Cave Diving
By Kurt Snover
Contact: kasnover@gmail.com
Recently I read a book that reminds me of my youth, back when I undertook what in many ways was my most adventurous and dangerous activity of my life - cave diving in northern Florida. The Florida panhandle is made of limestone karst - limestone strata permeated by springs, sinkholes and underground rivers. Some rivers flow underground, forming springs
where they pop up to the surface. The water in many of these rivers and springs was crystal clear, which made for beautiful underwater scenery. And enticing cave diving.
During high school and college my good friend Billy and I lived in Tallahassee and did a lot of water skiing as well as some skin diving
together off the Gulf Coast 40 miles south of town. We became interested in cave diving in 1961 or so, when I was 18 years old. I don’t
think my parents had much of a clue what we wanted to do. In any case they said ok, if we first took a class in scuba diving. We ended up
taking a rather low-brow class, involving simple underwater exercises with mask, flippers and a scuba tank in a swimming pool. But hey, it filled
the requirement.
We each obtained a scuba tank and regulator in addition to mask and fins, and we were ready to go! Oh, and ropes and lights as well. We contacted Brent, the one other schoolmate whom we knew had done this sort of thing
previously and who graciously agreed to take us on our first cave dive. We chose River Sink, a crystal clear river that pops up to the surface, flows about 100 yards downstream and then disappears underground. We knew we’d be diving upstream, against the current. [Never would we dive downstream into a cave, as we knew that even a slow current could speed up enough to trap us if the river flowed through a sufficiently narrow constriction.]
The cave entrance consisted of a narrow vertical chimney about 30’ deep and 12’ or so in diameter. At the bottom, the cave made a sharp 90 degree horizontal turn, followed by a narrow passage that led to the first small room. Brent tied one end of the rope to a tree and prepared to dive down the chimney. The plan was for Billy and I to wait a few minutes and then follow him down. As I was preparing to go down next, Brent shot back up the chimney and out of the water, gasping for breath. Brent had an older Jacque Cousteau-type 1-stage regulator on which the air hose had come
loose, flooding his mouthpiece with water. OK, said Brent as he packed up to leave, I’m finished.
Billy and I looked at each other. Good lord. If that had happened 5 minutes later, when one of us was in the chimney, it likely would have been a disaster. What to do next? We didn’t discuss it. We were ready and anxious to go. Brent went home and Billy and I went down into the cave. Everything went smoothly and we had a great time.
Over the next several years we did a lot of scuba diving in various caves in North and Central Florida. While some of the first cave divers in this area had found mastodon bones and other interesting fossils, we didn’t. Our
pleasure was the excitement of the adventure, being inside amazingly bright reflective underwater limestone caverns. Swimming through narrow channels that would sometimes open up into large caverns. And never knowing what’s around the next bend unless we went further.
We refined our primitive safety procedures, such as they were. For example our tanks had a reserve valve setting that could be opened for
another 10-12 minutes of air, enough to help ensure we’d have enough air to swim back out. The valve was something we frequently checked during the dive, as we knew it was possible to bump the control lever open inadvertently and deplete the reserve. And we always dove with single air tanks, never a double tank that would add the unmanageable
requirement of having to decompress on the way up in order to avoid the bends. We became comfortable swimming back out of caves through murky, poor visibility wate caused by our swim fins stirring up silt from the
cave floor as we went in. This meant that sometimes during an exit, we had to find our way back out blindly by following the rope, hand over hand.
Cave diving certainly satisfied my need for adventure back then. After moving to California and falling in love with the mountains, I left cave
diving behind. Thinking back on those earlier days, I’ve always felt a great sense of relief that I never got in trouble.
Addendum. In subsequent years, the sport attracted many more cave divers. Formal cave diving certification became available in addition to the more common open water diving certification, neither of which existed when I was diving. Serious cave divers can now obtain 2-mouthpiece regulator setups, the secondary one with a hose 6’ long suitable for buddy
breathing. As cave diving increased in popularity, so did cave diving deaths. Signs were posted at some of the most dangerous
caves to discourage divers without cave diving certification from entering, and the State of Florida tried briefly to close the most dangerous diving areas. Sadly, the clear water in North Florida springs and sinkholes has now all but disappeared due to surface water contamination.
I shudder thinking back to our first cave dive, and the extreme danger that a matter of a few minutes difference would have meant. Did Billy
and I ever discuss emergency procedures? No. We somehow just assumed we’d do what was required if necessary. Looking back, the
only way I can understand this is the concept of invincible youth (I’m reluctant to use the word ‘stupid’ here).
For those interested in learning more about cave diving, you might take a look at the 2019 book “Into the Planet” by professional cave diver Jill Heinerth. In it you will read, among many other things, about the exploration of Wakulla Springs in which 42,000’ of underwater channels have been mapped. That’s 8 miles!!