January 8, 1999

Jill and Paul Heinerth headed down B Tunnel to set more radio beacons. After recovering the B4 beacon coil at the end of the Monolith Room, they carried this onward, upstream in B-Tunnel, to a point just shy of the Pyramid Rock Room. Brian Pease located the B4 beacon set by Mark Meadows and James Brown yesterday, but which triggered today (by a 20 hour timer). Brian later located the beacon set by Paul and Jill today before the Pyramid Rock; the BC Junction beacon (B1) is expected to fire off around 10 a.m. tomorrow. Their bottom time just eeked out to 2 hours when the Mission Control video crew caught a flash of their lights on the closed circuit video at 55 meters (180 ft) depth, so they get pizza in the can* during decompression!

In the evening, Wes Skiles, Tom Morris, and Joel Tower arrived. Wes is under contract with National Geographic to do underwater photography, both for the magazine and the TV division. The three came to scope out the expedition and will return later to begin the actual documentation.

*"Can" is Wakulla 2 slang for the decompression chamber

Here's Paul's view of what he experienced:

To B or not to B

It was pretty neat to go back to where I was 11 years ago. This time around we only used 6 scf (170 liters) of oxygen and 10 scf (283 liters) of heliox diluent compared to the 700 scf (19,810 liters) of heliox in 1987. As Bob Dylan says, "the times they are a changing." The entire dive time in 1987 was 12 hours; for an 81 minute bottom time. Last night our Mission was 10 hours, with only 3.5 in the water, for a bottom time of 120 minutes. The reason for this big reduction is the use of rebreathers.

As I was driving through the B Tunnel I couldn't help but remember the last big dive of the 1987 Project with Wes Skiles and Tom Morris. At that time it was a record dive, though we didn't realize that until afterwards. Jill and I thought a lot about Tom and Wes during the dive, so when we saw their smiling faces pressed up against the window of the chamber several hours later, it was a great sight. As we decompressed, they reminisced about how technical diving had developed in the last decade.

During our Mission, Jill and I took quite a bit of time leveling the magnetic induction coils, but we felt no time pressure to move along quickly. I recall quite a bit of time pressure in 1987 to keep travelling. Eleven years ago, we were constantly checking our gauges as we used up our precious gas.

The comfort level with warm air in the rebreathers and the heated bell… with my wife… was a definite improvement from 11 years ago.

As far as the cave is concerned, the flow was up, the water was cobalt blue, and there were no additional breaks in the main line (as I'd seen on my shorter dive into B Tunnel a few days ago). We deployed three buoys and two magnetic induction coils which have now been located on the surface. We deployed the last coil in a circular tunnel with a pebble-strewn floor, with some sand and mud. The walls were polished clean by the current. The coil (B8) is well down river of the boat house at the surface and it is just before the Pyramid Rock Room, inside the cave. The B1 coil was located in the parking lot on the back side of the Wakulla Lodge.

I'm definitely looking forward to driving the digital wall mapper through there to get the data needed for our mapping efforts. The size of B Tunnel is much smaller than the grandiose A Tunnel. The average conduit is approximately 6 x 6 meters (20 x 20 ft) and winds sinuously back and forth. Every time the passage goes up there are dome rooms that are well over 18 meters (60 ft) across and 12 meters (40 ft) high. We traveled from a depth of over 90 meters (300 ft) to as shallow as 60 meters (200 ft) (in the Monolith Room). Other rises were less dramatic (around 12 meters--40 ft).

Just before the Monolith Room I spotted some dugong bones (prehistoric manatee) on the floor. I saw them in '87, but this time I had more time (due to using rebreathers) and had time to look and see that there were a lot more bones there than what I thought I saw in 1987.

Motoring upstream beyond the Monolith Room, I had to fin at one spot to maneuver a tight curve. Other than that corner, we were able to travel against the strong flow without kicking, being towed behind our FatMan scooters. The tunnel twists and turns quite a bit more than I remembered it. B Tunnel is very pristine… very clean, because of the current, there is very little silt. With minimal traffic (as opposed to some Florida caves) it has not been all scarred up by the passage of divers. I look forward to going back.

I did see quite a bit of wildlife down there… so remote from the surface. We saw several catfish, fresh water eels, baby albino crayfish, and minnows. Many of these were seen after the Monolith Room. I would guess the fish were juvenile bass. These were clearly open water fish, not cave adapted. I wondered why they traveled so far into the cave.

--Paul Heinerth, January 9, 1999

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