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WKPP - 18+ GRAND AGAIN Apr 1,2000 was our ( JJ and my ) April fool's day , or so it seemed to Surface Manager Dawn Kernagis when I answered her last question, "how long is your bottom time going to be?" with "Six to seven hours". The plan looked different: what we were doing is having an open circuit team set up another open circuit team which would then leave a scooter each for me and Jarrod at 4500 feet, and an open circuit team that would leave a scooter each for John Rose, Chris Werner and Ted Cole at 3500 feet. Werner's team would then leave 9 safeties and a scooter each for me and JJ at 9,000 feet, while JJ and I would go in on three scooters and deposit safeties at 7500 and 9,000 behind this team and then move the others forward in 12-15 minute increments out to 14,000 feet, where we wold begin exploring a passage we had found in 1998. I told Dawn, "If we start adding at 14K, we will end up with the same kind of dive as last time ( which was 18k). Not wanting to alarm anyone, Jarrod and I had not discussed this with anyone, and only discussed it with each other when we both burst out laughing as we saw each other for the first time that day. We both knew. I had been driving along, talking to different members of the team on their cell phones as I always do before the dives, and was talking to Pina who was looking for Jarrod's phone number and I got out my calculator by accident. That got me thinking about scooter burn times, so I added up our fire power. We had would be leaving 9,000 with three 2 ½ hour scooters. I told her I'd call her back and did not give her the number so I could call first. Out of range. But later, he told me he was doing exactly the same thing. Everything went fast. We were making great time out to 6500, the exact time it had taken to put that line in on open circuit back in 1992. We picked up the bottles there and moved them forward. At 7,000 feet, we saw where Stone's Brits had tied the line back together where I had broken it on our last 18K dive in 1998. I started laughing. The knot was a mess. I was thinking, " at least the ungrateful bastards could have put the line back up on the wall, but at least they were not weenies like the rest of that team who cried to the Park Manager that we had "sabotaged" them. All they had to do is read my story and know how the line broke. The vis was so so, after having been brilliant in A and K Tunnels. O was dark. We dropped the other safety and then at 8,000 we passed the other team coming out, and I high fived Werner on the way by. Only in the WKPP do you pass teams 8 G's back at 290 and think it is normal. At 8+ I saw the lead we had sent Werner's team to hit. I had told them the wrong place. My fist reaction was to yell in the reg at JJ, "where is the T?", and I stopped to switch drive bottles on my rebreather, dropping the first one at 1/2 plus 200, like that makes any difference. I had talked to Rick Stanton on the phone, and he did not remember seeing the T . That made me think it had come undone, since I passed a huge passage ( an alcove now that I remember it) with no line. We do not do much with line arrows way back, we go by knowing the survey. JJ and I picked up six of the safeties when we finally hit the T, and started forward. We were 90 minutes into the dive, still making good time. There was a reflective usdct buoy there and we were both curious as to how far Stanton had gotten. I laughed out loud when I saw another reflector off on the next T where we had added a bunch of line that looped back on itself after going all over the place back to the north. I was glad I had not put either of those T's on the map, and equally glad when we passed their last marker a couple of minutes later - just shy of our open circuit best, and just shy of all of the good leads. 90 days of line following and they deserved every minute of their failure. We deposited the safeties as we went and checked the leads we had marked in '98. One , near 13,000 feet, was amazing. All along we were just cruising, relaxed and feeling our gear. Everything was perfect, but as I saw my compass needle swing West, the adrenaline started pumping - we were approaching the 14,000 foot T Room. On the surface we had agreed, "Let's just see how we feel and how we are doing when we get to the T". As I saw the needle swing and saw the walls disappear and the rock began to look familiar, and we passed above the T on the floor and both "ok'd" it with a circle of our HID lights, and banked into the turn towards 18 grand, it reminded me of the time I came across a car fire on Florida's Turnpike: I was the first car to get to the roadblock, and a Trooper stepped out into the highway and stopped me. He said it would be a few minutes. I counted fifteen Highway Patrol cars on the other side. I looked at my toll ticket - 35 miles to the next exit. A few minutes later he let me through. 35 miles with no cars and no cops. I went through all six gears with the hammer down and held it that way at 170 mph for 35 miles of pure adrenaline , feeling the car slide on dry pavement at each little turn in the highway , windows down , engine screaming and the road looking like a sidewalk in front of me. I was getting that same feeling now. At 17 K we dropped some bottles, and switched and dropped our third scooter, and went to our fourth with our fifth still in tow. I noticed the good syphoning flow - nothing to be alarmed about, I told myself, but I had to swim back to my bottles - just practice for Turner Sink. At 18K, however, the flow was gone and the water, already dark for the last 3,000 feet had really gotten dark. I ducked the roof a couple of ties at the last second and was wondering what a catastrophic gas loss at 18 K would be like in the fire drill category - like a long day . I recognized the depth changes as we approached the end, and saw my line arrow bunch hanging from the last tie off, with the note we had left ourselves, which says "NUTS"... We tied in and started adding line, immediately breaking our own record. The problem became that we could not tell where to go in the dark water, so after a little while we tied it off and cut it, and then moved back along the line with me holding while JJ scootered the walls checking for a better passage. The one we were in was not flowing suddenly. The problem was now that when JJ got more than 30 feet from me , I could barely see his HID light. We got out the wetnotes and had a conversation. JJ said, "Do you want to go get our bottles and scooters and check the leads and work our way out?". "Yes". I was thinking that while everything was perfect now, it might not stay the way if we stayed in the back groping in the bad vis. We had 13 hour lights, an extra 250 minutes of scooter burn time over what we needed to get out, we had gas everywhere, the scrubbers were fine, and we were warm, but we have done this before. To be continued.
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