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While your article was probably intended to be about Bill Stone and
his problems at Wakulla ( since you guys "sponsored" it ), we certainly
appreciate your efforts to present a balanced picture of what the real
story is in the WKP by including us in your article. I appreaciate you
sending your photopragher to Isla Muheres to take pictures while I was
fishing with my father and brother. This was all a good effort on your
part. Bad marks however on showing a picture of me in the water and
defaming me by saying I was part of Stone's "team training for a dive" -
that I will never live down.
However, as I told you repeatedly, you guys really need to check
your facts the way your parent magazine "National Geographic " does. I
know, you do not have the staff, but I told you I would be glad to help
you with those facts. You would not let me see any of the parts quoting
Stone on the "facts", an inconguity of concepts that would bring howls
of laughter to all who really know.
Let me tell you where you are in error. First of all, I did not
"pray" that Stone would fail. I said I would kiss his ass if didn't. I
was really hoping he would not kill anyone, as this has caused our
project huge problems, and delayed the resumption of our exploration at
Wakulla until just this weekend. Elsewhere we are uneffected.
Let me remind you guys that we use rebreathers and long range
scooters, just as Stone attempted to do ( and long before he had any to
use) , only we run multiple teams concurrently and so do in one day what
he could not do in 90 days. We just deco out in the water and only dive
at Wakulla once in a while, in fact four times in the year we set the
record. We have the rest of the WKP to work at the same time. Stone said
we spend all year setting up for one push - that should read "we spend
all morning".
We are an environmental project. We don't chop down the forest to
have a look at the trees, and none of us had any intention of
participating in anything like the show he staged there for obvious
reasons. We also dive over the same safeties all year, and only set up
the cave as we explore further. Stone took a month to get a dive off,
and stumbled around for two more until the plug got pulled on him after
a serious of miscues that ended with the death of Dr Kendall.
Stone said his divers "routinely" went to distances that they never
got to in their wildest dreams. Maybe he meant round trip, not one way.
We spoke to the divers, and they never got to t's that were less than
9,000 feet out. They never explored an inch of new cave in the conduit
portion, and in fact they left over 25,000 feet unseen and unmapped.
They had nothning but trouble doing this, as you intimated in your
article. Stone makes it sound like it was some big lark. The fact is it
was a running abortion, like the first project , which did not
"pentrate" 11,000 feet, they got about 3500.
Stone said our survey was "off by 300 feet in the first 4000 feet".
The fact is I have given no living person that data, and the funny part
is that Stone's guys did the survey of the beginning of the cave, not
me, and the C, A, and D tunnels were all way off. Stone pulled a stick
map off of our internet site that uses his data ( from his book which I
keyed into a map program ), not ours, and an approximation for the rest.
I purposely left off most of the detail, and a good portion of the cave.
Even funnier is the fact that his mapper only "sees" tunnels that are on
our internet map. The map you have in your magazine is fantasy at best,
and has certain stretches exaggerated and or faked. I know, I explored
all of it.
And the last thing that really causes me a huge problem everyday is
the swimming and running bit. Both of your magazines say I run in the
morning and swim at night. This gets me laughed at every day at Masters
since they all know I swim in the morning. Thanks to Stone they also
call me the "Bad Egg".
By the way, nobody is going to buy that mapper or use it for anything.
We already reconcilled all of our stuff to surface features, and also by
way of correctness, the State of Florida has nothing to do with the rest
of the caves in the WKP - that is all either Federal or private. There
will be no Bill Stone, "USDCT" or other sillinesss in any of those
places - only the WKPP. We got there the old fashioned way - "we earned
it".
Also, we set another World Record last weekend, and everyone on the
team was at dinner by 6:30 in good health, but you guys did get that
kind of thing about us correct, and for that we do appreciate your
taking the time to find out about the WKPP. Do not worry about the
errors in your article. Your readers don't know 1400 from 14000, but the
whole cave diving community is laughing in Stone's face, and he has to
look at that face in the mirror every morning.
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