There was little in the way of formalized instruction in cave diving in 1971. Only one unlikely individual taught the arcane practice in Tallahassee. Before long, several friends and I were spending countless hours underwater, often late at night, in the capacious Florida State University outdoor swimming pool.
Under the tutelage of Larry Briel, we used up double tanks of air in the shallow water, sometimes until past midnight, following lines with our masks blacked out with tinfoil. The scholarly Briel was not himself particularly athletic or capable of great feats of exploration, but he was able to convey the most important tenets of cave diving: focus, discipline, and monklike devotion. He was more the Yoda than the Darth Vader-type.
Our imaginary caves were composed of pool-side furniture spread along the bottom as obstacles through which the guideline was carefully strung. We removed our tanks and pushed them ahead of us while sharing regulators, “buddy breathing” in every conceivable position. We concocted emergency situations and replicated them again and again in the controlled environment of the pool.
On other nights we drove to backwoods sinkholes in the Tallahassee area. At first we stayed in the open basins, avoiding areas under ceilings. We practiced swimming over the silty bottom until we found ways to propel ourselves like ghosts, stirring no silt, expending minimal energy. Only then did we start pushing past the cave entrances to the unexplored realms beyond. Within months, the students had outgrown the resident master and were pushing limits only the obsessed would consider worth the risks. Within a year we had extended the few lines that were already in caves in our part of the state to several times their original length. Then we began industriously weaving our nylon webs through many more.
Long evening drives in Tex Chalkley’s old Mustang, after my daily teaching obligations, to a newly discovered sinkhole; after a brief, bloody skirmish with killer mosquitoes while donning wetsuits and tanks, we were magically transformed into poor man’s astronauts. Effortlessly, we slipped through passageways in crystal-clear water, below the swamps and warm Florida nights. Trailing our thin nylon lines along bedding planes, smooth-bottomed, carved-out limestone layers, five feet high and fifty feet wide, we sometimes dropped through holes in the floor to find we had, in fact, entered through the ceiling into a room that could comfortably hold a twenty-story building. Playing our powerful sealed-beam lights on white limestone walls, we let ourselves fall motionlessly into voids, occasionally wrinkling noses against the face plates of our masks to clear our ears.
As depth increased, we could feel the increased pressure thicken the air flowing through our regulators into our lungs, and we noted with fascination the narcotic numbness beginning to take effect as nitrogen molecules in the air anesthetized our nervous systems. Euphoria accompanied this nitrogen “high” sometimes; on other occasions, minor worries magnified into major anxiety as our reflexes slowed to three-quarter time along with our breathing rates. The extreme limit for depth in the sport diving community was 130 feet. We regularly undertook long under-ceiling swims at depths ranging from 180 to 240 feet. Some in our group ventured well past 300 feet on air.
Cave divers bonded like soldiers. We developed the intimacy of people who must depend on each other to stay alive but with an emotional quick release. We employed a dark humor regarding the unbelievable death rate in those years. I’ve seen partners on a dive chalking a number on their sleeve to designate that they would be #6 if “Jim” came back without them.
The world of underwater cave exploration was an extremely hazardous, yet somehow orderly and tranquil world for me. If one communicated well with one’s partners and anticipated problems, it was a predictable and controllable environment. Starkly beautiful, mysterious; alien yet inviting. I loved these caves for being there, for forcing me to focus every moment I spent in them.
Their uncompromisingly lethal nature for the careless or the preoccupied made them a special refuge for the devoted. I have never been more relaxed than after executing a precision cave dive—perhaps the same feeling as that of the male black widow spider who, after being sated, successfully escapes the embrace of his lover.
My comrades and I were called at times to retrieve the bodies of fellow cave divers who had not managed to avoid the widow’s kiss. Emblazoned forever in my mind are scenes of incredible terror, when the inexperienced or untrained had comprehended the hopelessness of their situation, panicked and drowned. But my first direct association with death in this world of wonder and beauty wasn’t searching for novices who had wandered in a short distance, it was something quite different.
As I became more and more enamored with cave diving, the death toll among its practitioners was starting to escalate out of control. It wasn’t just the untrained and inexperienced who were dying, although that group did comprise the steepest bump in the statistical curve. There were more and more serious cave divers pushing the limits and even members of our own tight little group were succumbing at an alarming rate. My dive log indicates the first date that I had to deal directly with the dark side of cave diving was when a North Florida summer was preparing to become fall in 1972.
September 17th is significant in America as the single bloodiest day in our history—the battle of Antietam. But on September 17, 1972, my mind was focused on the grim business of recovering the bodies of three divers from a cave near Mariana, Florida.
I had just returned from a week in Stony Brook, New York, where I was certified as an instructor in an institute run by the National Association of Underwater Instructors (NAUI). Ironically, I was fresh from delivering my graduation presentation at the Institute in which I took the staff to task for their dim view of cave diving. Many in the general diving community could find no rational explanation for the multitude of cave and deep-diving fatalities occurring in inland Florida. They could only conclude it was a foolish, extreme perversion of the sport they were so devoted to promoting. They felt the death rate was particularly disturbing because it created an unfair public perception of the dangers of scuba diving in general.
It was difficult for them, as well as the public, to understand how water-filled caverns could be so fascinating that they were drawing divers to take what, from a distance, seemed unconscionable risks. Without benefit of experience or adequate knowledge, they condemned the practice, ridiculed the foolishness of some who had died taking “insane” chances, and urged wise divers to keep their distance.
I said nothing until the last day of the institute, when, secure that I performed well and could speak from a position of strength, I delivered an indictment of those who had been attacking my passion on what I felt to be unfair grounds. I accused them of spreading misinformation and innuendo, and of castigating as fools people whom they knew only through reputation, and whom I knew through intimate association. I was particularly adamant that real cave divers died not from ignorance but from actions based on calculated risks that they were willing to take. “They knew the risk and they accepted the consequences” became my refrain throughout the talk.
Also, I pointed out that by far the greatest number of people who died in underwater caves were not cave divers but people diving in caves—often perfectly adequate open-water divers, including instructors like them, who had no business dabbling in caves without special training. Luckily for me, the directors and staff of the institute were secure in their own abilities and, to their credit, took the lambasting with good humor. They gave me high grades and promised to be fairer in their appraisal of this specialized “art form,” as I had referred to it.
Now, hardly unpacked from my trip and barely dismounted from my sanctimonious high horse, I was heading off to recover three experienced cave divers. Tex Chalkley, my closest cave-diving buddy at the time, called to tell me he’d pick me up at 6 A.M. and we’d head to Mariana to meet with Sheck Exley from Jacksonville and Dave Desautels from Gainesville and a couple of others, all experienced in cave-diving recoveries.
In a sense, the other guys were coming into our
territory—Tex and I had become over the previous year pretty much the acknowledged experts on the caves in the Florida Panhandle. Tex was, to all appearances, the total opposite of me in the politically self-conscious world of university life in the 1970s. He was clean-shaven, finishing up his law degree, wore white buff shoes, coat and tie, and thick glasses. His mannerisms were lawyerly, and he almost had “Republican” tattooed on his forehead. I had a full beard, taught undergraduate-level anthropology, and associated with professors and students who thought SDS, SNCC, and Abbie Hoffman were too damn conservative. Cave diving made interesting bedfellows; Tex could have dressed in drag for all I cared, when the chips were down 200 feet deep and 2,000 feet back in, his was the face I wanted to see beside me. Tex had ice for nerves.
Unfortunately, we had never dived this place called Hole-in-the-Wall. The cave which ran at an average depth of about ninety feet, emptied from a depth of fifteen feet into a large quiet body of clear, spring-fed water known as Merritt’s Mill Pond. We were familiar with the pond but not this particular spring conduit.
On our arrival the sheriff came over and expressed his appreciation for responding to his call but reassured us that the situation was well in hand. While we were en route, Navy divers from the Navy Dive School in Panama City had agreed to handle the matter and would save us the trouble and trauma. I could tell that the sheriff was puzzled over the reaction of the assembled cave divers. As a group they could muster up the most pregnant silences I have ever witnessed.
Tex asked if the Navy contingent had seen the cave opening yet, and the sheriff said, “No, but their Master Chief was heading out there now to scout it out.”
In response, Sheck gave the sheriff a winning smile and drawled in his lazy Southern accent that he “reckoned we’d just kinda wait and see for a bit.”
Sheck was a low-key fellow, several years younger than Tex and I, but his reputation had already reached legendary proportions in the world of cave diving. He held most records for penetration and depth, and was on the way to claiming most others. He was also one of the people listed by name at the institute in Stony Brook as being a lunatic. He was no lunatic, just clearly and admittedly obsessed, as were most of us. He was also on the way to becoming a close friend of mine when I heard the “lunatic” comment, which is probably what provoked at least the vehemence of my reaction at the institute.
Although Tex and I had been exploring a lot of caves, most of the accidents that were the focus of so much attention in Florida at the time occurred in the popular springs more toward the mid-part of the state. We were often put on standby in case things were drawn out over days, but the present company out of Gainesville and Jacksonville did most of the recoveries.
In fact, this was to be my very first body recovery, and I was still relatively new to the interplay of egos and law enforcement politics that accompanied this sort of tragedy. I knew it would be insane for these Navy divers to attempt the recovery, and all of us present knew at least secondhand, Sheck firsthand, of the disastrous attempt that the Navy made to effect such a recovery in a place called Madison Blue not too many years ago. It wasn’t that the Navy didn’t have good divers; it was just that they were not trained in cave diving and if their chief decided to macho his way through this situation we were probably going to see a tragedy transform into a disaster. Hole-in-the-Wall was much worse than Madison Blue because you were forced to traverse a serious constriction within the first minute of the dive.
As it turned out, we should have given the Navy chief more credit. He came back to shore and, after saying a few brief words to the sheriff, walked over and introduced himself. A personable man but all professional, he simply asked to take a peek at our dive gear. Sheck swung open the door of his van, revealing the sets of large double-cylinders, customized lighting systems and line reels neatly stowed but well-worn. “You boys done this a lot before?”
“Yessir.”
“Sheriff, I’m sorry, but I’ve taken a look out there, and I’m not putting my men in that hole. I’m thinkin’ these boys here cut their teeth on these damn caves, and they’re the right ones for the job.”
I was impressed. The man was a pro who knew his limits and wasn’t going to endanger his men over storytelling rights. He had the savvy to know that there was absolutely nothing in the extensive training regimen of Navy divers that prepared them to don scuba gear and swim through tight holes in the ground filled with silt and a catacomb of dead ends.
The sheriff tried not to show his consternation but was obviously at a bit of a loss. As he set about re-establishing his demeanor of authority and control, he couldn’t quite accept the fact that the Navy was going to back out of this thing. The whole responsibility and liability issue was back on his shoulders. Tex, a law student and mellow of tongue, assured him that all would be okay. We were covered by waivers and had worked effectively in many other counties, and he simply needed to relax: Let us do a recon dive, and we would work up a recovery plan for his approval afterward.
Soon, we were sitting, two divers to a jon boat, with a deputy motoring each of the three flat-bottomed craft out to the cave mouth. Here, we were met by another surprise. There was a fully equipped cave diver from Alabama standing chest deep in the water near the shoreline ready to join us. He had been there from the previous night and the sheriff seemed reluctant to tell him he couldn’t go with us.
It was a touchy situation. After the incident with the Navy we were loathe to tell the sheriff that we couldn’t possibly let this man dive with us. Not only didn’t we know him, we did know that these were his friends who had died and he had been up all night grieving and steeling himself to enter the cave to find them. He had already made a solo attempt.
But, by this time, we were reaching our own limit of frustration with the proceedings and decided we wouldn’t try to stop him. The sheriff simply didn’t have the inclination to run him off, and we had lost patience and weren’t going to delay the operation any longer. We figured we would let him accompany us on the recon, which we hoped would be fairly straightforward, but would put our collective foot down about the recovery operation itself. In retrospect it was a mistake—a mistake that could have cost us our lives.
All six of us did the recon dive. This was unusually large for a cave-diving team, but it was getting late in the day, and we all needed to see what we were facing. Our six turned into seven as the unknown diver joined us when we descended to the cave mouth. The first thing I noted was that, as we had been told, there was indeed a real tight fit right at the entrance. We could make it through with tanks on but not much else. This constriction was what we were going to have to exit through with the bodies. Tex fixed me in his gaze underwater as we waited our turn to squeeze through and just shook his head. The uninvited diver joined us and Tex swept his hand in an “after you” gesture to the man. I almost turned back after seeing how nervous he appeared squeezing through. Who knows what he might have been like in normal conditions, but he was in a state I could only characterize as “on the edge.”
Moments later, Tex and I had worked ourselves through the tight spot and dropped down into clearer water, where we could see the #18 gauge (about a sixteenth of an inch in diameter) permanent line that someone had installed. I noticed that it was twisted, not braided, which was not comforting. Braided line took abrasion and pulling much better. Also, the thought was running through my mind that I didn’t know who had installed this line. But it sure as hell wasn’t Tex and I. That meant we didn’t know how well it was wrapped and what kind of condition it was in. I later learned the line was installed by Billy Young, Paul DeLoach, and Ron and India Henley.
Lines are one of the most critical element of cave diving. When the uninitiated first see th-inch nylon string stretching into the recesses of an explored cave they are usually shocked at how thin and frail it appears. In fact, in the earliest days of cave diving, lines were considerably heavier until the techniques and equipment evolved to the point where longer and l
onger penetrations were possible. The line is rarely touched by experienced cave divers unless rising silt is causing a blackout. In such a case, they form an okay signal with their fingers around the line and run their hands along it gently until they can see it again, even dimly, and follow it with their light. It is the nylon equivalent to the mythical bread crumbs that lead one to light from land caves—underwater they are also leading one to air.
The laying of line so that it is always visible and accessible to fingers when necessary, but out of harm’s way when not needed, is a matter of pride to cave divers. The manner in which it is wrapped around projections and laid taut and firm so it doesn’t snag equipment is all subject to scrutiny and critique by divers who follow.
Offshoot lines to side passages are always separated from the trunk line. The dive team usually carries small “jump reels” to temporarily bridge the gap and home-made arrows, or sets of clothespins that can be adhered to the line in a manner that definitively points the way out. Line-laying technique is important enough to cave divers that entire chapters of manuals are devoted to the subject.
As we had now dropped through the vertical chute from the constriction, we were totally dependent on the line for orientation. While I examined the nylon string, I couldn’t help but notice that our helper (diver #7) was already showing his stress: erratic arm movements and sloppy buoyancy control. Tex stopped dead in the water to watch him as Sheck and the rest of us began moving smoothly down the line. Tex did not like this fellow being between us and the entrance and would be damned if he would let him trail behind.
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?
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