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Today's primary order of business was scooter testing. We finally received the custom-wound scooter motors cores that Steve Ormeroid had helped arrange. One was placed in a Fatman scooter, and Henry Elsner ran the scooter for an hour, Richie Hudson 1.5 hours, Jeff Johnson 1.5 hours, Henry went back in for another 1.5 hours, and finally Mark Hercun went in for another hour, for a total of 6.5 hours with no noticeable reduction in speed (averaging 170+ feet/minute with stage bottles). Richie reports that the torque wasn't any greater than the previous model, but it did run slighly faster. At the end of the sustained run the motor was running warm (not hot) and the GM Ovonic batteries were only down to 26.5 volts (far from empty). The C-Tunnel Radio Location mission on Feb. 15th will be the first to use the new scooters inside the cave. Upcoming missions include: F/L Tunnel digital mapping on February 16th; O-Tunnel scooter staging on the 17th; and a renewed effort on O-Tunnel south on the 18th.
This mission was probably the best dive I have had here during the Wakulla 2 Project. Although Paul Heinerth and I got off to a late start, my equipment felt much more trim and balanced today. As we descended down to the entrance Wes Skiles, our National Geographic Society photographer and his photo team got off a few shots of Paul and me before we got inside the entrance restriction. The photo team followed us inside and then passed us while we dropped our 20-cf. air deco bottles and changed the setpoint on our rebreathers.
Swimming farther into the cave, Wes' merry band of aquatic lightning bugs waited for us at the Grand Canyon where we would all be positioned for a shot. Once we they were ready, Paul and I headed into the huge room where the team had set up two huge underwater strobes dubbed the "Great Balls of Fire" (each a 6,000 watt-second blast). With the group in position, Wes was able to fire off three shots that filled the massive void of the Grand Canyon with enough light to see every inch.
After the last shot was taken, Paul and I were off to the B/C junction to pick up one of the radio beacons that Jason and Rick had left from their clean up dive in O Tunnel. We picked up the beacon and headed into B Tunnel. The water flow in B Tunnel had dropped to a speed that made our trip in slow but easy. We stopped to fire off one radio beacon at the B-10 marker, then continued on to place a second beacon at the B-15 marker.
Once that work was done, Paul and I headed up to the end of the line that Jill and I laid at the back of the cave. We arrived at the end of the line at two hours into the dive. This passage was much smaller than I had remembered and I was amazed by the fact that Mark Meadows and Jill Heinerth had flown the wall mapper into this part of the cave. I picked up the radio beacon they had left at the end of the line, attached it to my scooter and placed a B-20 marker at the end of the line where that beacon had been placed.
Looking down into the collapsed area that terminated this small 10-12 meter (30-40 ft) diameter room, I could see the cracks that continued on in the same direction as the original passage were just too small for us to go into without conventional side-mounted open circuit diving equipment. Paul and I backtracked for a few hundred feet, looking for possible leads around this breakdown area. After swimming around for 30+ minutes looking at leads, I told Paul that I would start on the conventional line survey of the line that Jill and I had laid (for auxiliary information regarding intermediate buoy location that Barbara had requested), while he continued to check out the small leads. I scootered back to the end of the line and started my survey.
After completing 2/3rds of the survey, I scootered back to get Paul and the tow scooters that we had dropped about 150 meters (500 ft) from the end of the line. Eventually I found Paul's primary scooter tied to the line next to a new junction that he had just put in. Looking down the new line I saw Paul's lights coming out of a small passage enveloped in a silty gloom.
Paul's lead very quickly branched out into an up-stream and a down-stream tunnel, both large enough to scooter through though he chose not to take the scooter in during the reconn dive. He left his reel in the downstream passage for a future trip back to this area. We then picked up our tow scooters and headed back to where I had left my survey slate. I picked up my slate and continued to collect data on the way back to the junction with end of the WKPP line.
Once the survey was complete, we scootered out toward the entrance, the flow getting faster and faster the closer we got to the entrance. The view in this part of the cave was fantastic and I stayed back a little bit, watching Paul's lights illuminate the passage up ahead as we flew our scooters through the winding passage. Flying out of B tunnel on a fast scooter and the flow at your back is reminiscent of trying to fly an animated plane in a video game. The only difference is that if you crash your scooter or rebreather into the wall, you don't get another chance to make it out of the cave by dropping a coin in the slot.
We stopped only once to pick up the first beacon (long since located on the surface by Brian Pease) that we had set on the inward part of the journey. After we arrived back at the A/B/C tunnel junctions, we picked up the last beacon from Rick and Jason's dive and headed out to our first decompression stop.
We arrived at the first stop four hours and thirty-nine minutes after leaving the surface, in the bell at one hundred feet 2-1/2 hours after that. We came out of the chamber into the chilly afternoon air the following day (the 13th), just over twenty-one hours after leaving the surface the day before.
Paul and I would like to thank the entire Wakulla 2 Project team for spending two days of their time in very cold conditions to let us go into the cave for a "play" dive. Most people don't realize what it takes in the way of man hours, both in and out of the water to make one of these missions happen. We have a very dedicated team of people who, after two and a half months of work have been able to keep hold of the "Big Picture" (something I have had to be reminded of myself recently), which is to produce the first 3D map of any cave anywhere. We have done that here at Wakulla. We could go home now, and we will have still succeeded. Everything from here on out is "gravy" and I'm looking forward to a huge serving of it.
Today we had a team meeting to
discuss goals for the final weeks of the project. In the
left photo, Brian Kakuk (left), Mark Meadows, Henry Kendall,
and Chris Brown (right) participate in the discussion. In
the right photo, Bill Stone leads the discussion, gesturing
with regard to potential mission scenarios [photos
©1999 Barbara Anne am Ende].
Today's Humor Picture: As I
snapped a series of photos around the roomful of people at
our meeting today, John Zumrick, M.D. anticipated my zooming
in on him and was prepared with a special Valentine face!
[photos ©1999 Barbara Anne am Ende].
Copyright ©1999, U.S. Deep Caving Team, Inc. All rights reserved. No portion of these pages may be used for any reason without prior written authorization.
