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The rebreather portion of our diving went smoothly this weekend. Rat, Rose, and Hagler front ran us with safety bottles and long-range scooters out a mile, and JJ and I picked those up, switched scooters and moved the safeties forward to 7500 feet where we explored new passages. We found three in an area between 6800 and 7500, one a spring. This dive was just a ride and look dive , making final preparations to begin normal exploration next time when our third man, Brent , is back ( he was on his honeymoon in Greece, but did do an oc dive this weekend ), and when we will have the mapper and the gun cams installed, and all of the safety bottles in place ( there are now 31 in the cave ). The nice thing about using a rebreather in this application is that we not only have twice the safety gas needed to get out, we have basicly an unlimited supply on us to look things over closely, like the giant room we were working this weekend. When a room is out 7500 feet at 300, you need time to look. This is also a tough explore since the walls are pitch black and they abosrb the light. We run high helium content to do this since the sensory deprivation of 300 feet with no walls , floor , or ceiling at times could be distubing, and not having had a Brett Gilliam "extended range deep air class", I have to do the next best thing ( do it the right way). Since the Halcyon effectively reduces our gas consumption at 300 feet to less than it would be on the surface, while still giving us full open circuit capability in every respect while having nothing to look at or fiddle with , we are able to investigate things in these caves that nobody else has been able to accomplish, and we can do it in any cave at any time with no external equipment, a big plus for investigating non-point-source polution, the subject of our grants. It took us 45 minutes to run 7,500 feet, and 100 minutes to turn the whole bottom time back to deco. I noticed I was getting one mile per 500 psi in an 80 at 300, and used 200 psi to inflate my wings. I used my deep deco gas to do all of those stops and my breaks, and still had enough in the bottle to do my travel and deep deco the next day on an open circuit dive in D Tunnel with a 30 minute bt, where Scott Landon, Chris Warner and I took water samples and visited the site of Exley's famous swim out. Same goes for my other gases: I did all of my deco for the 100 minute bt through the rebreather other than the oxygen, and had enough left over for a full oc dive the next morning. One 95 of O2 made the whole oxygen protion on oc. When we disassembled the equipment at home, the scrubber still had dust in it, and the machine needed no cleaning or drying. I saved the material from the scrubber for ocean diving, since I was only on the rb for seven hours. The combined scooter power that JJ and I had on us was the equivalent of 400 minutes of time, or between 60,000, and 80,000 feet of distance, significantly greater than the distances we need to travel to get the job done. Since we do not care about bottom time or deco, since we are way out on the flat portion of the deco curve, and have more than enought gas in the water to do the whole thing, deco and all, on open circuit, and have done enough of these bottom times to know what works, we can do the job thouroughly out there and collect some real data. This exploration series has been a great learning experience, and we are now ready to proceed with exploring not only Wakulla, but Leon Sinks, the really difficult cave, and put the whole picture of the interaction between these caves, the surrounding land, and the Bay into perspective. The Halcyon has proven to be an incredible tool for this job, a perfect application with no excuses, only results. We also ran 28 gas dives this weekend ( up to the point where I came home, there were more scheduled) without a single misstep, flaw, problem, or hitch, and not one tank of air was used for anything, not deco, not travel, not anything. We have pictures to put up on the webb site which will demonstrate the committment of the Woodville Karst Plain Project to exploration, equipment, techniques, and doing it right safely and effectively. Everyone else can describe their own dives. These guys are now so proficient that we can run huge interactive dives without any discussion of how it will proceed, the final victory for doing it right and eliminating personal preference in a high-tech military style operation. The fact is we have more fun than anyone out there, get more done, and we have only good things to report, no horror stories and no excuses, and we actully show up and do it, and we have done the preparation that is necessary. I saw the US National Swim Team coach this morning at the Hall of Fame, and he asked what kind of in-water times we were running, and what my dive buddies did to stay in shape for this - I told him they do what I do or equivalent, and he said, "there is no subsitute for the magic of aerobic conditioning", asnd that means that there is no electronic magic carpet that will let you do what we do. The only thing that works is showing up every day , thinking it all through, and doing it all right. -- Send mail for the `techdiver' mailing list to `techdiver@aquanaut.com'. Send subscribe/unsubscribe requests to `techdiver-request@aquanaut.com'.
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