February 7, 1999

Matt Matthes was quite pleased to see the data on the screen from his mapping mission yesterday. The low visibility in A and K tunnels caused him to have a little trouble keeping on the straight line with the 3D mapper. The smile on his face comes from his pleasure at seeing the mapper data match so well with the previous data. Also, he was enjoying the 3D view of K Tunnel as seen by the mapper, which did not suffer from the 3 meter visibility limitations of its human driver. [photo ©1999 Barbara Anne am Ende].

Mapping 'K' Tunnel

By Matt Lederhosen

After days of preparation and test runs with the new Cis Lunar MK5 dual rebreather, Brian Kakuk and I took off to map a part of the Wakulla Spring cave that had not yet been mapped with the DWM, K-tunnel.

During our preparations we were filmed and interviewed by a large crew working on a National Geographic assignment to cover and document the USDCT effort of mapping and exploring parts of the extensive cave system.

Finally it was up to us to give each other the OK sign and take off into the clear water. While I was driving the Digital Wall Mapper Brian was leading the way to illuminate the waypoints and radio location buoys that I had to fly over to mark them with the mapper. That procedure allows our Map Guru (Barb am Ende) to tie the data into the surface location grid.

The run in A-tunnel up to the A/K-tunnel junction went uneventful. At the A/K tunnel junction I performed a Down Mode Align, necessary to split up the massive amount of digital information into separate files and re-calibrate the inertial navigation system. Meanwhile, Brian hovered in the K-tunnel entrance, giving me a good orientration point to where the trip was going next.

It was about half way into K-tunnel that the visibility started to deteriorate, falling from a good 30 meters (100 ft) to less the 3 meters (10 ft) at times. The line in K-tunnel is laid along the ceiling, and that is where the warmer, bad "vis" (visibility) water was as well. Visual contact with Brian was impossible at times and I had to concentrate to not lose the line. I did lose the line twice but located it again after a little while. Driving the mapper in bad vis along the ceiling proved to be a challenging task. I was more concerned about not producing a map and shearing off the canards, which would have made the ride out a unpleasant experience.

Being separated from Brian about 2000 meters (7000 ft) into the cave at 85 meters depth (280 ft) in less than 3 meter (10 ft) of visibility and at times away from the line was an extremely unpleasent experience. But with the knowledge of having the dual rebreather, I had plenty of time and redundancy to sort out myself and the mapper (my biggest concern).

When we reached the K/A-tunnel junction we decided to turn the dive and not proceed on further into the cave as originally planned, so I called the dive.

The way turned out to be a nice ride through a huge and beautiful cave as we passed the bad vis part of it.

After a bottom time of 2 hours and 54 minutes we stopped for our first deco stop at 58 meters (190 ft). After an in water time of 4-1/2 hours we entered the Personnel Transfer Capsule (PTC) at 30 meters (100 ft) to finish up our decompression in the surface habitat. Total runtime was close to 14 hours.

The Lederhosen is leaving today

Today, Feb. 7th, I am leaving. I want to take the chance and minute to thank everybody on the project on helping me and my moods during the 2-1/2 months I spent here, a sincere thanks a lot to everybody on the team and I am happy that I have met you all.

I would like to thank Bill Stone and the USDCT for giving me the great chance of participating at the Wakulla 2 project. The two expectations I had when I got here were to meet a lot of new people and to learn a lot about techniques and hardware that I have not used before. I have not been disappointed in both.

Reality is calling, I have to return to Mexico where my hammock is waiting.

Thanks again to every body, I had a great time.

Matt

Click on the thumbnails below to see maps of the new data gathered by Matt and Brian on February 6th.

Today I went on a riverboat cruise with my dad. I took pictures for National Geographic of wildlife on the Wakulla River. There were a lot of alligators and tons of birds. The alligators were mostly on little islands, taking a sun tan. I watched my dad get interviewed by Boyd Mattson of National Geographic and then I went swimming for a long while, helping to pull more hydrilla. Then I helped take apart and put together some rebreathers with Dr. John Zumrick and Mark Meadows. Last I went to Sonny's restaurant and went to bed VERY late.

[David Curtis Stone is a young explorer intern, with the team on assignment through February 13th.. Ed.]

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