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This is a very long one, but one of my personal favorites, and one that has
been requested.  It is a two parter.  In this message, Sheck makes what may
sound like some questionable decisions, but stayed tuned to see how he
probably saved his buddies life.  Not only was Sheck as tough as Wolf pussy,
he was also extremely modest.  FB

"On Thanksgiving day�Exley and Deloch embarked on a triple stage push on D-
Tunnel�  As Exley later remarked, this was a true �Thanksgiving� dive for
more
than one reason.  Exley explains:

�I started back down (from looking at an alcove) and suddenly there was a
lound "thunk" as my batteries broke loose from the retaining mechanism and
shifted toward the scooter nose.  This made the DPV want to pitch forward.  I
tilted the scooter back and the batteries returned to their original position
and the scooter righted itself, but it still would not power up.  So I gave it
to Paul to take out while I finished up surveying what we had installed on
this dive.

�We were not very concerned at this point because we had turned the dive early
and had very large reserves of gas, plus there were additional stage bottles
in the cave.  When I finished the survey, Paul handed me the scooter.  I
mounted it and grabbed his T-bar for a tow after he insisted.  I wanted him to
motor out without me while I just swam along behind.  However, he insisted, so
I just went ahead and got on it.  We motored out successfully to Room #3, then
the compass on my right wrist was sucked into the prop of his scooter.  This,
in turn, caused the bungy cord around it to jam the scooter prop and pin my
right wrist.  I cut it loose with my forearm knife, inadvertently dropping the
compass and knife, and finally cut enough of the bungy away to free the prop.
However, uncertain about his props sea-worthiness, I elected to leave my
scooter and come back to get it on a later dive.  Paul towed me back to our
emergency stage bottles at 1500 feet.  I had sufficient gas in my tanks at
this point and asked Paul to leave and go motor on out while I swam out.  The
heavy drag of my three stages and my Viking suit made exertion necessary to
make any progress.  On a high PO2 for over an hour it was difficult and my
breathing was inefficient.  My final stage bottle, for which I had borrowed a
stage that morning, still indiacted 1500 psi when I got to Grand Junction, but
I was out of gas in that particular tank.  I picked up one of the two
emergency depot bottles at Grand Junction,  but the regulator was bad.  The
other one breathed hard, but I was able to get some gas out of it and
exchanged it for one of my empties.  Given the additional exertion required to
swim, I was again short on air by the time I reached the the three 80�s at the
Grand Canyon depot.  At this point, I set my survey slate down, and grabbed
one of these bottles while dumping two of my 80�s.  My primary light went out
just before this so I switched on my 50 watt secondary.  This complete, I met
up with Paul at the entrance.  Our bottom time had been 77 minutes, and we
still had 9 hours 22 minutes before we could surface.� "

Stone, W. C., The Wakulla Springs Project, pg. 128-129, The U.S. Deep Caving
Team, Gaithersburg, MD, 1989

Next time, post dive analysis. FB

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