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Could somebody forward this to the rebreather list ( I have been banned ). It appears that the Ginnie Springs crowd is propagating all kinds of rumors about the usdct, one of which is that they went "14,000 feet" in Wakulla. This is not true. We interviewd the divers who did the dives ( the Brits ) and based on what they saw and did not see, and where the radio becons showed up, they got about 9 grand out there - an impressive performance, and a very risky one considering the scooters they were riding, the lack of safety bottles adequate to get on on o/c, and the scooters they were towing which would not make it back out from that point, or even halfway back out with all that gear on . ( We use four 2 1/2 hours scooters each for these dives, giving us a strong chance of overcoming a lot of other problems, and 3 each safety bottles every 1200 feet, three times what we need to get out on open circuit in there ( we get over 3000 feet per stage on o/c) - these guys do not approach that kind of breathing rate, and they had far less bottles). The Brits were lucky enough to get the best conditions ever recorded at Wakulla Springs for these dives, although in getting their gear out they had the more usual bad conditions. The 9,000 foot dive took them 4 1/2 hours. By way of comparison, we put that line in, and 2,000 feet more, in two dives on open circuit, in 155 minutes. Sankey, Brent and I did the setup and laid the first part, JJ, Brent and I did the second dive, adding nearly 4,000 feet. That was to the line that Gavin and I put in on o/c on a tripple seven years ago. The former was a seven stage dive. The other 25,000 feet of cave that lies beyond that point ( the rebreather zone we call it), which is cut off of our map on our web site intentionally, is only known to the interested parties : the owners of the land, the Federal Government, and the State of Florida. The usct was supposed to stay under the Park property, so we felt no obligation to show them this map. I will say they would have had one hell of a time trying to find the coils had they ever made it out there, as the cave does some wacky things from that point on. The reason for the secrecy? We are negotiating land swaps. I honestly did not think these guys would get anywhere near this stuff, or we would have finished it all off last year. Right now it is marked like I-95 - you can't miss the leads. For some reason, they ignored all the jumps and just stuck with one line or T'd lines, which is not the long line at all, which they would have found out to their dismay had they gone a little farther. The cave appears to "wall out" past Cherokee. The way on is tricky. We will put the real map out once the deals are done. -- Send mail for the `techdiver' mailing list to `techdiver@aquanaut.com'. Send subscribe/unsubscribe requests to `techdiver-request@aquanaut.com'.
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