"No group of divers in the world is better at this sort of mapping --nor at the paramount cave-diving imperative of "pushing" a tunnel to the greatest distance possible -- than the 158 members of the Woodville Karst Plain Project (WKPP). The ten-year-old group's divers spend more than 40 weekends a year pursuing their proud, long-term goal of mapping evey foot of cavern beneath the Woodville Karst Plain--and, in the process, continually setting and breaking world records for distance at depth underwater. The article definite sets the record straight on what we did, although it is ambiguous in discussing what Stone did, simply becasue they used him as a source of information, and he misled them. They also put all of our quotes about Stone and his band in there, even though I told them it was not necessary since we already won the war and he had proved us right, all the way to the accidents and the death, and he had been beaten up so badly by his own actions that he did not need any more from me, but Sankey finsihed him off completely with a few bullseyes. Stone himself admitted that his divers were "not up to WKPP standards", and claimed that his rb , chamber, bell , and $34,000 scooters allowed these misfits to do dives that they claimed were similar to what we do. The fact is they did not execute what I would consider a decent set-up dive in 90 days of repeated trying, but he is correct: if some of those people can do anything and walk away from it, he defintiely went a long way towards levelling the playing field. However, the real playing field is not some drive-up park where Carte Blanch is issued - the real world of this kind of diving will not accommodate any of his methods, and that is why the WKPP has the end of the line everywhere, and always will. Technology and enough gear might make a pig appear to be singing, but this is no different than having a conversation with a parrot - seems like he is talking, but there is nobody home. This was like one of those animal shows where the pets do tricks. It was like Bill Mee's wife's monkey - the monkey puts on her glasses and pretends to read the paper - just a funny monkey. Stone is not funny, and neither are his vargrant trailer rats - they nearly finished cave diving off for good, and in fact that was there intention - they failed even in that. We still have the football, we are still scoring.
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