Panhandle Springs and a Sink 7-23 & 7-24-9 Dive Reports

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SuPrBuGmAn

Contributor
Messages
12,436
Reaction score
297
Location
Tallahassee, FL
# of dives
500 - 999
After a pretty good dive on the Paddlewheeler in Gulf Shores, I got back home and immediately started packing up my car with the capable Miss Jellyfish, a bunch of cave diving gear, an overnight bag and sleeping bag. I was able to scarf down a few cheesesticks before cmufieldhockey showed up. She left her car at my house and we took my wagon, since it can hold the boat and all the cave gear we'd be carrying. After a stop at the shopping mart to pick up breakfast for the next couple days(powdered donuts and apples!) and a stop by PensacolaNewbie's place to pick up another lifejacket, we headed back to cmu's place for the night. She's moving, so I helped her finish cleaning the rest of her place until about 1AM. The alarms at 5AM sucked, but we packed up the cmu's cave gear into the car and headed out. The trip out East went by quickly and we were in Marianna before too long.

Spring 7-23-9

We headed over to a boat launch I hadn't used previously, unloaded the boat and set it up without holding anyone else up. After loading the cave gear, we headed upriver. The sun was out and beating down hard, but once we were moving, the breeze kept us cool. The river was quite nice and we saw lots of wildlife along the way. All sorts of herons and egrets, even an owl. Saw a few hawks as well. Turtles sunning themselves on logs plunged back into the water before our boats wake knocked them over. We also passed up a 5 story mega-treehouse, complete with a suspension bridge over to the 2nd story balcony of the "real" house. The only thing slowing us down were the occassional set of shoals that had to be negotiated. We passed a large run and headed up it to investigate, it was clear, but not cool enough to be coming from a spring anywhere close. There was also far too much water being issued to be coming from the small spring we were looking for, so we turned back and headed back to the river. Again, heading upriver, we quickly made our way to our intended spring run. It was narrow, but plenty large enough for the Miss Jellyfish. The water was cold and I knew this was our run. After a few hundred feet, we were staring down at a crystal clear basin with a limestone fissure crack heading into the depths. There was a slight boil on the surface. We tied up to a tree root and geared up in the spring run.

I had brought a camera along, but stupidly didn't check the batteries. The camera didn't turn on... I've never been to this site and I need to get some photos of it, so I'll definately be making a point to get back before too long.

We slid down the fissure crack after a gear check and dive plan. There were lots of debri, bot natural, and not-so-natural, then a sidemount entrance, which we negotiated quickly. Something caught one of my safety spools, so I stowed it away quickly. We were in a small room, with line heading down another quick sidemount duckunder restriction. There was another vent in the room pushing out yellowish water, that was noticably colder. We went with the line and entered into a huge room with white limestone walls. There were some interesting formations and visibility was in the 50' range. Beautiful! We made our way up the line slowly, eventually coming into view of large mattes of bacteria covering the bottom. It looked like yellow/orange attic insulation, so very interesting. The dimensions of the passage were plenty large enough for us to stay off the bacterial mattes as well as the silt bottom. We eventually hit a "T", took a right and headed down some more passage. Another quick duckunder and more passage, more awesome formations and surreal cave. The another "T" where we hung left and down a bit of a pit and the passage got a bit lower, but still very easy to pass through cleanly. At this point we kept passing several fissure cracks, which shot out on both sides and above. It was awesome just looking up and around at the different features in the cracks. There were a few siltmounds with limestone duckunders, but we negotiated them fairly cleanly. Eventually, I hit my turn pressure(diving LP72s) and we started our exit. We were carefull enough through the low areas to never blow out the visibility. Not once did I have to get on the line through our exit. Its a great cave and I can't wait to get back to get a few photos of the basin as well as explore a bit further with some larger tanks. I had a max depth of 76' for a divetime lasting 78 minutes, including about 15 minutes of deco(entire dive on air). Had some victory donuts on return to the car.

Sinkhole(Stasia's Cave) 7-23-9

We hit up Popeyes for lunch and brought it over to Cave Adventurers to eat while our tanks were filled back up. There was one other diver there, so we got filled up pretty quickly but spent some time there BS'ing... its kinda manditory. We left eventually, heading West and found ourselves meandering down a crazy maze of dirt roads. It hadn't been too long since I was last at this spot, and only a week or two before that had cmufieldhockey scouted the site out. We zipped along and all of a sudden blasted out onto a paved road... Wrong turn somewhere, god knows there are no paved roads where we needed to be. We back tracked and saw where we neglected to turn off and corrected. We found ourselves onsite before too long with only one other pickup truck onsite, just a couple locals swimming, fishing, leaving pipes sitting out in the open :no: LOL. After walking a couple tanks to the water, we geared up and headed in ourselves(little over 5 hours of SI), enjoying not having to setup the boat for this dive. Cmufieldhockey took the lead and passed through the entry restriction with both her tanks intact. I knew better, and pushed one of my tanks out infront of me before pulling through into the cave. Once tied in, we started our way upstream against the torrent. At the break in the line I turned at last time, I tied in a gap and started to work my way against the current bottlenecking at a low-wide duckunder restriction. It took me a few minutes to negotiate it, not because of the dimensions, but because of having to work against the flow itself. Once through, there were lines running on both sides of the cave. Not knowing which line I needed to take, I ran my gap further in to where I could see one line ended and the other continueing on - I tied into the continuing line and we proceeded. We progressed a few hundred feet further until we reached a "T" that looked as if it were blowing in gale force winds. I was close to 1/3rds, so turned the dive and we got blasted downstream again. Reeling my gap back in was messy, lots of slack line, etc, but we got it cleaned up and continued our exit. The formations in this cave are breathtaking and you could find fossils in several places. We made our exit, both of us exitting with tanks in place this time. Back in OW, we explored the debri pile a bit further, but couldn't find any passable vents to the downstream section... I couldn't imagine a dive with that amount of flow siphoning INTO the cave though... talk about scary. I had hit a max depth of 80' for a dive lasting 51 minutes. Gonna bring LP95s next time and hope the extra weight helps offset some of the flow and atleast it'll give me more gas to fight with. Had victory donuts to celebrate.

We were tired before this dive, after this dive, we were completely spent! We headed over to cmufieldhockey's friends house in PC, where we'd crash for the night. Grabbed a shower and the three of us hit up a pizza joint for a great pizza and some cheesebread/pita things(they were good). I crashed early after finishing up my dive logs and slept hard.

Spring #2 7-24-9

We decided to sleep in late and 8AM came around and I felt much better, getting better than 9 hours of sleep. We left out fairly early and at more donuts and apples for breakfast. We hit the boatlaunch with a few other trailers onsite, but no boats being put in or taken out, so we were able to setup and load the Miss Jellyfish at our leisure. It was friggin hot again, but once on the water, the breeze offered some relief. It didn't take us long to make the short trip to our destination and the run offered clear water in contrast to the muddy river we started our trip on. The basin was beautiful, crystal clear and had a strong boil over the center.

We geared up in the run and headed in, cmufieldhockey in the lead. The flow here is strong and the pull-n-pull technique is necessary to progress. Still wasn't nearly as bad as our second dive on the previous day. We headed down to the sand restriction about 300' in and turned after taking a look at it. This was just a warmup dive for the day, so we zipped back on out. It was as always a fun dive with a max depth of 94' for a dive time of 28 minutes. Had some victory donuts.

Spring #3 7-24-9

We spent a portion of our nearly 3.5 hour SI at Vortex getting some air fills and heading down to yet another boat launch. Turns out one of the tanks didn't get filled, so we had to cut the dive plan down a bit to leave us with enough redundancy to make our dive safely. We were able to salvage the dive though. It was a super short run from the boat launch to the divesite and we geared up in chest high water. The Miss Jellyfish even planed out on the trip! The basin was filled with tannic water, but once we descended, it opened up to cool, clear spring water after only about 5' of depth. We could see the majority of the large limestone ledge that makes the predominant feature of the basin. The line was loose coming through the cave opening, so I tied it back up and cmufieldhockey led the dive on the way in. We zipped down the cavern and the low bedding plane angling down into a room with a silt bottom floor and a hazy halocline, there's more than one watersource entering this room, very interesting. We hit a "T" and looked on the right side just a bit to check out the vertabrae and ribs of an ancient dugong embedded in the wall. Once we finished up looking at the fossils, we turned back and took the left side of the "T", then a left at yet another "T", which led us into the main passage. This passage is low with a superfine red silt floor and a crumbly ceiling that percolates with our exhaust bubbles. Extreme bouyancy is needed to stay clean throughout this passage and we managed pretty damned well. A few hundred feet in, we came through a low duckunder restriction that opens into a nice size room thats actually big enough to swim around in freely. From there, the passage stayed big and we went another few hundred feet before cmu called the dive. For the most part, we just drifted out of the cave with the little bit of gentle flow that was present. This was the FIRST time I've exitted from this cave with any visibility! Once back in OW, we explored the ledge a bit and looked at some interesting features found throughout. I exitted with a max depth of 63' for a dive lasting 48 minutes. Victory donuts!

We hit up Dees on the way out and had another great meal. It was only around 5PM, so we were the only people in the restraunt. We were tired and our bellies full, so we started heading back West. Cmufieldhockey would still have another 3 hours to drive after she picked up her car at my place, which was still 2 hours away, so it was good to get on our way after an early dinner. The ride back was used up by talking about cave diving among other things, and exhausting the CDs I had available in the car. It was truly a great trip with some of the most challenging dives I've done yet! My only regret was not having a working camera along with me... but that just gives me a reason to hit these spots up again.
 
Good read Mat. Sounds like some interesting dives. Glad you and Stasia could get some dives in before she leaves us here in God's country. Sorry she will be moving to a foreign country!
 
She says she'll come down the next time we head further East to dive Jugg Hole sometime this Fall/Winter :) I'm sure she'll make trips down whenever she can.

Looking forward to our next little adventure on the 8th/9th Glen. Ben says P&G is gorgeous right now!
 
Sweet, P+G clear would be awesome. Our last trip made me want to work on getting some good video. With a little work with lighting, and taking my strobes off to lighten things up, we might be able to get some good video.




She says she'll come down the next time we head further East to dive Jugg Hole sometime this Fall/Winter :) I'm sure she'll make trips down whenever she can.

Looking forward to our next little adventure on the 8th/9th Glen. Ben says P&G is gorgeous right now!
 
LOL, I just sent you a PM about the same thing :D

I think its a great idea!
 
:worthless:

geez...

Had a blast!! Thanks for showing me all the cool places :)
 
AMAZING!!!! Pix are worth a million words but your Thousand or so words put me in the cave with you and that sounded like a trip back in time and one hell of a great way to spend a weekend!!! :)
 
:worthless:

geez...

Had a blast!! Thanks for showing me all the cool places :)

I forgot to mention the pair of aligators we saw on the way back from Spring #2, I always forget something!

AMAZING!!!! Pix are worth a million words but your Thousand or so words put me in the cave with you and that sounded like a trip back in time and one hell of a great way to spend a weekend!!! :)

Glad you enjoyed it!
 
:worthless:

geez...

Had a blast!! Thanks for showing me all the cool places :)

Look familiar? :D

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BTW, I'll give you guys a report on P&G tomorrow... :D:D:D
 
Insulation! :D

P&G is supposed to be awesome right now! :/ Looking forward to getting back out there soon.
 
https://www.shearwater.com/products/perdix-ai/

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