Submerged: Adventures of America's Most Elite Underwater Archeology Team

by Daniel Lenihan

  I was having my own problems, psychological ones. The water was eerily clear and the formations pleasing, as we moved down the passage. But I had a disturbed man behind me, and I was searching for the bodies of cave divers, not open-water divers who had just strayed into where they shouldn’t be. These folks, judging from the one survivor of the expedition, had the right equipment and a fair amount of experience but they hadn’t come out. “They knew the risks and accepted the consequences,” my refrain from the institute kept running through my head. Did they really, I wondered?

  Typically, in Florida, where about 99 percent of the cave diving in the United States takes place, experienced cave divers only drowned when they mixed serious depth with caves, usually well in excess of two hundred feet. I didn’t know of any passage here much deeper than the ninety to hundred foot conduit we were presently in. The inexperienced died a stone’s throw from the opening from panic, disorientation, and because they just didn’t have any way to go up. Experienced cave divers were usually found very far from the entrance or very deep.

  Also, I was, for want of a better word, spooked. At this point in my career I hadn’t seen much death, and I wasn’t looking forward to it. I settled into the easy, deliberate pace that Sheck set in the lead. He had his buddy next to him, then Dave and Dale Malloy, also skimming along both sides of the line but never touching it. They were followed by me, my new friend who had pulled up to my right, and Tex trailing behind a few feet, watching the progress of #7 like a hawk.

  I noted my new partner’s breathing getting more erratic, and the movement of his light beam was choppy. These are two clues to the mental state of their partners that cave divers are very keyed into. It might appear an expert cave diver in a lead position is inattentive to his buddy because he rarely glances backward. But invariably, he is monitoring the even play of his partner’s light beams on the walls ahead from the corner of his eye. Flashing light rapidly on an object in front of your partner is an all-stop signal in cave diving. Repeated movements in a diver’s beam that are jerky or erratic might alarm team members to the point that they will call the dive.

  Then, there is the breathing. If one pays attention in water, it is usually possible to monitor another’s breathing rate, but in open water, people seldom bother. In the dark confines of a cave, the only sounds are your own breathing and the sounds of air rushing through the extended airways of metal and rubber hoses of your partner’s regulator. You can see the bubbles, but that can be deceptive; it’s the sound that alerts you—fast, shallow intakes of air and no clear pattern of exhalation.

  Seconds after I became aware of these clues, I noticed Tex had already stopped again and was intently watching. Who knows what demons the stranger was confronting. My irritation that the man had forced himself onto the dive was softened by my sympathy for what he must have been going through. I felt a knot in my stomach on this foray, and I was looking for strangers—these were his buddies. Suddenly, he grabbed at the line for some sense of security, I suppose, and the old piece of twisted nylon snapped.

  I then witnessed one of the most impressive reflex reactions I have ever seen underwater. The nylon line, which was under tension, recoiled in both directions. Sheck’s partner grabbed the end heading into the cave, and Sheck, in a remarkable feat of athleticism, inverted from his face-forward swimming posture, whipped under me, and when the silt cleared, he was kneeling on the bottom with the end that led out gripped tightly in his hand.

  But the ambivalence toward #7 was over. Tex and someone else I couldn’t make out in the rising cloud of silt were physically escorting him toward the exit. They came back surprisingly quickly and I learned later that just before reaching the constriction, he had bolted from them and was last seen clawing his way through the tight crevice toward the dim light. They left him—the logic was they couldn’t help a panicked diver, anyway. If he made it fine; if not, they’d collect him on the way out. Sounds cold, but that was reality.

  Without the burden of our traumatized companion, our progress was much improved. Sheck and I repaired the line, and off the six of us went. After ten more minutes of swimming, I saw Sheck’s light hit something shiny and fix there; my heart leapt into my throat. When I caught up to him I could see in living color the first of our missing divers. He was on his side, only a few feet from the line; double tanks, an extra pony bottle (he was carrying a lot of air), and all his equipment including his mask were in place. What burned itself into my memory was the absolute serenity of the scene, so different from what I expected: no signs of panic, nothing—a very orderly looking, very dead diver. The chill of the seventy two-degree water seemed to suddenly creep right through my suit into my bones.

  Tex moved carefully above him so as not to disturb the silt and checked his air-pressure gauge. He held his light up to illuminate his own face and lightly slashed at his throat with his fingertips. He was signaling to us that the man had totally drained his tank. Sheck pointed at the pony bottle, and Tex pressed the purge valve of the regulator—nothing. This fellow had used everything in his double tanks and his spare bottle and was still almost a thousand feet from the entrance . . . and not lost. This was getting stranger all the time. I looked down at my own gauge and saw plenty of air remaining to continue our search. What had happened? Cave divers typically enter on a third of their supply, exit on a third and save a third for emergencies. This would have been the air-consumption miscalculation of all time.

  We left the man in place and continued on. Our plan was not to attempt a removal until we had scoped out the whole scene. We hadn’t advanced 150 additional feet before we found the second fellow. Same ritual checking, same result. For some reason, I wasn’t surprised when about 200 feet farther we found the third victim. Same again, except for the curious anomaly that he had a full pony bottle but no regulator attached. We were now well over a quarter mile back in the cave, and it was time for us to swim back out, decompress, warm up, and regroup.

  On the surface we motored back to the boat landing to change tanks and debrief. The sheriff alerted the coroner when we planned to do the recovery dives so he would be present to receive the bodies. We divers were stumped, however, when it came time to give a reason for the accident. They were next to the line and headed out, so obviously not lost, no apparent panic, no apparent malfunctions, too shallow for deep-diving gas effects like nitrogen narcosis or oxygen poisoning, no nothing! I listened with interest and then took my time assembling my gear for the recovery.

  I needed to gather myself. This business had shaken me; for some reason, the beautiful, crystal-clear serenity of the environment had gotten to me the worst. It was like these caves that I loved had lied to me. I could accept succumbing in a particularly difficult constriction, at 250 feet deep when you were tiptoeing on the razor’s edge, lost, entangled, but why here? This was a crystal-clear reach of passage, just under a hundred feet deep, large enough to negotiate side by side, and these guys were all headed out within arm’s reach of the line. Did they know the risks? Hell, did I? I knew one thing, for sure: I wasn’t ready to accept the consequences I had just seen.

  I went over the recovery plan in my head, step by step. First Sheck and his partner, Steve, were going to retrieve the farthest guy in. Then Tex and I would retrieve #2 and bring him out right behind Dave and Dale, who would be exiting with #1.

  “Tex.”

  “Yo.”

  “You know that part about following Dave and Dale through the constriction?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Ain’t gonna do it.”

  “Well, the plan’s made, and Dave and . . . , hell those guys are good.”

  “They’re better than good, that’s not the point. Dave is also . . . big. Also, these guys, the victims, they look stiff to me.”

  “Well, they oughta.”

  “No, I’m not kidding. They’ve got rigor mortis and I don’t think they’re gonna slide through that constriction real easy—point being, I don’t want to be inside wait
ing for those guys to clear that constriction. I mean, what if they can’t?”

  Tex chewed on a plant stem (he was always chewing on a plant stem) and considered my question. “Hmmm, I guess that would be kinda disappointing.”

  “What?”

  “If they couldn’t get through and we were behind them.”

  “Indeed.”

  In this manner we had analyzed the problem and come to the conclusion that we should either reverse order or do our recovery separately. For reasons I’ll never understand, Dave and Dale just decided to reverse order. They were more confident than I was that Tex and I could make our way through with a victim.

  An hour later, Tex and I followed Dave and Dale into the room-size spring basin, where we passed Sheck and Steve decompressing, with the body of a diver held between them. The basin was very silty from all our activity getting down and from them getting the fellow through the constriction. My light picked up a pinkish tinge to the water around the victim; the effects of pressure had made his lungs rupture on the way up, common in diver recoveries but no less disconcerting.

  I could hear the scrabbling of Dave and Dale in the tight spot; soon they were through, and I was next. In totally blacked-out visibility, I felt and pulled my way through the rock crevice, feeling the limestone scrape my tank and skin my knees and wrists even through the quarter-inch-thick rubber suit.

  Then we were in surreal city. The crystal-clear water at the bottom of the entrance was reduced in visibility to about six or seven feet, due to the team exiting with the body. It improved slightly as we moved further in but it just wasn’t the same cave anymore. I watched the line move by as we flutter-kicked quickly toward our victim. I was in no mood for sight-seeing.

  As soon as we reached our destination, I quickly grabbed the deceased by his tank valve and turned toward Tex. We had planned to swim him out between us, with me on the right and Tex on the left. It worked for a while but in the reduced visibility, it became too difficult, causing both of us to repeatedly bang our knees and elbows against projections in the cave floor and wall.

  Finally, Tex turned and placed his hands underneath the man’s arms from behind, and I lifted his legs. This worked better. For most of the swim out, Tex back-pedaled facing me, and I nodded my head one direction or the other to signal him to turn so he wouldn’t have to look behind himself. It’s a swim that will always be with me. The man’s name was embossed on black tape on his Scubapro decompression meter. On every kick it popped up into my field of vision as if reminding me that he had been a person with a history—a name other than “victim.” Regardless, my mood had improved—probably because we were doing, rather than anticipating, and it would soon be over. Then we got to the constriction.

  Here I had the opportunity to thank my instincts about insisting on the order of exit. We could not fit our victim through the crevice. His rigor had frozen his arms in a half-extended position as if he was trying to embrace someone. A mess of straps and ancillary gear made removing his tanks impossible in any reasonable period of time.

  Both Tex and I crawled into the crevice and with one hand each on his tank manifold, we pulled for all we were worth. He seemed to give, moved several feet, then wedged in hard. He was seriously stuck! My nightmare had come true, only it wasn’t me on the wrong side of the constriction. I find it hard to admit but, in honesty, my dominant emotion was relief. As worried as I was for my comrades, I couldn’t help but be overwhelmingly relieved that it was them and not me on the other side of that constriction.

  The situation was serious and on its way to becoming dire. The man was truly stuck. Tex and I were wearing ourselves out in our awkward position, frantically trying to pull him through. Finally Tex motioned me aside. His instinct told him that we were working to some degree at cross-purposes in the confined area, and he might do better alone. He lay on his back, head pointed out, removed his fins, and, with my help pushing, situated himself with both hands on the man’s manifold. His legs wrapped around the prostrate victim’s upper body, with his feet planted solidly on the projecting wall of the cave. It became totally black in the crevice; with my light, I tried to illuminate down Tex’s torso as far as possible. Dimly, I could see his hands tense on the manifold and I knew he was pushing his feet against the rock with all his might. Only his head was visible in the muck—his neck tendons standing out with the strain. Suddenly, with a crumbling sound of limestone projections giving way, Tex and his ward sprang through the opening.

  I gasped with relief, pulled them the remaining few feet into the basin, and then dove back into the crevice to see if I could help the others. To my amazement, I found myself grabbing not Dave or Dale but another body. These guys were pushing him through ahead of them! As fortune would have it, this fellow was in just the right body attitude, and he slipped through comparatively easy. I dropped back into the basin and sat in the murk with my arms around Tex and our victim. We would go through this decompression together.

  I had a lot to think about as the silent procession of Jon boats made their way back to shore. Dave and Dale were never aware how close they had come to being statistics, and Tex and I didn’t see much need to belabor the point. The discussion was more on what had happened to the three victims. Their buddy, diver #7, who had tried to help, had apparently made it up safely and had left the scene.

  The divers, still with their equipment on, were stretched out in one of the boats with a white sheet draped over each one. The sheets had turned crimson where they draped over their faces. The lungs of the dead divers, ruptured from being removed to a lower pressure were still oozing a bloody froth through the nose and mouth. A natural process, but I was happy for the sheets—I only wished they were some other color than white.

  As the metal boat bottoms scraped on the sandy shore, I heard one of our people say, “No shit, an offshoot line?” Sheck looked over at Tex and me with a grimace and said, “Well, guess that’s it.” The team had come to a conclusion about what had happened, and in retrospect it was the only thing that made sense. One of our divers said an offshoot line could be seen from the trunk line. There was no sign it had been jumped with a reel, and, worse, the tally of equipment found on the bodies and in the cave revealed no arrows and no clothespins.

  It can never be proved, but we all knew in our hearts what had happened. They had jumped to that offshoot line and after exploring to its end, had come back to the trunk. Then, they had looked at the trunk line quizzically for a few seconds—I swear I could vividly see them doing this in my mind, as my comrades reconstructed this hypothetical scenario—and they had gone the wrong way. That was all it took, the leader heading the wrong way; caves look different on the way out. The less experienced assumed he must be right and followed. I couldn’t dwell on what it must have felt like, when they found that damn trunk line wrapped off deep in the cave and realized they were turned around.

  The whole way out they knew there was no way in hell they were going to make it. The fact that they were so close together meant they probably tried to buddy-breathe, to share the last of the remaining air supply. It’s curious how this knowledge affected the members of the cave-diving fraternity as they quietly packed their gear. There was a new-found respect for the victims. Sheck murmured to the rest of us, “Ole boys did all right, considering.” There were nods all around. It was what passed for a eulogy among cave divers. Consequences accepted—I knew the men under those sheets would have been proud to hear those words.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  TIME FOR A CHANGE

  My infatuation with the exploration of underwater caves slowed not a beat after the incident at Hole-in-the-Wall—more archeological finds, more natural wonders discovered, more tragedy, including people I had dived with. But the increasing notoriety of the caves was having a strange effect on the general diving community; they were becoming more and more fascinated and visited the Florida karst in record numbers. Almost a year to the day from the incident at Hole-in-the-Wall, I found myself taki
ng part in a recovery of two divers from the other steep bump in the statistical curve, novice divers. It was September 23, 1973. Only a few weeks earlier President Nixon had told us to “put aside our backward looking obsession with Watergate,” and the last American soldiers were on their way home fron Vietnam.

  Four of us had entered and penetrated the farthest reaches of Ginnie Springs before finding the first victim. These young men had obviously overbreathed their equipment. Extreme demands to breathe by the panicked diver made the air suck through the restricting airways of the regulator like a thick milkshake through a thin straw. They had madly torn the offending gear from their bodies and strewn it around the cave. Air tanks still half filled with air that was inaccessible to gasping lungs, hands showing signs of having clawed the ceiling, lips frozen in some final protest—it was time to shut down our emotions and switch to automatic pilot.

  I was partnered with Dave Desautels, who was leading the dive. He knew Ginnie well and allowed us only a few seconds to absorb the scene. He glanced at our two partners and pointed at the victim, indicating they should act quickly to remove him. We proceeded to find the second body. Dave knew that in the passages farthest back in Ginnie silted out almost immediately, from gin clear to zero, which is why they were so treacherous to the uninitiated. Even if you were motionless, your bubbles dislodged thick clouds of reddish-brown muck from the ceilings.

  We proceeded into a narrow, silty passage with clay walls. The soft clay walls presented their own special challenge. There was no permanent line in Ginnie, so I had to deploy the line from a reel all the way in. I had selected a heavier gauge than the usual #18 because I knew that when we exited, the place would be blacked out and the line would work its way into the walls at each turn. Few things are more gut-churning than blindly following a lifeline out of a cave right into a solid wall. One had to pull it gently back and forth in zero visibility, hoping to find the groove it had made on entry.