered a hearty breakfast.
At about 10 p.m. the previous night, the two 37-year-old Gainesville cave divers had emerged after 13 hours underwater, including more than three hours spent 300 feet deep and 11,000 feet underground in Wakulla Springs.
This was not some sort of diving record stunt. Jablonski and Fort Lauderdale's George Irvine already had set the world record for underwater cave penetration at the same site in 2000 with a dive that took them 19,000 feet -- 3 ½ miles -- below the surface.
A RECORD DIVE
Instead, Saturday's dive was a preamble -- after a six-year hiatus -- to exploring the limits of one of the largest and deepest underwater cave systems in the world. A push past the 19,000-foot mark is planned for May 19-21.
''It's not that we're pushing hard for the record. The record occurred,'' McKinlay said. ``Our goal is to map the cave out west and to connect it to one of the neighboring cave systems, Leon Sink.''
Jablonski and McKinlay are two leaders of the all-volunteer Woodville Karst Plain Project (WKPP), a group of highly-skilled technical divers dedicated to exploring, mapping and conserving the vast network of water-filled limestone labyrinths that snake through the subterranean landscape of North Florida.
Since the 1980s, the group has lent its cave-diving know-how to a variety of private, state and local government projects -- the latest, a study to learn whether a sprayfield of treated sewage from Tallahassee to the north is contributing to nitrate loading, a form of pollution, in Wakulla Springs.
The springs spew out between 200 million and 300 million gallons of fresh water per day from beneath the earth's surface, providing drinking water for the region.
But besides science, group members are motivated by a desire to explore where no human has been before; reaching virgin cave passages is a lot like landing on the moon, except you're still on your home planet.
''It's really a magical kind of experience,'' Jablonski said of Saturday's exploration. ``It's a weightless magic carpet ride that's like going through the Grand Canyon. The rock often erodes in ways that make really cool shapes on the walls. You see fossils embedded in the walls. It's very much traveling through time. We feel privileged to be able to be supported by a group of people to do this.''
UNDERWATER HABITAT
Saturday's dive required an underwater and surface support team of more than 20 lugging and swimming literally tons of equipment to and from the cave, keeping track of who was underwater and on land, what gas mixtures divers were breathing and how long they had to decompress before they could return to the surface.
Hunter Swearingen, who runs a Tampa commercial real estate firm in real life, served ashore as manager, unflappably coordinating the operation with laptop and palm pilot from a folding table in the shade beside the spring.
In a scene surreal enough for the cinema, Swearingen had just received a note sent by Jablonski from deep underwater through a chain of support divers asking for someone to call his wife Kelly to let her know he was OK.
With a casual, ''OK, guys, see you tomorrow,'' Jablonski and McKinlay had sunk beneath the surface of the spring at 8:30 that morning, each wearing about 1,000 pounds of equipment.
Dressed in dry suits, each was equipped with a Halcyon semi-closed-circuit rebreather, which recycles a diver's breathing gas; two bailout gas tanks (in case the rebreathers failed); three battery-powered underwater scooters built by Irvine in his garage; two aluminum tanks, underwater lights and other various tools.
While the two explorers retraced the path of earlier expeditions, support divers were leapfrogging extra gas tanks, stationing them at intervals inside the cave's passages. The deepest support divers would later undergo hours of decompression, gradually ascending to prescribed depths to avoid getting ``the bends.''
When Jablonski and McKinlay made their way 11,000 feet inside the cave, they cleaned off guidelines buried in silt and cut and retied flimsy ones. No one had been down that far for more than six years -- due to poor visibility from rainfall -- so there was plenty of housekeeping to do.
PLANNING A RETURN
Heading back out of the cave, they faced a 10-hour decompression obligation before they could breathe fresh air once again.
Those long hours were spent resting in underwater habitats made of upside-down cattle troughs and chemical spill containers fastened to the cave ceiling at 120 feet, 50 feet, 40 feet and 30 feet deep.
Air pumped inside the habitats enabled the divers to shed some of their gear and even snack on food from pressure-proof containers. Support divers swam down and made equipment exchanges.
''It's a very patient process,'' McKinlay said of the long decompression. ``We have notebooks and discuss the dive. We can plan the next dive when we're still suffering through the first one.''
With the next big push scheduled for just more than one week from now, their biggest wish is for dry weather in North Florida.
Said Jablonski: ``If you have 20 feet of visibility and the tunnel is 150 feet wide, you're going to make some wrong choices.''
Miami Herald