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What area are you looking for info on? We are always glad to discuss this in detail. Is it the cave part or the diving part, or both? I can tell you in general that we seem to have hit upon some pretty good ways to get it done without incident, lately. Hopefullly this is our fault and not just our good luck. Give me a place to start. In general, we have a very long cave sytem, the longest underwater in this country, and it has finally cleared to where we can dive other than the spring portions, where we have been practicing for the last two years, although this is some really great diving, and we have found some very long deep stuff. The group has been at it for several more, back when the whole thing was clear. As it first cleared, we were able to connect to another system that had eluded us due to extreme distances between the two, and bad vis. We got that, and then we extended the bottom of the system back up to the north by a few thousand feet from Wakulla's main conduit tunnel. Now we will go from the last sinkhole above that downstream , while working upstream Wakulla. Anytime the rains black it out, we go back to the spring stuff (we know the caves well enough to get through the bad stuff to the spring tunnels The problem in the downstream is the howling current and the bad vis, both of which will improve (they are deep , also, 285 on the ceiling). The upstream Wakulla presents a problem due to bad vis as well the further upstream we get, so it is hard to find the right way, so we are just trying every tunnel systematicly. At the same time, we will be working north from the new connection and between the two from new sinks we have found. We aso have several other new permitted sites coming on stram now that we will be woking in the same karst valley Our real claim to fame is aggressive teamwork and simplistic gear. All of our stuff is really quite simple, like the scooters, lights, rig, and techniques, and realies heavily on diver skill and training. We use multiple scooters, and carry many bottles quite efficiently. Nearly all of our divers can perform all of the dives, so we can send several layers of teams extreme distances without problem. This is a many as 18 diffeent people, quite an accomplishment at this level of diving (to have so many good ones). We are alsways trying to train more, and have a constant supply of great divers coming along, as well as scientists in grad school, who are anxious to work with us. This combintion gives us the longevity and continuity that the permit givers like to see, so we have obtained the most long term access ever achieved here in Florida - 5 year permits inthe National Forest, and open ended at the various parks . We have done thousands of man hours of extreme exposures without decompression incident, as well as repetitive exptreme exposures without problem. We have gone five years without a scooter failure in the caves (they have broken out of the water, however, or seals have leaked, but never failed). We haven't killed anybody in years, and realy our only screwup in that regard was letting people dive who wanted to but shouldn't have. Anything specific, let me know On Sat, 8 Jun 1996, john thornton <johnpt@jo*.de*.co*.uk*> wrote: >> >> >George >Nice to cross swords with you, its good to see a real fish that takes >bait. >On a slightly more serious note how about sending me some more detail of >what you are doing, some of us over here are curious for more info. > >Have you been georged today? >-- >john thornton > >
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