Reinhard may have some, but you can see similar pictures on either the
WKPP.org or GUE.com web sites. JJ and I do not use the double rebreather,
but we do carry a lot of things with us, like five scooters each , safeties,
and drive bottles. While we stage these throughout the cave and we do have
teams that front run us out to quite a distance, we bring all of that gear
back to within a mile and then a clean up team goes and gets that. For a
about an hour of the dives, JJ and I are carrying five scooters, four
bottles, and all the reels and peripheral tools. Keep in mind that JJ and I
also video the exploration and survey portion of each dive as well. You can
see clips from those videos taken some 19,000 feet into the cave on the GUE
site. Reinhard and Michael are training up a full team to do setups like we
do here, and of course Michael Waldbrenner and Reinhard Buchally dive with
the WKPP and maintain a full complement of RB's , Gavins, and so forth here
in the States and fly over for the dives. In fact the last time Pina and I
dove Wakulla we dove with these two guys.

With the new RB 80, JJ and I have picked up some 50 feet per minute of speed
over the old unit, and we can fit anyplace that a set of doubles will go. We
are running 13 hours worth of HID light plus video lights for an hour, 12.5
hours of scooter power, and the equivalent of 7,000 cubic feet of gas and
netting out about 150 feet per minute including all of our staging stops.

One massive advantage that JJ and I have now with this new unit is the
continuing fact that we have already developed and proven decompression
techniques that allow us to get out of any bottom time at 300 feet in less
than 9 hours of deco, so it makes no difference whether it is 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
or whatever number of hours, and with the new speed, we can do much greater
distances in the same times it took us to do the 18 and 19 thousand foot
dives, which we will need since Leon Sinks is a siphon and there are no
known sinkholes between Turner and Wakulla. That distance will be a minimum
of 50,000 feet, and just to get to where we are in Wakulla from Turner going
downstream is at least an additional 24,000 feet if the caves run in
straight lines. This is why we needed the new RB 80, the missing link in our
program.

Can you imagine trying what we do with an electronic rebreather, other than
bulletproof scooters, and anything but the kind of lights we use? Put that
one in your deco program. We are normally so far into these systems that
scootering out full speed with everything going perfectly takes as long as
driving from Ft Lauderdale to Orlando. Think about how you would handle
serious problems, or any problem, with three hours to go to get to the door
even with everything just right. I can tell you about some times we did it
the hard way with everything going wrong, but even perfect is beyond the
imagination.

What Buchally and Waldbrenner did is the same thing - it is called having
your shit together and executing. JJ and I were hoping that these two guys
would break our record with that last dive to get us motivated . While we
sorely miss Bill Stone, he was not really any competition. All he did was
get JJ and I to make it ridiculous for the fun of it. With our own guys
doing it, the concept changes and we start wondering what really can be done
with these tools and this team of divers, and we are certainly going to find
out.

Let me also point out that while we have a lot of good divers, and there are
probably good divers everywhere ( or at least people who could be turned
into good divers if they were around the right crowd ), most people who are
good enough to do this stuff are good enough to set for themselves the limit
of what they like doing. The neat thing about WKPP is we have the best guys,
and they all are doing exactly what they want to do.

-----Original Message-----
From: David M. Burnworth [mailto:xlh883@ea*.ne*]
Sent: Saturday, August 18, 2001 5:28 PM
To: Techdiver@Aquanaut. Com
Subject: Re: New European Record at Doux de Coly by WKPP divers


Are there any pics out on the net of people with double rebreathers and
bailout bottles?  I am just curious how a person looks and deals with all
that gear.

D. Burnworth

> same burn time. Reinhard was using double rebreathers and carrying all of
> his bail out bottles the whole way.
>
>


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