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The bad news is that Leon Sinks is under, the good news is that
Wakulla has gone down with it .
Wakulla was clear for a solid month before Stone got around to
showing up, and then for the past 29 days he has buffalloed the Park by
putting in cave radios and surveying the land above while creating
stories to cover the CF's that were taking place daily.
The "mapper" has not been deployed.
In that 29 days these experts managed to travel a solid 2400 feet
into the cave, nearly 100 feet for each day they have been there.
By way of comparison, in our last big Wakulla dive , we added a
mile of line between the three teams diving. That was one of our "Little
Piker Weekends" ( actually , it was a one day deal ).
So here is the scorecard on Bill Stone and Wakulla Too with 29 days
down and the cave out of commission: no mapping, no exploration, no
film, no nothing but exaggerated bottom times, and a bunch of people
quitting.
The A Tunnel will not get sonar mapped by Stone. That is OK - we
made a sonar map of the first 4100 feet a few weeks ago, and will do the
rest in May when it clears. The D Tunnel will not get sonar mapped by
Stone - too risky to send divers through the nasty water, but he might
get desperate and try it. That is OK , too, since Exley made a great map
of it already. D Tunnel will not get connected to Sally Ward ( because
it does not connect that way - it connects in B Tunnel).
The C Tunnel might get mapped - big deal, it is a dead tunnel , and
we already walled it out.
Just so you know, we ran out of letters naming the tunels and went
to other names not yet on the map - there are nearly 30 tunnels and
50,000 feet of surveyed passage in Wakulla - a big cave.
The B Tunnel is now the only thing to do. It is still open and
going, but there is a slight problem - it is an open circuit dive, and
it is a "No Hoovers" open circuit dive. The flow is howling, it is
small, and it is a ways to get to the good stuff. On top of that, guess
what? There are some severe restrictions that the RB and the Fat scooter
will not get through, let alone the mapper. Brent adn I had to crwal
throgh one of them dragging the stages behind.
And then there is the deco. This is the tunnel that showed us who
had PFO's, and who did not. This one put a few guys out of deep diving
for good .
Just to be real helpfull, we smoked every lead in the tunnel but
one - the very end - that one we left as the Grand Prize. To add line at
all, one must go the distance, and when they get there they will know
what it takes to go 1/3 the distance that we went . Let's see if they
can do it in the next two months with their $8,000 batteries, their bell
and chamber, their 17K rebreathers with the 50 cent deco computer, their
song and dance, and their big mouths, since it took us one day and one
dive ( our first in the tunnel ), and a triple stage to put the line in.
Then they can try the other side - Sally - they merely have to go
upstream through the Bannana Room, through "King's Retreat", follow the
line and turn right when they hit the giant tunnel, and head towards B -
a walk in the Park, but unfortuanely for the experts, it , too , will
have to be an open circuit dive done with Gavin scooters. If they want
to see how to do it, they can watch "Extreme Cave Diving" which is a vid
of us finding the spot where King weenied with borehole Tallahasse Power
Cave staring him in the face.
This project so far is a total failure, but at leat they have not
killed anyone, so I will admit I was wrong about that, and glad to be
wrong . I will also have to give credit to those who quit both before it
started and after it started for being a hell of a lot smarter than I
had given them credit for, and again I was severely wrong about those
people, too "numeris" to mention here. I am also gald to not be diving
for a few weeks sicne we need to go back to Palm Beach and find the gear
from that accident last year, and then we have a few special suprises
for eveyone in trickland for when we do get back in there.
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