By Gregg Stanton and contributors

Gregg Stanton

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January 6, 2011

Gregg Stanton

Picket Mine study for NASA

After carrying extra cylinders down a steep slope to the water’s edge, we put our dry suits on, and help each other adjust our rebreathers to a comfortable fit.
With extra cylinders properly attached, and oxygen safety cylinder tied off at 20 feet, our powerful underwater lights lit brightly, and our safety line tied to the surface, we descended into a vertical dark shaft. At 70 feet we come upon a familiar weight used by body builders that has a line running horizontally into the wall of the sinkhole, the start of our cave dive. Visibility is not bad for this location at about 15 feet. We enter under the overhanging rock and into a landscape from a different world.
Recently I explored Picket Mine, now flooded and cold, located in Wisconsin, to find the walls covered in orange globular, colonial bacteria under study by NASA. It seems this species found in the mine resembles a fossil found on a meteor that was reported to have originated from Mars. Now, every time I enter our caves, I envision finding life forms either new to science or from another world.
I now see black encrustations on an otherwise white wall and recognize them as a goethite mineral deposits that are very fragile, beautiful and abundant at this Wakulla cave.
We reach a “T” in the permanent line indicating two different paths into the cave, one up stream and one down. We each leave a personal arrow with our name on it to be collected on the way out. If we are separated, we will know if the other got out OK by collecting them upon exiting.
The water quality improves as we swim, both in visibility and on occasion warmth! Pockets of warm water boil down from the ceiling suggesting the sink behind us is siphoning surface water from a nearby swamp today.
We proceed until we begin to find piles of rocks on the floor, breakdown from the ceiling where in years past, a drought may have loosened the roof until, without water to support it, a portion collapsed. Rising out of the debris are tiny white and equally blind amphipods swim vertically up in our way feeding on incoming organic material from the surface. They in turn become food for blind crayfish, which become food for the catfish we see at the edge of the cave passage.
All of this, mind you, done in complete darkness, by sensory capabilities we clearly do not possess.
We turn into the big room we seek today. We again leave arrows to show us the way back, then turn into a small hole to our left and slowly in single file, slip downward into a room that has a ceiling at about 50 feet and a floor in one end at 130 feet, and a diameter of three times that hight. We find a line running around the outer wall of large room and again set our arrows to mark our exit.
There is breakdown rocks in the middle of this room as well, better water clarity and the expected rising amphipods. But where are the crawfish?
Nearly at the end of the circumference I find the answer: dark blotches on the floor, with remnants of crawfish in the middle. Many have died leaving their exoskeletons are a reminder that they were not eaten.
Could this be cold surface water invading their warm world causing a shock to their frail physiology? Could surface pollution be the culprit? Upon certain conditions of high tide and low regional rain fall, the salt water invades caves like this one and kill fresh water creatures caught in deeper passages. More study is required.
But it’s time we returned to our world. So with heavy heart to lost life, we ascend to the upper passage and recovering our arrows in single file, swim back towards the surface.
I always look up and see the surface light with tree branches silhouetting a bright day, and pause to thank the many who in my past have made such a day possible.

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January 13, 2011

Gregg Stanton

I can see!
Well, that is what all my students say before the class. But during the class, they realize what they can see in the atmosphere (up here on dry land) is often very different from what they can see in the hydrosphere (underwater).
Sometimes they just learn how to accommodate the differences resulting in missed information. Those who require glasses on land will need lenses placed into their mask to improve their vision underwater as well.
Why such challenges?
Jacques Cousteau called the underwater environment the Silent World more because with underwater sound being vastly distorted, sight dominated his sensory input.
We are mostly a visual creature anyway. On land we make sure that we have good vision by using prescription glasses, a form of land mask. Such prescription lenses are even more important underwater.
Yes, we do have a sense of smell, taste, touch, and sound, but all of these senses are diminished, dramatically altered or just lost when we go underwater.
We must see clearly underwater to read gauges, aquatic animals and our buddy. Some mask lenses have bifocals to better see further away and close-up equally clear. Sight becomes a dominant requirement to enjoy the underwater adventure, even with its distortions. So what’s going on?
A few years ago, my daughter was diving in Peacock Springs. She told me that at one point during the dive there was a line arrow (a directional marker that we attach to a string that leads us out of the cave) floating in the center of the cave. She said she was stunned, that she couldn’t figure out how this piece of plastic was floating in the very center of the passage.
As she approached it, she realized that there was a cave line running through the marker that she could not see at a distance. This line was her only way back to the surface.
Even now, I have prescription lenses in my mask. As I get older, I have difficulty seeing my gauges to tell how much gas I have left to breathe. I now have bifocals in my mask, the lower to magnify my computer and gauges, and the upper lens to see around me.
Light entering the water from the atmosphere (sun, moon, bright surface lights) is either reflected (off the surface or off objects in the water), refracted (altered by the increased density of the water) and absorbed (different colors are lost more quickly than others). That’s a mouthful! What it means to the underwater adventurer is very practical.
Reflected light means dawn and dusk come respectively later and earlier underwater. For us, it just gets lighter underwater later in the morning and darker earlier in the afternoon. Aquatic creatures go to sleep earlier and wake up later if they are active during the day or the opposite if they are active during the night.
Refracted light means fish look bigger and closer than they really are when viewed underwater. The light reflected off fish underwater enter our mask and is altered because of the density difference between the water, the glass of the mask, the air in the mask, and the fluid of our eye. Sizing a fish to be sure it is of legal size is a challenge under these circumstances. A rule of thumb is the fish looks 25 percent larger and 33 percent closer than it really is.
Absorption of light means that the deeper we penetrate the water, the more the color in light is absorbed. Red goes first, orange next and yellow follows until we finally see no light at all.
The acronym ROYGBIV is often used to describe this color loss with distance from surface light. If you use a flashlight underwater, the true rich marine life colors jump out at you (and probably at the other reef residents as well). Color absorption is used by reef creatures to camouflage or hide themselves in broad daylight. Some masks have color filter lenses to compensate for this absorptive challenge.
The surprise to most folks is that the most important piece of diving equipment they will ever purchase is their mask.
That is why we have our largest wall dedicated to masks, including the prescription lenses so often overlooked.
“Now I can really see” is a typical comment after a student gets the right mask in place, and the undersea adventure gets exciting.
I can see!

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January 20, 2011

Joerg Hess

Historical meaning of Wakulla for diving

By Joerg Hess

Hi there – allow me to introduce myself. My name is Joerg (pronounced “York”) Hess. I met Gregg Stanton, former Director of FSUs Academic Diving Program and current owner of Wakulla Diving Center over a decade ago, through our common passion of diving. At that time, I had been diving all over Florida, mainly inland freshwater sites – all over Florida except the Wakulla area of course. Two things intrigued me about this unassuming gentleman: His extraordinary skill and knowledge under water and his historical knowledge and involvement in diving above the surface. Gregg invited me to participate in his quest to document our underwater resource, not just as drinking water, but as a cultural aspect of our county. Imagine the stories these dive sites can tell!
Going back to the main topic, I do not intent to bore you with details of underwater feats. What I found worth mentioning, back then as now, however is the historical meaning of the Wakulla area for diving, as well as an apparent lack of appreciation and knowledge of the same by its native inhabitants. I heard about Wakulla Springs and those exploring the area when I started diving in Germany many years ago. Familiar names to me were Wally Jenkins, Parker Turner, Bill Gavin and Sheck Exley as the early explorers, who defined a lot of the practices still in use today. The 1987 Wakulla Expedition, directed by Dr. Bill Stone and the U.S. Deep Caving Team, defined a shift in the paradigm of diving with wide consequences, its impact still felt today. Yet you will find few of their accomplishments in the local lore, almost as if erased intentionally. In fact, you have to travel far outside the county, to places such as the man-in-the-sea museum in Panama City, 2 hours to the West, or museum of diving in the keys to learn more about the history of Wakulla County diving. If you know where to look, however, you can still encounter reminders of this very living history all over Wakulla County, including some of the players of the time – Gregg being just one of them. This history dates back many decades, and has many a story to tell about the events happening in one spring or another. Unfortunately, this part of history, good and bad, sad and funny, is fading away as those that made it pass away. We need to recapture this history and keep it alive in our community. Would it not be great if you could walk the spring trails while learning about the accomplishments, tragedy and humour associated with each site, from a time when they were still open to the diving public?
John Spicer, a bit of a historian, likes to introduce our local Wakulla County Dive Club (WCDC) meetings with the story that he is working on a book describing the 400 dive sites you cannot use in Wakulla County. Indeed, Wakulla Springs serves as a beacon, but is overshadowed by many smaller dive sites, that the WCDC is dedicated to locate, open and explore. In future columns, John Spicer and I will bring you stories about many of our local windows into the Karst (springs, sinks, siphons) as we ourselves dig them up from those still alive to tell them. If you have a favourite story, an unexplored sink hole, or know someone with knowledge of our freshwater aquatic heritage, please let John and me know by contacting us at WakullaCaveHistory@hotmail.com. This will be fun!
Yours is a fantastic cultural resource, right below your front door, which is considered by many as a world heritage. I hope you appreciate it for what it is, and share it with the rest of the world – I can tell you that they are eager to visit, explore and experience it!

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January 27, 2011

Breathe!
Just like the water we drink, we take the gas that we breathe for granted.
On land, to do so is expected since the gas we breathe called air is somewhat universal. It has roughly 21 percent oxygen (the good stuff we desperately need to live) and 78 percent of a carrier gas called nitrogen that, for the most part, we do not use.
OK, for those deep in chemistry, what we breathe also has trace elements – including carbon dioxide.
But this mixed gas changes the moment we submerge since water is 800 times as dense as air.
Our gases are very compressible, which means we find the increased pressure of the water on our gas spaces in the body results in more molecules contained in the same space.
Fortunately, this condition is predictable, allowing us to compute the dose of any gas in any mixture we choose to breathe underwater, including air.
Let’s take air to 33 feet in ocean water where we find the pressure has doubled that of air at the surface (we call this surface pressure an atmosphere, and at 33 feet, two atmospheres).
Our body is now exposed to twice as much oxygen and twice as much nitrogen as it was at the surface, even if we held our breath from the surface and swam down.
Our body consumes the extra oxygen with relish. The inert nitrogen however is accumulated in the body’s tissues and must be vented slowly out after the dive.
Of course, recreational divers descend much deeper than 33 feet and suffer no ill effects provided they follow care safe practice procedures taught in all basic scuba certification courses.
Thirty years ago I played a small part of a diving paradigm shift. We reasoned that if the nitrogen was inert and detrimental to our diving, could we find a way to reduce the amount of nitrogen in our divers breathing mixture.
Thirty years earlier, the commercial diving community was already doing this using a proprietary gas.
Dr. Morgan Wells of NOAA had published dive tables using a different gas mixture for scientific diving. But the recreational community rejected the idea as too dangerous.
I worked with National Association of Underwater Instructors’ education board members about the facts, not myths, of a gas we called Nitrox, ultimately convincing them to be one of the first to adopt a safe practice of it in our recreational community.
Nitrox is any mix of two gases, one being oxygen and one being nitrogen.
Today, Nitrox blends of 32 percent (as opposed to 21 percent, which is air) are as common as air blends in recreational diving.
And the reason is simple: by increasing the oxygen content (which the body will consume within safe operational depths) you reduce the amount of nitrogen (which then reduces the decompression time and stress we experience upon ascent).
More simply put, we feel better after a recreational dive. Required training beyond basic scuba certification is one day, the cost over air for a 32 percent blend is two cents per cubic foot.
Dr. Wells put it best when he said: “Mother Nature provided the planet earth with a Nitrox atmosphere known as air. She never said that air was the best breathing medium for divers. Here, as in many other fields of endeavor, human beings have used their knowledge of natural laws to go one step beyond what nature has provided for them.”

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February 3, 2011

Karst.
This Czechoslovakian word describes our underland environment as soluble, water-filled limestone with flowing underground passages and windows to the surface covered by a shallow sand veneer. These Karst windows are formed when the water table drops below the roof of submerged cave passage, losing its supportive nature, resulting in a roof collapse.
This shifts the overburden all the way to the surface. Considering that our land is normally flat around here, those frequent depressions seen everywhere are often the result of cave collapse that just did not drop far enough to expose the ground water level.
You can find examples of every type of Karst feature in Wakulla County. The most prominent are the Karst windows, of which we have many types. The obvious one everyone knows is a sinkhole, where water neither flows in nor out at the surface.
Water often runs through the basement of the sinkhole along the original passage that existed before the collapse, and causes the water to be of constant warm temperature, and to turn a deep blue when clear.
If the water passage is blocked, then the water remains opaque and cooler, often shifting with the seasons. The slope on the sinkhole walls can be used to get a rough idea of its age.
Big Dismal Sink in the Leon Sinks Park (just north of Wakulla County) collapsed in recorded history, and has deep vertical walls to the ground water level. Little Dismal Sink on the other hand has more erosion and less slope to the walls suggesting it is older.
A spring is a Karst window with water running out on the ground. Major springs like Wakulla Springs are the headwaters of rivers like the Wakulla River. Actually, there is an underground river headed south to the Gulf of Mexico, very near the above ground component of the Wakulla River.
This also explains when the flow rates of the Wakulla Springs vary widely depending upon tide, rainfall and the level of the area ground water.
A siphon, which is less understood, is a Karst window that swallows water back underground. Yes, we have many of those, too, in Wakulla County, such as Promise, Lower River and Lower Cheryl. In most cases the water flow is gentle and of little concern to divers, otherwise they might have difficulty returning to the surface after a dive. Siphons are often fed by a swale, or short surface river run between a spring and a siphon.
We have very few dry caves in our county. Gopher Sump in the Leon Sinks area has an air space over a water passage which is called a sump.
And last but not least we have blue holes – a term used to describe marine submerged sinkholes. A past student of mine took DOT coastal aerial photos and identified several blue holes right up against our shore, some known like the many in Spring Creek and some not known like Goose Bay.
Blue holes have a marine component (marine organisms) and tidal pulsing making them a spring at one phase of the cycle and a siphon at another. Imagine starting your dive on a peaceful spring flow expecting to be pushed out when you decide to go back to the opening, only to find the current has changed direction and now is pushing against your retreat! Ray Blue Hole off our coast has that reputation.
Visit Leon Sinks National Forest exhibits and trail and see the many Karst features that bless our Wakulla County.

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February 10, 2011

Taking better care of our diving cylinders.

People who dive using compressed gas cylinders are always concerned about dropping one since the explosive force of a ruptured cylinder can derail a diesel locomotive, or knock a small building down.
Add the technical diver’s use of 100 percent compressed oxygen and the risk is even greater. Diving in corrosive environments like salt water, bouncing around in small boats on the way to a dive site, and heat exposure all add to the challenges a cylinder must endure.
When a cylinder ruptures, everyone is affected. We must take better care of our diving cylinders.
But statistics tell us the real danger in a cylinders life is at the air fill station. Cylinders may suddenly lose their pressure when a safety burst disk pops due to corrosion, over-filling or heat expanding the contents, but they do not explode in the field like you saw in the movie “Jaws.” They do explode as they are filled due the heat of compression and increasing pressure working flaws in the metal of the cylinder.
Every year we hear about 11 cylinder ruptures reported to the Department of Transportation. The graphic pictures that come with these reports are very sobering.
For this reason, a fill station visually inspects every cylinder prior to filling, and requires a detailed annually inspection to a national standard. The DOT requires every compressed gas cylinder be tested every five years where the cylinder is over-pressured for integrity.
Over-pressured cylinders may show metal fatigue that will condemn them for further use. Customers pay a nominal fee for these detailed inspections. Cylinder owners are encouraged to inspect these results and discuss best safe practices with qualified staff.
Our community recognizes that the person who uses a compressed gas cylinder is as vital to safe cylinder performance as is the fill station, so we all share in the expense of the effort.
Wakulla Diving Center, for example, now offers DOT cylinder testing and a one-cent per cubic foot reduction in the cost of diver’s purchased breathing gas for those customers who have WDC’s current (within one year) inspection decal affixed to their cylinder.
Our diving community is most anxious about safely filling cylinders, in that a rupture will destroy their support facility and severely hurt anyone standing nearby.
Containment devices and customer access policies such as a drive-through fill-station, will reduce public exposure to this hazardous area.
We should all be committed to a safe diving environment.

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February 17, 2011

“Bone crushing depths”

By Joerg Hess

Mike Nelson, Cousteau and other aquatic TV heroes made death-defying swims to bone crushing depths to return with glorious stories of bravery and adventure.
Back then, our safe depths were very shallow, our breathing gas and cylinder size, very limiting. Today, we have a better understanding of depth and have many more alternatives for safe depth exposure.
The depth itself however is not felt by the diver. Our body tissues are mostly made of water, and the pressure is passed right through us. Cavities such as sinuses are simply vented, thus equalising the pressure.
But unlike whales and seals, humans are susceptible to the narcotic effect of nitrogen, a major component of our earth’s atmosphere.
It is generally accepted that the limit for safe diving is at between 100 and 130 feet depth.
The concern is not nitrogen’s detrimental effect to our health below that limit, but merely our impaired ability to think in response to situations requiring our attention.
In 1986 a small band of cave divers working with Dr. Bill Hamilton (diving physiologist) applied helium to air to create what is today known as trimix, and began exploring the caves of Wakulla County.
That same year, FSU, under Prof. Gregg Stanton, and in concert with the International Association of Technical and Nitrox Divers (IANTD) taught Trimix diving to a Biology 530 class to a depth of 200 FSW.
In 1987, a major project under Dr. Bill Stone used this breathing gas mix for deep diving. This project is also referred to as the “big bang” in technical diving, as it demonstrated the safe use of helium-rich gas mixtures on a large scale to reduce or remove narcosis.
Helium mixtures have been used in military and commercial surface-supplied diving prior to that date. This type of diving however required extensive surface support, which is not available in the scientific or recreational community. This impressive feat was performed right here in Wakulla County. More details about the project can be found at www.usdct.org/wakulla87.php.
Since then, helium as breathing gas has seen more widespread use. Instead of the 100-foot depth limit as mentioned in the beginning, the diving community now adheres to a 100-foot narcosis limit. To reduce the narcosis you add enough helium into the breathing mixture so that the narcosis level throughout the dive is less than that of a 100-foot dive breathing air.
The perception and effect of absolute depth has lost its meaning, and is replaced by gas volume requirement, decompression obligation and exposure time.
What does stay, for some reason, is the public notion of “bone crushing depths” at Wakulla. Fifteen years ago, a scuba dive to 300 feet was so spectacular, that it would be published in magazines, and presented at meetings. Today, with the aid of better knowledge and developed technology, such a dive will not draw curiosity in the diving community, and is achievable to a novice diver within a year, should he or she be determined to pursue it.
Alongside the expansion in depth limits comes the extension of dive times. The average underwater time for a novice diver is around 30 minutes. Similar to the increase in depth capabilities, the dive duration for a technical diver has extended from two hours to over six hours with similar logistical effort.
Four-hour dives have become everyday excursions. Powerful yet energy-efficient LED lights, and Li-Ion batteries reduce weight and bulk.
Modern dive suits, like dry suits with advanced under-liners that lead sweat and water away from the skin, make such long exposures very possible, and even enjoyable.

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February 24, 2011

A crime scene under water.
As I descended into Cherokee Sink years ago, I passed through a milky and warm surface level, the result of high nutrients from local area run-off.
We were training for an Antarctic under-ice research project scheduled for later in the year. I was on an umbilical hose that sent compressed air and voice communications down to me. The water quality suddenly improved at 25 feet and there in front of me unfolded – a new BMW resting on its roof, with new tires and all.
After a quick and heart-stopping search of the interior for possible bodies, I recorded the licence number and model of the car, then return to the surface.
What I did not realized then was that this dive began my work on a concept later called Underwater Crime Scene Investigations (UCSI).
For more than two decades I taught a multidisciplinary class at FSU called Applications of Diving to Research. Since I had students in biology, anthropology, engineering, geology and criminology (just to name a few), the projects they came up with for study were very exciting.
One criminology student hypothesized that every sink hole was a crime scene. He based his idea on comments made by Wally Jenkins, often a speaker to my class, that in the early days of diving in Wakulla County, you could not get clear access to the caves because of the debris dumped in over the years.
The idea quickly became known as “out-of-sight, out-of-mind” and was expanded to include trash dumping and hiding evidence of crime.
Two thousand feet back in Jackson Blue Springs cave in Marianna is a trash pile from which a 1940s vintage stop light was retrieved and set upon a rock. The sink hole has long ago filled in, but the bottles and other debris remain in the Trash Room.
So the criminology project began the survey of randomly selected Wakulla County sinks for evidence of crime. The first sink hole held a safe, recently stolen from a store in Tallahassee.
We stopped the survey and called the police. The second site had a gun and the third a car.
After three sites, all with confirmed crime scene evidence, the student felt he proved his point and submitted his documentation for an excellent grade in the class.
Law enforcement could not collect forensic data that could be used in any of the cases. It was believed back then that, once in the water, evidence lost its value.
Of course the biology and anthropology students knew otherwise. We now know fingerprints and body fluids can be extracted from guns and clothing after submersion.
Years later, after numerous other submerged cases that lost data because it was underwater, I proposed developing a set of protocols to be used by detectives to collect evidence underwater.
Dr. Tom Kelley and I were awarded a large federal grant, and hired diving faculty from anthropology, engineering, criminology, biology, education and forensics, to study the problem, write the protocols and teach the police to function as a research team once search and rescue efforts were over.
One year later, we successfully demonstrated our protocols in Niceville at a staged terrorist attack using the Okaloosa Police Department Underwater Team as investigators.
And since then, we wrote the manual, published through Best Publishing on Underwater Crime Scene Investigations.
Next time you dump something into a sink-hole, think what could happen upon its recovery.

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March 3, 2011

New generation of divers!

By Joerg Hess

A large, silent form slides through the water absent of any bubbles. Is it the Creature from the Dark Lagoon, a manatee, a shark?
No, a new generation of divers!
In the previous weeks, we covered the basics of breathing a gas under water. Gregg explained the advantage of adding oxygen to acquire a mix called nitrox.
In my last column, I explained the narcotic effect of nitrogen, and that narcosis can be avoided by replacing nitrogen with helium. The resulting mixture, referred to as trimix, safely allows for extended depth ranges of well beyond 300 feet.
All of these concepts however have one thing in common: These gases, whether air, nitrox or trimix, are usually breathed by inhaling through a regulator, and exhaling bubbles into the water. This is called “Open Circuit,” since the gas travels in one direction, from the tank, through the regulator and diver’s lung, then lost into the surrounding water environment.
This concept is most famously credited to Jacques Cousteau, who, together with Emil Gagnan in 1942, redesigned a car regulator to the demand regulator similar to the ones still in use today.
Why do we actually have to breathe? This may sound like a rather basic question, and the answer is simple: We metabolise or consume oxygen, so we inhale it.
We produce carbon dioxide from that metabolism, which we need to exhale.
However, we only consume a little portion of the oxygen we inhale, the majority is exhaled again without ever being used.
When all you have is a dwindling gas supply such as a small scuba tank, this is a rather wasteful exercise. It may surprise our readers that a way to re-cycling the exhaled oxygen was invented long before Cousteau ever set his eyes on the underwater world. As early as 1772, attempts were made to re-use the exhausted air.
Unfortunately, these early trials were limited due to a lack of understanding. The first successful dive on an oxygen recycling device was made by Henry Fleuss in 1876. He had applied previously invented Closed-Circuit Rebreather (CCR) technology to mine rescue and then to underwater salvage.
Oxygen together with carbon dioxide was exhaled into a bag containing the caustic potash to remove the CO2, the purified oxygen could then be inhaled again. Over time, the oxygen volume diminished, and was replenished from an oxygen tank. No bubbles were exhaled into the water, and no oxygen was wasted.
This really simple concept of a rebreather is still in use today, albeit more refined.
The pure oxygen rebreather is limited to a depth of less than 20 feet for safety reasons. Astronaughts have suits that contain an oxygen rebreather when they go on space walks. If however, a dive is to be made deeper than 20 feet, the oxygen must be diluted using nitrogen, or helium. These mixes then allow the same depth ranges as the standard open circuit gases, in excess of 300 feet, but using smaller tanks. The oxygen consumed by the diver needs to be replenished on a rebreather.
Sensors are used to measure the oxygen in the breathing mix, then pure oxygen is added when needed.
Welcome to the new generation of bubble-less diving.

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March 10, 2011

Concern regarding diving injuries.

So much concern has been expressed regarding diving injuries that one might think aquanauts represent a high risk group.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Bone crushing depth, Decompression Sickness and ruptured lungs are rare in our diving community, in large part because divers are well trained and use reliable equipment.
The reason I write of this topic today is because I am suffering from one of the most common problems in diving right now. I have an ear infection.
Yes, the same problem that affects many of you terrestrial folks is a constant concern to divers. And it hurts just as much.
To be specific, the infection I speak of is in the outer ear canal, that part of the ear that is flooded with water during every dive.
Saltwater diving does not provide near the opportunity for the microbes to infect because the salts desiccate the canal once drained.
I just finished another one of my infamous 13 hour underwater classes, all of it in freshwater. Washing my ear canal with a mixture of alcohol and vinegar might have prevented the infection, but I ran out of the solution and began the preventative treatment too late in the class.
So, the microbes grew in the moist dark cavity near my ear drum. Soon I could press my outer ear and feel the pain.
At that point the alcohol and vinegar just caused the infected area to sting.
It was only a matter of time before I could tolerate this condition no further.
Apart from the pain, you see, this swelling complicates my diving.
Located just below the area typically infected (the lower part of the ear canal) is a vent tube that connects the middle ear with the mouth called the Eustachian tube.
When healthy, I use this Eustachian tube to equalize the pressure in the middle ear as I descend in the water (because increased depth means increased pressure around me).
This swelling in the ear canal blocks the Eustachian tube resulting in an imbalance of pressure between the outside and inside of the ear drum. Something must give!
What gives is the painful flexing of my ear drum (tympanic membrane). And if that flexing is too great the ear drum can bleed or rupture.
Many people cannot dive because they have either not mastered the technique of middle ear equalization, or because of scaring or anatomy challenges, simply cannot equalize the pressure.
I can persist and clear using different techniques like the Valsalva or press your nose and blow, exactly like you do when on an airplane.
By going up and down in the water column I can eventually get enough gas into the middle ear to stay down.
But that is a bad plan.
By irritating the Eustacian tube on descent, it also swells and further closes off the passage, such that when I want to back to the surface, it can be blocked badly.
Now I have little choice but to bust the ear drum on ascent since I have a limited supply of breathing gas at that time.
Something as simple as the common ear infection will now keep me out of the water for the next week.
Bummer!

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March 17, 2011

Junior SCUBA diving training

I entertain children at my dive shop, Wakulla Diving Center, often.
They come with their parents, awed by the technology around them and thrilled that they too one day will follow into the underwater world.
Our TV entertainment documents life underwater, the alien nature of aquatic life.
What better place to explore new worlds than at our very door step.
But where to start?
Certainly, begin at the skin diving stage. A mask, a pool or clear spring and supervision will provide all the needed ingredients at any age when interest is expressed.
Swimming skills are improved when the child can see underwater.
Now there is a reason for altering their otherwise comfortable dry environment.
Breathing skills soon follow.
By the time they reach the age for compressed gas training, their most basic aquatic skill will have been mastered.
Training agencies have depressed the minimum age to start compressed gas diving to 9 years of age. I find this to be too young for several reasons.
Maturity, for example, is required to make safe decisions.
As you may also know, all divers decompress after a dive, the rate of shedding nitrogen consistent with the depth and time of exposure. Rapidly developing bodies can be compromised if there is too much decompression stunting growth.
If the 9 year old does dive at this age, they should be kept to very shallow depths (20 feet) and closely supervised conditions.
I prefer beginning their training at 12-14, but every parent knows their own children’s capacity to engage in new activities.
Junior SCUBA diving training should take longer than adult training. Children have more to absorb and less patience with which to do it.
Advanced topics are not as important as basic principles of how to use the equipment safely and what to expect when exploring.
All children love to explore. Pressing macho, competitive and advanced diving issues common to adults is inappropriate and often confusing at this stage (not that isn’t at any age). When we teach children we prefer to take three weeks for a class and involve other children and their parents.
Diving is a family affair.
A parent taking a class with their kids is important for several reasons, not the least of which is a quality time opportunity.
Added supervision is always good, and confidence building for both the child and the adult is priceless. I speak from experience since my kids are avid divers that I helped train. I have confidence in their abilities.
I feel exposure to the science and technology of diving has led them to a richer curiosity in life and allowed them to set loftier goals.
Come by and meet them at the shop sometime and see what I mean.

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March 24, 2011

Why Dive?
There are so many recreational activities that we may try in this community causing some to wonder where to begin.
If you are an outdoors type of person, hunting, fishing, sailing, canoeing, kayaking, power boating, bird watching, swimming, swamp buggying, bicycling and hiking opportunities (to list just a few) abound in Wakulla County.
If you enjoy swimming, you may also like to scuba dive. But why dive, you may ask.
When I was 14, my father found a set of fins and two masks. He brought them with us on a trip to the beach where he offered to share. That came down to one fin and one mask each part-time between three kids.
After eight hours of floating over a shallow reef, I knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life by and underwater. I also got a raw sun burn that day. So you could say that I found a path with which to follow, that ultimately brought me to a career as a marine biologist and now a facilitator of underwater opportunities.
The unknown, three dimensional alien world dominated by absolutely weird creatures with adventure written all over it. This was real.
What more can a 14-year-old kid ask for?
Flat creatures with long tails that hid in the sand, long skinny snake like fish that displayed very sharp large teeth, colorful sea shells everywhere, crabs large and small, brilliant reef fish dancing between elaborate coral colonies, some that came up and visited with me and some I had to swim down and inspect more closely.
Exhausted at the end of the day and reluctant to return to shore with the humdrum routines of childhood, I began to ask questions the adults around me said I must answer on my own.
I checked out books like the Undersea Adventures of Jacques Cousteau, fish and shell taxonomy books and anything marine and devoured them, only to return to the beach to validate what I saw.
When my parents were assigned to Hawaii, I was more than thrilled!
Imagine, a set of islands with abundant reefs. Early on I got an aquarium and began collecting creatures during my ocean swims. I then spent hours glued to the glass watching these critters interact in my synthetic ocean.
Soon, breath-hold diving was inadequate for my needs. I convinced my father to join me and take lessons in scuba diving. We did and a lifelong bond began.
We actually jumped the fence between the two bases (my dad is Air Force) and were trained by U.S. Navy Underwater Demolition Team members home on R&R through a club called the Pearl Divers. I then corrupted my friends to come join us scuba diving.
I spent my high school years immersed in the ocean’s abundance and of course the usual rest of the stuff, like school, scouts, part-time work and family.
I was so engaged in the ocean that I was never tempted with drugs, mischief or boredom. I knew where I was going (college) for any excuse to be around the ocean.
OK, so why dive as an adult?
Many folks like to take wildlife pictures. Underwater photography is a wonderful sport with countless rewards from publication to pictures on the wall. And underwater camera prices have come way down permitting all of us to capture those weird creatures on a memory card.
Some of us just enjoy observing all those beautiful creatures on the reef below or we collect for aquariums at home.
Sharing these adventures with your kids is very rewarding with dividends I have described down the road.
And yes, some in Wakulla County just love the underwater stroll down sculptured passages of local caves, admiring rock formations or mineral deposits interspersed with blind white crawfish.
Diving brings us all a connection to the aquatic environment since we don’t just drink it, our body is literally encapsulated by it.
Sounds like fun, does it not?

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March 31, 2011

Stress!

By Joerg Hess

You have too many things to take care of, and not enough hours in the day to do it all in.
Take a deep breath, exhale slowly – now you’re ready to take on the world!
Sound familiar?
Breathing is more than the intake of life-essential oxygen. Breathing affects our mood, improves how we feel.
Breathe rapidly, and you excite yourself, you get hyped up. Breathe slowly and deliberately, and you calm down.
Take a breath, slowly and deliberately, exhale slowly and deliberately, stay exhaled for a bit, then inhale again.
Repeat this a couple of times.
Feel better?
This is how you breathe when you watch a boring movie at three in the morning, relaxed, ready to fall asleep. In turn, this type of breathing slows the heart rhythm, calms the nerves, and makes you relax.
Sounds easy? It should be. Yoga uses this concept, too.
Experienced free divers apply this type of breathing to ready themselves. They use a single breath to descend under water, either in pursuit of spearing a fish, or simply for the exhilaration of the experience.
There is a group of free divers that even play with great white sharks – no cage. Try that while staying relaxed, and breathing slowly between dives – I couldn’t.
But that is extreme, and not recommended as a weekend endeavor.
What you can do, however, is breathe as described above, while sitting in your favorite lounge chair, and then hold your breath for 30 seconds. Inhale before holding your breath, but not too deep.
Towards the end, you will feel a strong urge to breathe, your heart starts pounding faster, and you may even start to sweat.
With experience and practice, you can extend your breath-hold period to a minute or more. Breathing calmly and deliberately between breath-holds allows you to recuperate quickly.
A low-volume mask, long fins, and a snug-fit wetsuit give maximum underwater maneuverability, while holding your breath.
This is very different from scuba diving, much more dynamic, much more exposed to the environment, a more intense experience.
Using technology makes you become more like a fish, but it is the single breath that technology cannot enhance – that is up to the person, and it makes it a very personal, pure sport.
“Underwater Rugby” is a stylized form of beating the life out of each other while staying under on a single breath.
It is a lot of fun, and trains the breath-holding ability. Numerous breath-hold diving records are set, and broken, on a regular basis: Deepest dive on a single breath, longest breath hold time, least amount of breathing during a certain period of time.
The movie “The Big Blue” (Le grand bleu) with Jean Reno gives a humorous view into the breath-hold diving community based on some historic facts.
However, human records will never come anywhere close to those set by seals or whales, nor will we ever become as gracious as these aquatic mammals.
It’s still an amazing experience, and it can start in your arm chair.
We are looking into starting a local free diving group, which can be trained in a swimming pool, as long as it is supervised – for safety reasons.
Give it a try!

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April 7, 2011

Exhausted

Three eight-day advanced diving training classes in one month is a daunting task. But with the improving economy, warmer weather and spring break, we attracted just such a schedule.
Each class has brought diving enthusiasts from around the country and around the world to seek adventure and new skills underwater, training with us on a wide variety of topics in our North Florida aquatic underland.
Some come to learn cave diving. They have heard of our beautiful caves, seen the many movies about Florida parks, and the adventure found within. We begin with lectures, and reconfiguring their open water diving equipment. We add extra tools like a long breathing hose, extra regulators, reels with marking line, and many very bright lights. We take away their snorkel, suntan lotion and hat. They start diving in the forest running a reel between trees and following lines blind folded. They learn to always follow a guide line to know the way out.
Then we start in Orange Grove over in Peacock State Park, one of the many parks under consideration for closure. Peacock is north of Mayo about 100 miles away from our Center. There they practice specialized fin kicks, blind-sharing breathing gases, trim and buoyancy to stay off of the very silty floor of the cave. Peacock is North Florida’s cave training grounds.
Next we travel west 100 miles to Marianna and the beautiful and financially profitable Jackson Blue Park. JB as it is known, has many miles of clear flowing underwater passage to explore.
Here my students learn gas management, emergency procedures and the three types of passage making called: jumps, circuits and traverses. Jumps are just that, moving from one line to an adjacent line still maintaining a continuous line out. Circuits are the most fun. Here you go into the cave following one corridor and circle around such that you exit back to the same way out by another passage. While JB has many circuits there are no traverses at this time so we must return to Peacock for that. A traverse is where you enter the cave in one opening and exit is another. Two thousand feet back in JB there is a trash room that was once a sink hole, now fully filled on the surface, but still open below.
After completing Peacock and JB, we move north east 100 miles to caves found in Madison State Park that has its own adjacent water bottling plant. There we expand the skills and provide practice in high flow conditions. We then round out the class by driving east to Little River park just north of Branford to complete the Marry-Go-Round, a circuit at 100 feet depth. We finish the class off by visiting the beautiful Ginnie Springs in High Springs, just west of Gainesville. Here our students dive the Gallery, Lips, Keyhole and Catacombs of the Devils System.
In eight days we transform an open water diver into a cave diver, drive more than 1,000 miles, and spend 1,000 minutes underwater, leaving them eager for more.
And not once do they get to dive the best here in Wakulla County.

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April 14, 2011

Nitrox

I have never understood why the diving community compartmentalizes air (21 percent oxygen and 79 percent nitrogen) as a single gas and oxygen as a mixed gas. What then, do we call a mixture of air and oxygen?
Why, Nitrox, of course! So why would we want to breath Nitrox underwater, how safe is it and how is it made? At a cost of only two cents more per cubic foot, there is good reason to consider using Nitrox.
If I gave you a pill for your gas tank that doubled your vehicle’s miles per gallon, would you be interested – even if you needed to watch the temperature gauge more closely?
Sure, because you get more miles for the cost of the same fuel. Nitrox does that for us divers and a lot more. By reducing the nitrogen in our breathing mixture from 79 percent down to as low as 60 percent (the most common blend has 68 percent Nitrogen) you increase your allowable no-stop bottom time, depending upon the blend and depth, up to three times that of Air.
At a depth of 60 feet, I can blend you a 38 percent Nitrox that will give you 200 minutes on a USN dive table.
But there is so much more: by breathing less nitrogen during the dive, and diving less than the maximum permitted bottom time, you are less tired after a dive, can spend less time between repetitive dives, and still have more time at depth than when breathing air. So there must be a catch somewhere, and there is.
The oxygen in air becomes toxic at 214 feet for most people, but long before you get there, narcosis (feeling drunk because of the nitrogen) interferes with our resolve.
If we breathe mixtures with greater than 21 percent oxygen while diving, we find that toxicity at shallower depths. Predicting these depths is a matter of math, something diving computers are good at. The greater the concentration of oxygen in the mix, the shallower the toxic depth becomes, right up to 20 feet, beyond which you cannot breathe 100 percent oxygen. We restrict recreational use of Nitrox to no greater than 40 percent and compute the toxic depth, which is posted on the cylinder (MOD=maximum operating depth).
Follow the rules and the gas is relatively safe. Safe, as you may recall, means without risk.
The greater risk is in the blending of the gas, so don’t try this at home or you may burn your house down. Oxygen is a very reactive gas in its pure form, so care must be followed when mixing it with air. The air must be free of hydrocarbons (a petroleum lubricant found in many diving compressors). Blending must be done slowly so as not to overheat the mixture until it is at its target blend. Calculations are required to get the correct blend since air also has oxygen in it. And of course, the gasses must be pure enough for human consumption, which means lots of filters and testing.
A radical alternative Nitrox blending technique is to just remove the nitrogen from air. This requires multiple compressors, gas separating filters and storage cylinders which increases the cost of the gas, but on a boat where there is no other source of oxygen, is a wonderful alternative.
So how do I get Nitrox? Simple: get training to use it and purchase it from a reputable supplier. We offer a single day Nitrox training class where all these details and many more are discussed. Our Nitrox costs two cents more than Air and requires no further alterations to your equipment than a NITROX sticker on your cylinder.
Our Nitrox is on tap so it is dispensed upon demand from large flasks of pre-mixed blends. Many take this class as a refresher to update their diving knowledge since we must also teach decompression theory considering how much less you will need to do.

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April 21, 2011

Tire reef lost off the Ochlockonee Shoals

A student taking a class of mine in 1982 asked, as part of his required project, to survey a tire reef reported lost off the Ochlockonee Shoals.
By then I had gone on many searches for shipwrecks, reefs and crime scenes to know the chance of discovery was very slim. He wisely asked Alton Oaks to run the class out and help find the reef, placed in 1964 by Hayward Mathews while he was a graduate student at FSU.
Tire reefs by now were established as a very poor choice of artificial reef material as they were easily displaced during storms, washing ashore and causing considerable environmental damage.
My student’s question was grounded in good science: why was the Mathews Reef different?
Oaks pulled out of the harbor, took a bearing and set his watch. After what appeared to be a short time interval, he told the class to drop the anchor in what appeared to be open bay with few distant land marks. My doubts grew even greater.
But the first team to return reported we were directly in the middle of a low-lying productive tire reef which was no surprise to Oaks. The rest of the day was spent photo-documenting, identifying resident creatures and describing the condition of the reef.
A report was later submitted by the student to the then-Florida Department of Natural Resources, suggesting the Hayward tire reef was stable. Unlike other tire reefs in Florida, the Hayward reef survived because of its location in a low energy and shallow shoal, and anchored in clusters with rebar and concrete along one end such that it stood upright providing much-needed relief and protection for small fish.
The location was ideal for future nearshore artificial reef development.
Not long after, I was asked to submit a proposal to expand the Hayward reef. After many discussions with students, I did submit and got $64,000 to construct a patchwork of reefs stretching 2,000 feet by 300 feet along the face of the Ochlocknee Shoals.
As you may appreciate, this was a considerable undertaking, and not possibly done alone. C.J. Spears, then the Director of the Wakulla Road Department, agreed to work with me to clean Wakulla County of all its decaying left-over concrete. This expanded into Leon County with the assistance of the Rotary Club of Tallahassee.
We secured the use of the Wilson docks in St. Marks, and a barge and tug courtesy of the Panama City Marine Institute. Over the next year I located materials and reported opportunity to Spears. We saw Wakulla County trucks hauling all manner of concrete conduits to the St. Marks staging area, with the road crew loading culverts on barges and the PCMI unloading materials at 12 plus different patch reefs, for a total of nine large barges of materials.
The FDNR reported our project was the most cost-effective reef ever built in Florida. The Rotary Club donated funds for the two buoys placed one at each end. The Howard patch reef is still intact located in the shallow southwest corner of what is now called the Rotary Reef.
In 1985 a group of fishermen who assisted us asked how they could assist us further. I asked them to organize themselves, for I was a biologist with more responsibility on campus than I could manage while overseeing the expansion of these reefs. They did and have contributed enormously to our on and offshore diving and fishing opportunity. They are now called the Organization for Artificial Reefs (OAR).
Remember, it takes only one idea, when acted upon, to begin something of great value, when supported by involved people.

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April 28, 2011

The Pearl Divers

I was raised as a diver in a club environment. Before there was NAUI, PADI and the rest, there were diving clubs such as the Pearl Divers, Sea Lancers, Bottom Scratchers and the like.
We joined because concentrated within these groups were like minded aquanauts who could teach how to safely enjoy the underwater environment. I was too young so my father had to also join and train with me.
Our club was on Pearl Harbor Base in Hawaii, and run by sailors, mostly Navy divers.
My dad, now 93, had to eat crow as an Air Force pilot, when we jumped the fence to join the Pearl Divers. I had to learn from the best!
Besides nominal dues to join the club, my training was free, provided by UDT divers back on leave from Vietnam. They mentored each student, spending one day a week in the pool until I could perform underwater what they felt was necessary to survive and prosper underwater.
There were many skills I had to master: I had to swim the length of the Olympic pool underwater on one breath, swim a mile in the pool with no aids, and in the ocean with all my scuba equipment on at the surface, and buddy breathe using one regulator mouthpiece for 30 minutes while swimming underwater – just to name a few.
I worked hard and finally made the cut after three months of training.
We took spear guns on our check out dives! Marine life identification was done by pointing and either giving the OK sign or shaking the finger from side to side.
Navy training films provided academics and our book was the New Science of Skin & Scuba.
Best of all however, was the social encouragement throughout the process. Bi-monthly meetings provided the backdrop for lectures and endless stories. Every month the club had a contest for the best shell, fish and picture. We contributed to club display aquariums, with marine creatures collected the week before.
Club-sponsored dive trips were plentiful, going to local exotic locations where everyone was invited.
We had our own air fill station at our clubhouse. I had no money to speak of, but when I wanted to dive, members would loan me what I needed without hesitation. I soon found an old CO2 cylinder and had it set up for scuba.
My first purchase was one of those new single hose regulators, a stark deviation from the double-hose beauties I could borrow. I either went surfing or dove every weekend throughout my high school years.
By the time I went to college, I was on my way to becoming a marine biologist thanks to that club and all the opportunity provided.
Does this sound like a fantasy? Every bit is true, and every bit is possible right here in Wakulla County.
Once upon a time, dive clubs made scuba diving accessible to those who would have otherwise been land-bound. Now the club name is Wakulla County Dive Club, which meets on the first Saturday of every month with John Spicer as their current president.
While they are still growing, they will be directed by their participants. I serve them as a safety officer.
Check them out on facebook or at www.wakullacountydiveclub.com.
Join us and let’s see where we can take the fun.

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May 5, 2011

Groupon and diving.

By Joerg Hess

Sometimes I feel like a dinosaur, out of place in a fast-paced world of change and progress.
Alas, it is not the pace or progress I am worried about, I’d rather even speed it up a bit.
It is more the direction things are evolving that causes my grey hair. But I am sidetracking.
We hear it all the time, how dangerous our activities must be.
We immerse ourselves, literally, in a world that we are not evolved for, and only stay alive due to the technology and knowledge we have developed.
And here lies the crux of the matter: It is technology and knowledge that keeps us alive, because without the knowledge of proper use, the technology is pretty much worthless – to be taken literally.
Yet it is the gaining of the knowledge and its application that people disregard and minimize to try to save money.
In a recent event, groupon moved into our diving world, and classes are offered locally for half-price if enough people sign up.
(Groupon is a deal-of-the-day website that is localized to major markets in the United States, including the Tallahassee area.)
Don’t get me wrong, I think groupon and similar businesses can be a good idea.
For manufacturers, they allow catering to the masses rather than fabricating single items, thus reducing overhead and production costs.
The substantial savings are passed on to the consumer.
But in our case, the “product” is tailored to the individual, and the training has to address the individual’s strengths and weaknesses.
This requires time, as well as your dive instructor’s attention.
How would you feel if your barber/hairdresser gave you the one-size-fits-all cut, whether it suits you or not, because he/she has to serve 20 other customers within the hour?
Looking at it from that perspective, allow me to repeat what is the offer: diving classes for half-price if enough people sign up, meaning the instructor receives less money for his time, and has to divide his/her attention among more students.
As a result, we receive a lot of requests from people who feel very uncomfortable with their minimal training received, and the resulting survival skill level they acquired.
Many of those who don’t simply give up diving ask for our advice.
Unfortunately, the answer is always the same: Get quality training in the first place! Those who don’t follow that advice end up loosing a lot of money on the newly purchased dive gear by selling it again, virtually new.
Those who pay more attention can then snatch up this dive equipment, lightly used, and for less than half price if enough people sell it, again, a very much “groupon” style.
It is good to spend your money wisely, but remember: You get what you pay for, and sometimes more than you bargained for.

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May 12, 2011

Nicole Stanton

Is it better to buy new or repair old equipment?

By Nicole Stanton

Customers bring in the wackiest equipment.
Some acknowledge that the 40-year-old regulator is a museum piece and they just want to show it off, or see if it still works. But there are those who still want to use these antique regulators.
Let’s do a comparison between a used regulator that is in moderately good shape and a new regulator over a five year period.
A complete regulator (no computer) costs $800 new. This includes the shop assembly and free parts for life for many mainstream brands of regulators. A used complete regulator (no computer) on eBay is $100, no free parts.
Right away, the price gap to fill is $700.
The regulator from eBay will need to be serviced. This is life support equipment and should be serviced every year.
The average regulator rebuild for a complete regulator is $110 labor, plus cost of service kits at $45.
The total cost of this rebuild is $155 plus tax.
The total cost of an eBay regulator is a minimum of $265.85 right out the gate.
Many manufactures have pushed the repair schedule for new regulators from every year to every two years, meaning that for the next two years, your new regulator will not need any service if it is well maintained.
This cannot be said for all older regulators – the used titan will still need annual service incurring the $165.85 annual rebuild with additional costs should anything additional need replacing.
Five years maintenance of the new regulator only costs $235, the eBay regulator costs $829.25.
When the total cost of each regulator from first purchase to the five year limit is tallied, a new regulator costs $1,035 and a used regulator costs $1095.10.
A total savings of $60 over five years.
If you want to save a few dollars, going used can sometimes be cost effective.
But with all of the manufacturer incentives to buy new, it can be well worth your while to spend your time at your local dive shop rather than surfing eBay.

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May 19, 2011

The definition of insanity

By Joerg Hess

A scene from the nature documentary “Animals Are Beautiful People” (1974) shows a monkey observing a native bury a salt rock in an abandoned termite hill.
Once left alone, the monkey tries to retrieve the rock out of sheer curiosity, but finds that it cannot withdraw its hand from the mount as long as it holds on to the rock.
Even during panic when approached by the human does the monkey not let go of the rock, and keeps trying to pull the hand free instead- until it is caught.
The definition of insanity — one of many I am certain — is to keep trying the same thing and expect a different outcome.
The monkey’s irrational behavior is amusing to observe, as it clearly expects freeing its hand despite continuing to make a fist.
Wakulla County is currently faced with a situation unlike any other experienced before. The fall-out from the banking crisis is reaching new depths, and BP’s oil spill ensured a decline in tourist numbers, and more people are unemployed.
We are amidst a crisis, which appears to hit us harder than many other counties. The way out appears to find a change that will reverse the downward trend.
Getting tourist dollars is certainly an important element in this recovery.
However, perpetuating the usual activities continue to fail to attract additional tourist numbers that would make a difference. It is therefore not surprising to see that the same old approaches to solving this problem result in the same consequence.
How about, instead of holding on to thoughts that clearly have not worked in the past, we look beyond the feared danger, and take new opportunities that lay right in front of our door step?
Rather than extend the restricted diving policies at Wakulla Springs State Park, we open it to equal access, like so many of the more successful state parks have demonstrated.
The Chinese phrase for “Crisis”, consists of two words, which, taken by themselves, mean “Danger” and “Opportunity.”
Let’s try out new opportunities with a commitment to preserving our State Park both above and below the ground.
I will be running the annual 5K at Wakulla on Saturday, May 21. Come and join us to raise awareness for the fact that the park is facing the real crisis of becoming the center piece of a proposed golf course, unless something changes.
By following the same practices, obviously.
I’d rather be diving!

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May 26, 2011

Lionfish

THEY’RE HERE: Lionfish are invading the Eastern seaboard. Here’s a shot of one taken in the Bahamas last year. (PHOTO BY GREGG STANTON SPECIAL TO THE NEWS)

Lionfish, also called turkey fish, dragon fish and scorpion fish, are native to the reefs of the Indo-Pacific. They are now invading the Florida Keys and Bahamas and were likely introduced into South Florida waters in 1992.
This beautiful fish uses its 18 dorsal spines to deliver a painful venom to anyone who touches them. In the past, most injuries were reported from aquarium enthusiasts while servicing their imported specimens. They can live up to 15 years, grow to a length of 15 inches with a weight of 2.6 pounds.
Unfortunately, enough have escaped into the wild to form reproductive populations. They are now spreading into our Florida waters where there are few if any natural predators. These fish are predators of smaller fish, consuming many of the fry of our sport fish.
In the Bahamas and U.S. Eastern seaboard waters, these Lionfish get so large that they can be harvested as food. Lionfish cookbooks are now available to encourage the harvest and eradication of this pest.
Lionfish harvest contests in South Florida are now hosted by REEF and other reef conservation agencies in an effort to reduce their negative impact on our reefs. You are encouraged to kill every specimen you find.
In 2010, FWC researchers first found two Lionfish from two separate net tows taken at distances of 99 and 160 miles off the southwest coast of Florida, north of the Dry Tortugas and west of Cape Romano, a new record for intrusion into the Gulf of Mexico. These specimens were taken from depths of 183 and 240 feet as part of a trawl survey funded by the Southeast Area Monitoring and Assessment Program, a cooperative state and federal program.
On Saturday, May 21, we found and collected a Lionfish in 110 feet of water south of Cape San Blas while diving with Joe Hope on his boat the Trigg’r Happy.
While the specimen we collected was too small to eat, now that they have arrived, they will grow much larger.

To report further sightings of lionfish off our shores, please call the nationwide reporting number (877-786-9567) sponsored by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the U.S. Geological Survey or fill out an online report on the USGS website at http://nas.er.usgs.gov/sightingreport.asp. We did.

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June 2, 2011

Parker Turner

Parker Turner (PHOTO HUNG ON THE WALL AT WDC)

I was fresh out of a study in the Antarctic in the mid-1980s that required diving in 27 degree salt water under ten feet of ice when I met Parker Turner.
He invited me to a conference in Cozumel, Mexico, to discuss the future of cave research and exploration.
The previous policy of the cave community was to keep a low profile, a secret society so to speak, but that was changing as folks like Parker realized educating the diving public was far more effective in curbing the rising concern about cave safety.
He offered to join us in our fledging university dive program, to forge a new perspective that included cave research.
What developed over the course of five years was a dramatic facelift that defined scientific diving at Florida State University for decades to follow.
No greater difference could be found between what was then called the scientific diver and what was happening in the cave diving community.
Scientific divers were working at depths shallower that 40 feet and mostly in salt water. They based their training and technology on recreational standards, but were task oriented in the pursuit of data.
The cave community had long ago established a rigorous training standard that included a deviation from the recreational community, in their pursuit of cave exploration.
Both communities had their politics that excluded the other. It seemed the two were not likely to mix well.
When Parker joined our staff, we began a dialogue that tore the premises of both communities down to their elemental basics.
Then we reconstructed using the best of both to form a university program with a dynamic that embraced underwater research at all levels.
We hosted in Tallahassee the first meeting of the American Academy of Underwater Sciences (AAUS) in 1986 and included the cave community.
This event was the first for both: an AAUS meeting outside of San Diego and putting the cave community in concert with a research organization.
The following proceedings of that meeting sold out immediately. At that national meeting we began the long debate for meaningful change within the scientific diving community that continues to this day.
The AAUS now has standards for cave research amongst many others in challenging environments and using advanced (non-recreational) technology, all stemming back to that time period in the late 1980 and Parker Turner.
To bolster the reformation, Parker and I went on the road to teach Nitrox and Trimix workshops, and support innovative research such as the Surface Interval Oxygen project held at Wakulla Springs in 1992.
He became the University’s Cave Research Coordinator and participated on numerous cave research projects.
I became a cave instructor and taught every member of my Applications of Diving to Research class the practice of Cavern Diving until I retired in 2004.
The university collaborated with the cave diving community on several projects that furthered the objectives of each.
We defined exploration separately from science diving and encouraged each to mature independently.
Now retired and the owner/operator of Wakulla Diving Center, I have dedicated our new facility to the memory of Parker Turner and all that he contributed to our understanding of this aquatic world.

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June 9, 2011

I live underground
I became interested in subterranean habitation when I had an opportunity to live underwater.
As a graduate student participating in the Scientist-In-The-Sea Program, I spent days living in an underwater house called a habitat. The effect was so profound that it altered my perception of what was possible, to include the bizarre.
First I noticed that living underwater meant I had a constant temperature, regulated by my surrounding environment.
Then weather became less of a concern, what with 50 feet of water above me to buffer inclement storms, I could remain safely tucked away from harm’s way.
And, of course, sitting next to a coral reef to visit for 12 hours a day, was nothing short of miraculous.
When you live in the three dimensional underwater realm, rules that apply on land are altered, such as flying everywhere, talking very little and mostly to yourself, realizing that your breath is finite with no surface exit to resolve its loss. My day would begin with tasteless food before dropping through the hatch into warm tropical waters.
A quick swim over to the air station to fill up my twin cylinders, and a swim off to my research area on the adjoining reef.
Every hour, I must return for a refill of my air cylinders, a routine shared by everyone else on the team.
I was studying the animals that lived on anemones (a soft tentacled anchored creature), so I covered a large part of the reef with an intense focus once a host was found. Yes, my fingers looked like prunes by the end of the day, but they recovered overnight while sleeping in the air-filled habitat.
We could feel the radiation of the sun as it crossed over our horizon. When the sun went down, the reef we studied went to sleep, but another woke up. We retired to the habitat and over supper watched as night creatures came to inspect us. Our large window at the end of the habitat had a light outside that attracted fascinating organisms worthy of a science fiction thriller.
To “come home” at the end of the project we had to decompress for 15 hours from our residence at 50 feet to reach the surface pressure.
I vividly remember climbing out of the water on to the deck of a boat and feeling the wind as a strange but familiar sensation.
The silence of the surface was also distracting, as underwater, between the reef racket and my exhaling bubbles, silence was scarce.
When I was faced with what type of house I was to build in Wakulla, I was easily drawn to underground for many of the same reasons as underwater: Constant ground temperature keeps my home at an average of 70 degrees, severe storms are seldom noticed, and only tracked on TV.
My family lives in a forest full of life, like the reef, that we visit every time we exit our habitat. I do have windows into the next best thing to a reef – a 30,000 gallon swimming pool where I can watch my students as they learn how to scuba, something almost as much fun as watching the night creatures in front of the habitat.
Bizarre what the imagination can produce when motivated.

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June 16, 2011

Spearfishing

In the beginning, most scuba divers are taught the same principals: never hold your breath while underwater, stay shallower than 130 feet of depth, go up slowly and stay within safe time exposures to avoid diving injuries.
Later in life, scuba divers specialize, becoming photographers, marine biologists, ice divers and much more.
Here in Wakulla County, we see folks specializing in river diving, spearfishing, scalloping, cavern and cave diving.
Recently, I had an opportunity to spend underwater time with some experienced local spearfishing scuba divers. I had been invited out to spearfish many times during the past 18 months since we opened the Wakulla Diving Center, but because of the new facility demands, I could never accept.
With spring came new offers and warmer waters beckoned, so I gladly accepted.
I first noticed that none of my diving equipment was appropriate for spearing fish. Upon closer inspection I realized that there is virtually no comparison between spearfishers and the cave divers I frequently dive with these days.
And let’s be clear, in Florida, it is illegal to spear fish in fresh water, where caves usually are found. Indeed, few spearfishers dive caves or visa-versa.
I found successful spearfishing required multiple short dives on numerous dive sites where the team drops in upon unsuspecting reef residents. The longest dive was usually around 20 minutes before the thumbs up signal was given.
A cave dive requires a long single dive, at the most two long dives in a day, lasting on the average of 80 minutes each. Yet at the end of the day both groups spend the same total amount of time underwater.
Cave divers carry redundant backup equipment and 50 percent more breathing gas than they plan to use. A typical cave rig can cost upwards to $5,000 and weigh 130 to 150 pounds out of the water.
Their multiple specialized regulators are configured with extra long hoses (seven feet) and multiple inflators. I can play games on their dive computer. They carry three or more lights, some with lights as bright as those of a car, knives that are very small and specialized, and reels to run between rooms to show the way out, all attached to a harness with a wing-like inflation bag on their back.
Spear-toting scuba divers, however, want simplicity and light weight, with a single multi-purposed regulator, integrated weights in a jacket Buoyancy Compensator. They may carry a whistle, a deployable surface marker and even a small spare air cylinder should they run out of breathing gas.
Oh yes… and a snorkel, something if found on a cave diver he would be forever ridiculed, The spearfishing diver’s equipment cost about half that of the cave diver, not withstanding the cost of a boat to get out to the fishing grounds!
And then, of course there is the spear, now refined to include multiple shafts, kill spikes, detachable shaft lines, one handed stringers on attached retaining clips to hold their prey.
Since I love to do both, I must collect two different sets of scuba equipment, and enjoy the radically different benefits of each speciality sport available right here in Wakulla County.

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June 23, 2011

Practice makes perfect

By Joerg Hess

Talk to the diving enthusiasts, and the typical dive lasts about 30 minutes.
It is not so much a question of depth or breathing gas availability, but more of personal preference and perseverance.
Unless you have gained a lot of experience, it takes concentration to manage the equipment under water. It is understandable that, after half an hour of intense focus, concentration wanes, and the dive comes to a natural end.
However, when pushing beyond this barrier, the experience manifests itself into “muscle memory.” The control of the equipment becomes automated, and the diver can enjoy the environment rather than having to spend his or her attention on the gear.
This is known as “practice makes perfect,” and applies to any other sport as well.
What is unique to diving are the circumstances: the cold water (and even the gulf during summer gets cold after a while) has unique effects.
The springs are a year-round 68 degrees, making long-term exposure both refreshing and tiring. On top of that, the diver breathes elevated concentrations of oxygen, which is argued to be therapeutic.
Breathing pure oxygen in so-called oxygen bars, for example, has been described to enhance health and well-being, strengthen the immune system, enhance concentration, reduce stress, increase energy and alertness and generally relax the body. Combine this with the visual stimulation of awe-inspiring sights that can be witnessed under water, and you have a cocktail for happiness and health.
I witnessed this personally last week during a sequence of multi-hour, deep dives in excess of 200 feet in our amazing underground rivers (aka caves). This type of diving is not new to me, nor were the dives particularly demanding.
I simply hadn’t done it in a while, but the results were obvious. Many people commented on how much more relaxed I seemed, and that I was definitely smiling more.
The only drawback I found was a forced abstinence from my morning runs, as the joint movement can trigger a delayed onset of DCS, or “the bends.”
It is a price I am happy to pay for the time being. I feel lucky that I can enjoy the real Florida beyond its natural boundaries, and can “walk” the underwater trail.
It is an amazing experience!

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June 30, 2011

Diving under Antarctic Ice

During the mid 1980s, I was asked to prepare a research team to dive under Antarctic Ice. After considerable debate, I chose Wakulla Springs to train for it.
I had many issues to address: the cold water, equipment configurations, overhead environment and team surface and underwater skill. None of the team had ever been under ice, let alone in a cave on surface supplied gas, so we had a lot of ground to cover before flying to the opposite side of the globe and then down near the South Pole.
Cold is relative to several conditions: your body’s acclimatized state, your thermal protection, and the time of exposure. To address the first, we exposed our team to the 68 degree water temperature at Wakulla Springs with no thermal protection for weeks before departure. At first we shivered within 10 minutes, but at the end of the training we could tolerate 45 minutes.
I chose to modify surface supplied (hose) diving technology that would avoid freeze-up problems while diving in 27-degree water. Your standard SCUBA regulator will freeze and not deliver breathing gas under these conditions after only a short exposure. It was not the cold water, but the minus 20-degree surface conditions that often caused the freeze-up problems. Reliable breathing gas from a heated fishing hut was pumped down through thick hoses to a band mask over the diver’s head that was equipped with a rubber shroud around metal parts filled with hot water. The diving scientist was thus tethered to the surface, talking to the surface and provided a reliable warmer breathing gas.
No, we did not dive them in swim suits as we did in Wakulla Springs!
I spent time with the U.S. Navy in Panama City gaining access to a new diving garment called Thisulate worn under a crushed neoprene dry suit made by Diving Unlimited International. When applying these modifications, our team could more than double the 30 minute exposure limits our predecessors could tolerate.
Those visiting the Wakulla Springs back then would see a team of diving scientists huddled on the wooden dive tower dressed in red space suits and wearing bulky band masks on their shoulders that covered the entire head.
We deployed them off the platform down to the water below, then under the ledge, to the bottom at 100 feet, simulating the 5-foot drop from the fish hut to the ice hole, then 10 feet of ice.
We would simulate setting up experiments, sending down equipment on tethers and talking everyone through their tasks while under overhead restrictions. Team coordination between tenders (holding breathing hoses) to supervisors at the communications box and the principal investigator directing the data collection had to know their task or expect injury. And then we would create problems they might encounter.
Today, the National Science Foundation Polar Programs use the very same equipment configurations we developed back then. What we did not know then, was that we would experience every one of these catastrophes, and survived them because of our training at Wakulla Springs.

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July 7, 2011

Toxic lakes in the Palau Islands

Imagine collecting sediment samples underwater in a tropical jungle on the other side of the world.
Around here the 100-plus degree surface weather makes diving the cooler caves difficult when we dress up for the cold water and faint from heat exhaustion before we get in!
But when I was asked to work with FSU chemical oceanographers to dive the bottom of a series of toxic lakes in the Palau Islands, I jumped in.
You may recall a National Geographic article on Jellyfish Lake, where the entire population of jellyfish migrates from one end of this enclosed island lake to the other every day. They follow the sun.
But below this happy migration is a body of toxic hydrogen sulfide water separating itself from above by a pycnocline or density layer holding colorful bacteria.
What we sought was on the bottom, sediment that has the predecessor of phosphate. Palau is near the equator, so it is naturally hot above and below the water. And the hydrogen sulfide is poisonous by penetrating the exposed skin of divers.
Sounds like a job for a robot, but no such option existed back then, so divers were deployed.
First we needed to build a portable raft capable of supporting an ample crew of divers in the middle of the lake.
We asked engineering students at the Academic Diving Program to design a platform made of locally (in Palau) available materials that had to be assembled in the water as there are no beaches. A prototype was built, deployed and tested right here in Wakulla County in Cherokee Sink.
Deploying divers in tropical waters dressed in gear to protect them from toxic hydrogen sulfide was a different matter.
We began with collaboration with the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and their chemical hazmat diving suit. NOAA trained us on this surface waterfed suit during our winter months since it required hot water. They reasoned that by pumping surface water into the suit, any toxic water at depth would be kept out, and being from the north, hot water also kept the diver warm.
We proposed to pump cold water down in the tropics. But somehow, with shifts in NOAA staffing the project, by the time we set up on station, that little detail was changed to pumping 90 degree surface water down to the diver.
This floor was no ordinary lake bottom. Imagine diving in a septic tank. The fluid above the floor is clear but the visual bottom is not the solid floor you might expect. The diver riding the core collector down had to tell the surface crew to stop before penetrating this optical fluid layer. Once through it, the density of the substrate increased slowly. He would then manually crank the core down until it would go no further.
I was asked to serve as the standby diver in full hazmat suit with no cooling water in my suit on the scorching barge deck (under an awning) while a young NOAA diver was lowered down.
Fortunately for us the diver was a biologist and keenly interested in the success of the project. Any exertion now meant overheating the diver. And I could hear this problem building in the diver’s voice over the intercom as he struggled with the slow core driver’s crank.
He finally reported to the anxious topside crew that he could go no further and was brought up. His umbilical became entangled in the core driver’s cable resulting is a rush to pull everything up fast. With the open core spilling out just under the barge, they pulled the exhausted diver on deck and peeled him out of his suit. He was as red as a cooked lobster, exhausted, but smiling as he knew he made the difference.
Quietly, in the confusion of the recovery, I slipped over the side and swam under the barge and capped off the core.
A retired Marine participating on the project spent the rest of the day with this 4-inch core that was at least 10 feet long strapped to his back, climbing up cliffs to get the sample back to the lab on a different island.
The sample collected became so valuable since we could only get one that all efforts went into the lab sampling the core.
What we did find was that at the lake’s floor, the water temperature was cooler than the surface by as much as 20 degrees. Fascinating!

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July 14, 2011

Folks diving in a cave must always know the way out.
We have previously discussed the thin white line cave divers lay behind them as a map to safely exit the cave.
Along the way, these lines, when left in the cave, become permanent lines complete with markers for personal identification, alternate passages (called jumps), distance markers and line arrows pointing to the closest way to the surface.
Early white cave line had these markers made of wood, duct tape and clothespins. Today they are mostly plastic.
In the early 1990s as more people repeatedly dove the same cave, these fragile white lines were replaced with a much larger, more durable and colorful (orange) polypropylene line named the Gold Line.
Today, Cave Safety Officers assigned by the National Speleological Society – Cave Diving Unit and the National Association for Cave Diving, coordinate Line and Safety Committees around Florida to replace white line with gold, place safety labels and generally improve the safety of our caves (build steps, work with land owners and federal, state and local officials). These respected organizations provide gold line funded by their membership dues.
I was once called to a meeting at the Tallahassee Sewer Service regarding a disconcerting report of high nitrates in Wakulla Springs.
Cave divers had been asked to collect water in Wakulla Springs using milk jugs. The tested water was found to have high nitrates, and the Tallahassee sewer was blamed. While much later they became a demonstrated contributor to the problems at Wakulla Springs, at the time I suspected another contributor to the nitrified water: the diver.
I asked if we could sample the water by non-diver means, perhaps a tube that the scientist could pull water from the surface any time they wanted a sample.
With the cooperation of the North Florida Water Management District, I procured long lengths of water sampling tubing left over from well studies and set to work.
I began in Wakulla Springs. I ran the tube from the well house down to the vent at 185 feet where later we would anchor a current meter, still there today. A pump pulled water, untouched by human hands, to the surface collection vials.
With my improved collection procedure established, I went on to place more tubes in Little Dismal, Sally Ward, Emerald Sink and others along the conduit feeding Wakulla Springs. I am pleased to say they are still in place today, some even extended. You see I attached the tubes to the safety line thus minimizing any further entangling possibility.
What future history will we write about the cave line?
Well, here’s a tip: Your Wakulla County Dive Club will be producing a new Cave Line information device. At the entrance of every sponsored cave you currently will find an NACD or NSS-CDS placard advising you to not go farther unless you are cave trained.
A large line marker will soon be deployed as the line drops below at 130 feet alerting the diver that “TRIMIX is Recommended Beyond this Point.”
Trimix, recall, is the helium breathing gas available to those recreationally certified on that gas, that reduces narcosis. And narcosis has been the problem with many of the Wakulla County caves.
Folks swimming our deeper caves will not miss this notice as it is attached to the very line every cave divers follows.

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July 21, 2011

The underwater light “torch”

Many people visit my shop and see we support cave as much as open water diving. Some shudder and say they could never adjust to the darkness of cave diving.
In point of fact, cave divers see further and have more light than most open water divers around this region. How can that be?
Our underwater (UW) caves are often clear and we carry lights so bright that to stare at the bulb when lit is like staring at the sun.
Without a light, our caves whether dry or wet, are dark. It’s probably better described as black, the absence of light.
Our earliest training requires that we take students beyond the natural light zone and turn all flashlights off to reinforce the consequence of losing your light. Many people feel insecure and panic in such conditions.
Exiting a dark cave is challenging, but possible using the cave line when underwater.
Dry caves are more problematic since dry caves do not use the cave live technique. To be sure we have enough light, every cave diver carries three or more flashlights. Once I lost all three that I had with me. But I also am of the old school that always carries redundancy – a buddy loaned me one for my hasty exit.
Back in the mid 21st century (1950s) folks who explored Wakulla Springs used surface-adapted flashlights, which proved to be unreliable as they often flooded and produced little light. It was however, better than no light.
Dives back then were shorter and shallower than today. Batteries were bulkier and had less duration. Small motorcycle batteries were encapsulated with cables fed to automobile headlights that improved light coverage.
The unintended consequence was that cave divers no longer required extra weight to off-set their buoyancy. My first cave light in the early 1980s was made of two fire alarm six-volt batteries contained in a clear plastic tube. A cable fed the electricity to a steel tube with a large reflector that focused the halogen (car headlight bulb) into any size pattern I wanted. Lamar English and his dad built them in Tallahassee and were called the English light. We mounted the battery pack on one side of our waist and swam with a decided tilt to balance the load.
As cylinders got bigger and heavier to permit longer and deeper dives, batteries got smaller and more powerful. Bulbs also changed from incandescent to halogen to gas vapor and recently to LED, each consuming less power and producing more light.
I just fast forwarded only 30 years. Today our underwater “torch” (as the Europeans call them) is the size of a small shoe and can last beyond five hours with light so bright the cave passage becomes a stunning exhibit hall.
Yes, we still carry three lights (a primary and two small secondary) since any light can fail, most often now because we forget to recharge them. Last week however, a vendor produced a light that was the size of a baby’s shoe that lit up the shop. He pointed out the technology has miniaturized to the point that our backup lights are often brighter than our primary light!
Of course each step forward brings increases in cost. A primary light can cost in excess of $1,000.
Fortunately cave divers invest heavily in their “cave kit.” Between training, cylinders, manifolds, regulators, reels of cave line, specialized knives, buoyancy compensators, harnesses, scooters, dive computers, exposure suits, mask and fins (no snorkel) and of course dive lights, the cost exceeds $5,000 plus. Now add a SUV to haul this heavy stuff around and you can see these folks are dedicated to their sport.
They can see very well in our UW caves. And we have what they want right here in Wakulla County!

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July 28, 2011

More on Wakulla Springs

More than two decades ago, I was asked to present what we knew about Wakulla Springs to an assembled group of faculty and visitors at a FSU’s Center for Professional Development luncheon.
The Wakulla cave was described then as an inundated dry cave since Mastodon bones are found within.
Not much has been learned since then, except that I no longer need to speculate about the origin of the water or its destination underground.
This water follows ever-expanding conduits as deep as 350 feet on its journey to the Gulf of Mexico. Wakulla Springs is the overflow vent of a grand mixing basin located further back in the cave, very much like, but larger than Indian Springs just down the street.
Rain north of the springs can dramatically increase (and drought dramatically reduce) water volume and, thus, flow. Wakulla Springs may have siphoned (pulled water in) at one time if wall sculpturing is believed.
The story is so much more interesting when you consider the consequence of this hydrology. When the water is flowing at its greatest volume during heavy rain and low tide, sand is collected from the cave and sent out into the basin where it is deposited on a very steep slope leading down to the vent at 180 feet.
This slope is held in place by the force of the outward flowing water. If disturbed, as Wally Jenkins did in the 1950s, by dropping a heavy weight on his way into the cave (a way to drop fast to reduce exposure time), the slope creates an underwater avalanche.
Visibility drops to zero and Wakulla Springs becomes a temporary siphon, much like a toilet bowl. Wally told me he would swim up until he hit the ceiling and blindly crawl out on his back when this happened.
No surprise then, in 1987 when the U.S. Deep Cave Diving Team set off another avalanche when they accidentally dropped one of the 3,000 pound weight pods onto their habitat.
And tragically, no surprise again when the same avalanche occurred at Indian Springs in 1992 that trapped and killed our good friend Parker Turner, after the loose cavern ceiling collapsed on to a steep slope while divers were swimming in the cavern.
In all cases, a large amount of slope debris and water flushed back into the cave. The Indian Springs cave vent and flow was so small, it did not reopen soon after. No one knows how long it takes Wakulla to reopen, but considering its size, most concede not long.
Soon the lighter sand is again sent back up the slope and deposited on the steepening slope as the vent reopens. But something is left behind.
Please envision a Mastodon grazing near the Springs. For whatever the reason, she slips and loses her footing and falls into deeper water. Perhaps she is old or sick and with water deeper than her height, she sinks to the basin floor and slowly enters the food chain. Years later, an articulated pile of bones remain. A drought occurs north of Wakulla Springs that reduces the flow that retains the slope of the basin and an avalanche carries the sand supporting the Mastodon bones down through the vent and deposits them in the first room at 230 feet.
How can we test this hypothesis?
Had the Mastodon died in a dry cave, her bones would still be articulated (held together). Had she been deposited there by an avalanche, the bones will be disarticulated and scattered about the room.
One day I would like to test that hypothesis. We finally have the technology.

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August 4, 2011

Three “Oh, Nos!” GO HOME

By Nicole Stanton

Ever had one of those days when nothing goes right?
A flat tire on your way to work, or the elevator being busted when you have to travel to the 13th floor.
In diving, these “Oh, no!” moments happen all the time.
When you are diving shallow and there is a clear path to the surface, these moments aren’t very important. But when you are traveling deep into the bowels of the earth, you need to pay attention.
The rule goes something like this, if for any reason you have an issue that makes you say “Oh, no!” that counts as one.
As you continue on, if you have to say “Oh, no!” three times, GO HOME. Crawl back into bed and watch re-runs until dinner and try again tomorrow.
In some regions, this is followed by the statement, “God loves you and wants you to live.”
Why would you drive two hours, put on a burning hot wetsuit and haul your equipment more than 200 yards to the dive site just to turn around and go home when you reach this magical number?
Well, you want to live don’t you?
The theory behind the three strike rule is that in any diving related death, no one problem will kill you. Usually it’s something like six or seven problems.
The average human can handle up to three major problems occurring at any time, after that it’s too much to balance. When you’re in trouble, all those other problems don’t just go away, they become even worse because as you divert your attention to managing the one failure, those others will begin to fail as well.
Years ago, a very good friend of ours was diving in a cave in Jackson County, let’s call him Bob. Bob was diving a Rebreather (when he exhaled, the exhaust was filled with oxygen and cleaned for reuse), one he had been fully trained and qualified to use. Bob’s dive buddy was diving open circuit (meaning that when he exhaled the exhaust was in the form of bubbles in the water).
Our friend Bob ignored the rule of three strikes.
One, he drove all night to reach his dive site; he was exhausted and mentally compromised.
Two, his oxygen sensors were not showing the correct voltages and were malfunctioning.
Three, his oxygen injection system was rusting and needed replacement.
Those three factors were known to Bob before the dive began.
What was not considered before the dive was the following;
One, Bob’s dive buddy was not briefed on what to do in an emergency.
Two, Bob had not invested in a bailout system that had been proven to save lives on Rebreathers during emergencies.
Three, when Bob cleaned his rusty oxygen injection system, he put it back in upside down.
Bob died because his oxygen injector (solenoid) was incorrectly installed. However, had his oxygen sensors been working, he would have known that his oxygen levels were too high.
Had he not needed a new oxygen injector, he would not have removed his. Had his buddy known how to help him during the emergency, he could have made a safe emergency exit. And with the improved bailout, Bob might have been able to save himself.
At any point, if Bob had called the dive at strike three, he would still be with us today.
The rule of three strikes is almost a mantra amongst technical divers because it shows how risk management is so important to coming home alive.

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August 11, 2011

Underwater weather.

With all this much needed afternoon rain, comes a change in our underwater weather.
Since our inland dive sites are fed mostly by rain, the more of it, the higher the current flowing on its way to the coast. Much of the rain falling locally collects first in what we locally call swamps.
Swamps are digestive pits where organics collect, such as leaves, releasing their contents, such as tannin. As the swamp water level rises, these organics flow into nearby sink holes and begin their trek to the ocean.
Of course we can just climb back into our car and drive peacefully home when poor underwater conditions prevail.
For us divers, this is a recipe for poor underwater visibility. And if we were to choose the one sensory system to rely on most underwater, it is visibility.
With poor visibility we can not see our cave line, our map leading the way out. We run into walls, ceiling and sediment floors with poor visibly. The current increases and we exhaust more energy to swim.
Simply put, why bother diving?
Wakulla Springs State Park is similarly impacted. The popular glass bottom boat rides shut down when the water turns dark in the main basin.
Indeed, Wakulla County is best known to divers as having unpredictable underwater weather. Several world class exploration projects have been postponed when Wakulla’s waters turned unexpectedly black.
Closer to the coast, we add a new dimension to our underwater weather. Caves with approximately 10 miles from the coast are archaea haline, or saltwater influenced. The more distant show tidal rise in the sinkhole, elevating as much as a meter (three feet) from the start of the dive to the end.
We often find a distinct warm saltwater layer or lens at the deepest part of these caves. We also find distinct fauna (animals), often new to science. Also, here we find clearer water, a fascinating combination for cave diving.
But further south and closer to the ocean we are more constrained by the tide. The closer to the ocean, the more the saltwater mixes with the tide, making it turbid as is often found in the marshes along the coast.
During the dryer months our clean fresh water encourages us to dive on the low tide. During the rainy season, we may find the high tide better. And now water quality changes during the dive.
Most of the caves south of Highway 98 are very tidal.
When we reach the coastline, we find sinkholes with connecting caves that are fully tidal. When the rain is abundant and the tide is low, they pump fresh water outward. When the opposite happens, they siphon saltwater in. Here divers MUST be vigilant to avoid becoming trapped in a siphoning coast sinkhole (called blue holes in the Bahamas).
As we proceed further seaward, our diving weather becomes ever more connected to the atmosphere.
Yes, tides bring cleaner water from the deep, low tides bring murky marsh water from shore. But wind generates waves that can reach down to the bottom and mix it all up.
Afternoon squalls are common close to the coast this time of year. If you are diving from a small boat, when the wind comes up and the waves reduce your underwater weather enough to retreat, returning home is not so peaceful.
All divers share a common concern for underwater visibility. Blame it on the weather.

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August 18, 2011

Life Support Investigations

As the Life Support Investigations teams coordinator, I am the one who gets the call that there has been another unfortunate diving incident.
The U.S. Coast Guard or sheriff’s office has someone’s diving equipment that needs inspection to determine if it has malfunctioned.
Over the years, our team of volunteer professionals that also dive Closed Circuit Rebreathers (CCR), have perfected protocols to evaluate diving equipment and the incident that surrounds them in the hope we may find ways to avoid diving injuries.
Our team came out of a Divers Alert Network (DAN) meeting to evaluate CCR fatalities. Since 1960 there have been around 180 deaths while using these life support platforms, but very little was investigated at the time, so there was little known about the cause.
The outcome of the meeting resulted in my invitation to create a protocol to investigate future incidents.
I started with what authorities were currently using. Because the list was extensive, I invited several colleagues to join me in sorting out what may work and what may not. I invited Dr. Joerg Hess (a frequent contributor to this column), who is an engineer, and Dr. Jon Conard, M.D., who practices Emergency Medicine and is a hyperbaric chamber medical officer.
Also asked to assist was Suzanne Floyd, a former Florida Department of Law Enforcement investigator, now teaching criminology at Gulf Coast Community College.
We sorted and debated every step. In the end, we compiled a multi-page document that begins at the dive site with steps to preserve data contained in the equipment, then advises the medical examiner on what to look for if there was a fatality, extends through a performance analysis of the life support technology and finally an analysis of the incident itself from police records.
We were then asked to test the protocols on an old case and found limited success.
After that, agencies began requesting our assistance. Today, our team is organized as a not-for-profit corporation with a few more investigative specialists, including an attorney and two-deep representation (in case of conflict of interest).
What began as research into a protocol to collect better data has developed into a pro bono service to law enforcement.
And what have we found?
As in most cases on land, the prevailing contributor to a diving incident is human error.
While there are many contributing factors such as distraction, complacency and poor judgement, one stands out more than the rest: Exceeding ones level of training.
The individual who dives beyond his depth limit faces more unknowns than he is prepared for, unfamiliar technology behaves in an unfamiliar way, and new places (like a cave) cause people to perform in an unsafe manner if you are not trained for it.
There is an old saying common to many high risk activities. There are old divers and there are bold divers, but there are no old, bold divers.
I have taken this experience into our classroom, and used it in lectures, training all levels from basic scuba all the way up to Advanced Rebreather Cave Diving.
We strongly believe in the National Association of Underwater Instructors motto: Safety Through Education.
All of our courses are longer so that we can expose our students to the greater volume of information available.
Diving is relatively safe if you know what you are doing!

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August 25, 2011

More about living underground.
I wanted to live underwater, but had to settle for a subsurface dwelling when no one would let me build next to a river.
I visualized the river flowing past my front window, just underwater. Thus, in the early 1980s on five acres in Wakulla County, I dug a very large hole between very large trees, and set about forming a very heavy foundation structure.
What I discovered as I dug into what I expected to be pure sand, was floating boulders the size of small cars made up of St. Marks limestone. Removing them was no small feat. At eight feet down, I found a more stable bedrock upon which I set my house.
I used a backhoe, a tractor with a small bucket in the back, to chisel out the concrete forms into the limestone bed rock into which I set steel rebar. I planned to pump 110 cubic yards of concrete to hold my house firmly in place.
But as the pour date approached, we found a small complication. With each afternoon rain storm that temporarily filled my very large hole in the ground, an ever enlarging drain was developing right in the middle!
My civil engineer father looked in one day and said “Son, you have what we call a sinkhole in the bottom of your foundation,” and called for as much debris to fill it as possible. We filled the hole for days with no end in sight.
He finally changed the design of the foundation to be like a bridge or cap spanning the hole with extra concrete to fill the sinkhole up. The day of the concrete pour was eventful as we did not know if the hole would be plugged or just drain a small fortune of concrete away. It worked as the concrete set up within the frames as planned.
The rest of the house went up over the years, 80 cubic yards plus more than a than 1,000 cinderblocks in the walls and 50 cubic yards in the ceiling, then three feet of dirt on the top, making this structure very heavy, but sturdy.
I am told the life expectancy of my building is in excess of 500 years, unless it falls into a sink hole.
Less than a decade later, I became a cave diver. And a decade after that I began diving a cave located a mile away from my home that is part of the underground rivers of Wakulla.
Had I known then what I know now, I would have dug the hole in my foundation deeper, and built a trap door in my floor for easier cave access.
More importantly now, I suspect one day our intrepid cave explorers will swim under my house and see this debris pile capped by a concrete plug and wonder what happened.
Speleogenisis, or the act of continuous cave formation, may be eroding my foundation.
So, please call me when you do.

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September 1, 2011

Cave diving season

Our winter training and cave diving season has started. This past weekend I was training folks in Cavern diving, which is an extension of open water diving.
Most folks fly in from around the world for training in our caves. We host them in Wakulla County. Their departure sometimes creates a problem as they like to dive right up to their gate call at the airport. For safety reasons we cannot allow this. Here is why.
Diving is a full contact sport, your entire body is involved, resulting in an off-gassing period that can last up to 24 hours (and more) after you surface from your dive.
One of my students in this weekend’s class announced near the end of the class on Sunday that his flight was to depart Monday morning at 7 a.m. Why is this a problem?
We live in a pressure world, in an atmosphere when above water and a hydrosphere when under water. Our air-filled atmosphere decreases in pressure as we travel upwards away from the planet’s surface. Our water filled hydrosphere increases in pressure much faster as we drop in depth.
Our body is mostly made up of water. Our liquid-filled tissues require gases to live. These gases are in balance with the pressure outside our body at sea level. But when we go up in the atmosphere our tissues off gas. When we go down in the hydrosphere, our tissues on gas.
The longer or deeper our body stays underwater, the more inert gas (Nitrogen in the case of air or Nitrox breathing gases) enters our body’s tissues. The more inert gas in our tissues when we reach the surface, the longer it will take for this gas to exit the body.
We may even need to spend extra time at shallow depths to decompress before getting out of the water. And all is well as long as we stay at sea level long enough after a dive to let the gases get back in balance with the atmospheric pressure.
But if we prematurely travel 1,000 feet or more above the surface of the water, we risk injury as this inert gas that normally is in solution in our tissues tries to exit our tissues in the form of bubbles. Most aircraft have a cabin pressure of 8,000 feet!
So what is a safe surface decompression schedule before boarding a plane?
In Hawaii it meant we could not drive home over the middle of the island as the mountain pass was higher than 1,000 feet. Visitors to the Caribbean who scuba dive are often cautioned to spend extra time ashore before returning to the States for fear of decompression sickness caused by the radical reduction of pressure while flying. So what can we do?
The National Association of Underwater Instructors (NAUI) recommends waiting for a period of 24 hours after a dive before taking a flight home. The U.S. Navy has a policy of waiting for 12 hours after what is described as a recreational dive and longer for more arduous dives.
Other agencies have as little as a two-hour waiting period after a dive. Each option carries an increased risk of injury, and must be considered carefully. But wait you must, or expect an injury that may require a costly chamber ride to cure.
Most dive tables and dive computers will take a full day to predict that your tissues are clear of any imbalance of gasses. As such, The NAUI recommendation seems prudent.
After all, the safest dive is no dive at all.

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September 8, 2011

Academic Diving Program

My current rebreather student is a direct product of seeds I planted 25 years ago. While a graduate student at Florida State University (FSU), I collaborated with fellow students to create a service program to assist us in our underwater research activities. Since we had no money but plenty of ideas, little official status but plenty of time, we decided that working together for a common good just might get us what we wanted. Back then we were young and naive. But the program was born of countless contribution at all levels.
At first, we collected diving equipment, then took it to the facility to store and disperse it. We informally taught basic diving as a reward for service. Those who wanted access must also participate in acquisition and maintenance. Before long, we were training our own interns, so called “wannabes.” And finally we were asked for an identity.
I rushed out and had a printer make me and the others in the group a business card that said Academic Diving Program (ADP). By the time I completed my graduate training, I was offered a faculty position to continue expanding this unique and popular program.
Across the next decade, we grew into better facilities on campus, expanded opportunities and supported more research. We joined national organizations of like mind and hosted their conventions at FSU. The provost noticed and offered to unify all campus diving under our ADP.
By the second decade our program had four staff members, annually taught 12 credits worth of classes in three departments, assisted a large diving club and supported millions of dollars of aquatic research conducted by faculty in seven departments. Our shared locker was valued at more than a million dollars. We saw the creation of an Underwater Archaeology specialization in the Anthropology Department and continued growth in underwater scientists on the faculty.
When I moved my faculty position to Panama City to teach the Scientist In the Sea Program in 2000, our ADP was supporting 500 people a year for a total of $200,000 price tag (and that included my salary as well).
Was it worth the investment? I found my answer today when my Rebreather student revealed why he is who he is today.
Mark graduated from the University of Florida (UF). Early in his studies he worked as an intern for the Academic Diving Program at UF, a sister program that took on our name and model during our earlier years. There he learned valuable skills and experiences that convinced him to seek a degree in marine science. He later worked for Dr. Bill Lindberg at UF. Bill was one of our early ADP graduate collaborators that participated in our formative years. Mark went on into fisheries science and is today returning for a continuation of his technical training at the next level, that of rebreather diving. He said that he would never have achieved his success had the UF-ADP not been there for him a decade ago, and the UF-ADP would not have been there had a few poverty stricken graduate students not decided to run on a dream that if we all pitched in, synergism would help us all.
Sadly, today both ADP programs are nearly gone, remnants of their former glory and influence on the emerging student populations on both campuses. What will it take to spark that enthusiasm again? Over my graduate desk in 1975 I had a sentence posted that read: CAUTION, ENTHUSIASM is EPIDEMIC.

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September 15, 2011

Let the winter festivities begin!

We are in transition.
The store at Wakulla Diving Center is much quieter now than last month. As the days get shorter, the nights get cooler and the kids are back in school, interest in diving is changing in our neighborhood.
Folks may go for that last fishing trip now that gag grouper season is open again, but for the most part, the diving season will now giving way to the hunting season.
Well, with college football on Saturday and professional football the rest of the time, what can we expect?
We know the ocean will get cold and stormy in the winter anyway. Most recreational divers are hanging up their fins and storing their cylinders until next summer.
OK, be sure to wash the salt out of your dive equipment first and then dry everything thoroughly before storage.
Do not store rubber goods in the garage next to the AC or hot water heater as they emit ozone. Ozone will cause the rubber to rot. Salt will corrode your metal parts.
Wet suits need to be stored flat, not on hangers, as the neoprene will stretch. Be sure to store your aluminum cylinders full, not half empty.
Fire (should you have one in your house) will cause the cylinder pressure to increase (five psi for every degree the surrounding temperature rises). Your cylinder’s burst disk pressure will not be reached before the cylinder walls will fail and the cylinder will explode, adding shrapnel to your misery.
A full cylinder will burst its overpressure disk and just make a lot of harmless noise.
Don’t forget to service your spear guns and regulators now so that they will be ready for the new diving season.
Most of you know that Wakulla Diving Center is not just a recreational dive store like the other dive shops in our area.
It is true that we have had a great summer season thanks to our diving community. We have asked for your help to identify what you want and provided it as best we could. Thank you.
But now a different community is stepping through our doors. With the cooler weather and less rainfall, our cave waters are clear and will soon be warmer than the air above them.
Technical divers from all over the world converge upon us for training on rebreathers, cave and deep (mixed-gas) diving.
This month I have two classes that keep me busier than I am during the summer. We have classes packed in right through the end of the year.
Yes, we still offer basic through advanced recreational diver training supported by our intern program and a growing list of Associate Instructors. Winter is a good time to get Nitrox or Advanced qualified.
As you also know Wakulla Diving Center has a larger staff now that Nicole has returned to the University of Rhode Island. Our new store manager is Keith Davis, a respected spear fisherman, who is expanding our selection of guns and merchandise services. Our Technical manager, Travis Kersting, is expanding the options for blended gasses (more gases), better hydro station and machine shop. He is still available for any regulator repair or cylinder maintenance service you may care to request during the winter.
Otherwise you will find him in the back renovating our new facility soon to be called under pressure. Look for it next summer!
And yes, it has taken us six months to replace the front door, destroyed by vandals, with a new etched door by the same artist.
Let the winter festivities begin!

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September 22, 2011

Lost a light while cave diving

Yesterday I lost a light while diving with my Cave Diving class.
The student’s primary cave light, a battery operated 21-watt LED system costing well over $1,000, ran out of power and flickered out 900 feet inside the cave at Peacock Springs State Park.
Normally we would stop the dive plan and exit the cave under a diminished capacity using a small back up light. My primary was bright as ever, and we still had more exercises to complete, some with eyes closed, so I pulled my spare primary light from my leg pocket and gave it to him.
The new LED light worked for another 400 feet, but then it failed also. Upon its recovery, I slid the light with its cable and battery canister back into my leg pouch and began the exit.
Our exit from 1,300 feet was uneventful until I climbed out of the water to find my $1,200 light missing. We were the last out before the park closed, so I returned this morning.
Mind you, we must train 100 miles from our shop because we cannot dive at Wakulla Springs State Park, so I drove 200 miles to return this morning before they opened to recover the light.
Early in the morning, the park was quiet, the water still and undisturbed, the wildlife, above and below the water, peaceful.
On our 2,600-foot journey, we passed through grand arches over large sand and mud dunes with blind crayfish, amphipods and shrimp scurrying around on the floor and up into the crystal clear water around us. Catfish bumped into walls as we passed by, not used to our bright lights.
I was reminded that what organics we encountered came into these caves when the caves flood, the result of heavy rains that may overflow the Suwannee River. The intruding waters can move these sand dunes around redesigning the floor every year.
Occasionally I saw an eroded Pleistocene gray clay bed exposed below a sand dune. Elsewhere, I might have seen a Miocene bed of yellow clay with protruding fossil sea urchins, but not here.
The walls and ceilings are a light cream color, and sculptured works of art. Dome ceilings abound, each a different design with flying buttresses, hanging rock curtains and multiple arches. I passed by what looked like a tree trunk that split into two strong branches before blending into the ceiling. The cave line ran through an elevated hole in the wall. Arched passages exit from our main corridor in all directions but we are bound to a main line so as not to get lost.
I feel like I am strolling down an art gallery stunned by the beauty of the surrounding detailed design. There is only silence and our muffled rebreather breathing.
I reflected on our passage this morning that many thousands of others must have done before me, that this wonderful pleasure is a benefit afforded to me as a resident of the state of Florida, a privilege I am willing, like so many others, to pay for (I paid $214 this morning for an annual instructor fee). As a visitor to Florida Parks, I enjoy strolling through these trails, no different from those who walk the surface trails, and with the same impact.
Like everyone, I want these trails preserved for future generations! But why can’t I take these underwater trails in my home county of Wakulla?
Yes, we found the expensive light, right where it fell out of my pocket. But the stroll was priceless.

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September 29, 2011

John Spicer

Natural Place to Be

By John Spicer

Wakulla County has been known for years as the “Natural Place to Be,” and indeed it is just that.
I can think of few spots on Earth which offer as many varied ways to rejoice and share in God’s exquisite creation.
It is a birdwatcher’s heaven and a hunter’s prey-ground and a fisherman’s fantasy.
Every Friday, my day off, I’m like the proverbial kid in the candy shop — I can’t make up my mind what to do first: kayak on the rivers, bicycle at the St. Marks Refuge, or hike the Florida Trail, or … go for a dive in the waters off and/or in this beautiful part of the world.
Hiking on the Florida Trail, in the Wakulla Springs State Park, through national forest land … and the flat forest floor begins to drop and below, water … but not a puddle and not a pond. A sink. Sinkhole. And if it were possible to look underneath the water’s surface….
Anywhere you sit, anywhere you walk, anywhere you run, anywhere you ride a bike, you’re probably walking on (or rolling over) water. The Wakulla Springs Cave system is one of the largest in the world.
Yes … It is the NATURAL place to be.
The Wakulla County Dive Club came into existence in November 2007. We meet on the first Saturday of every month at 5 p.m., usually at Christ Church Anglican, 3383 Coastal Highway in Crawfordville.
We formed the Club as a non-profit educational and social organization for the purposes of drawing those who love the sport together to:

  • Promote safe participation in recreational scuba diving.
  • Foster an interest in scuba diving by providing leadership, programs, services, and trips.
  • Provide education in the skills of safe recreational scuba diving, especially those related to safe cave diving.
  • Further advance the protection of the aquatic environment.
  • Provide for social interaction between club members.

The club’s membership is truly international, but primarily local. Most of our membership hails from Wakulla area but we have members from all over the country and the world.
We are especially eager to offer our services to be of any help we can be in protecting our local aquatic environment. Unlike those who dive Wakulla waters for scientific studies only, most WCDC members live right here. We’re available. We care deeply for our fragile ecosystem.
Have you ever lost anything of value in a sink, a spring, a river, the Gulf?
Do you have access to, and/or own property with a sinkhole or spring?
Is the sinkhole full of cars? Trucks? Appliances? Cans? Bottles? Your wallet? Precious antiques?
Or would you just like to know what’s down there?
Call the club! We can do cleanup! And just in case, we have attorney-approved waivers, or we will happily sign one of your own.
Do you need to test your pond/spring/river/sink water? We have expertise.
And join us for our next meeting on Saturday, Oct. 1 at 5 p.m. at Christ Church Anglican. Our speaker will be Michael Dunning from the Isle of Mann, U.K., who has vast experience over decades of diving.
Hear about recent dives and reports on local conditions. Meet other divers. Get involved in our efforts to bring big tourist dollars into Wakulla County by opening more sites.
Enjoy the fellowship.
Questions: please call Club President John Spicer at (850) 445-4062.

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October 6, 2011

Wakulla County has seen lots of sea level changes

Fear of rising sea levels appears to be justified.
Since 1930, global sea levels have risen 10 inches. But projections due to global climate change are for an additional three to six feet by the end of the century.
Sea level change however, is not new to Florida or Wakulla County, geologically or historically speaking.
In the past, Wakulla County has been both underwater and further elevated 40 or more feet above sea level. Florida was once an island with a surrounding water passage right through our county, which may be responsible for our abundant sand.
But more interesting is our recent lower sea level, during the last 10,000 years. The land offshore of Wakulla extended out over now inundated land some 20 or more miles.
Across this landscape, rivers drained the slopes. Sinkholes, springs and other karst features prevailed amongst forested terrains. Over the last several decades Dr. Joe Donoghue of the Florida State University Geology Department has been mapping submerged rivers and other karst features off our coast.
Anthropologists used this data to predict human occupation sites, given that back then the land was dry.
We also know that early man occupied this land back 10,000 to 12,000 years ago. We predict early man occupied villages adjoining water features. By tracing the submerged river beds in Apalachee Bay, Dr. Michael Falk of the Anthropology Department at FSU, searched and found evidence of inundated prehistoric occupation in an inundated oxbow of the river in what now has 11 feet of sea water overhead.
I often decompress at the opening of caves, in broad daylight. Decompressing can take a lot of time, something we occupy by inspecting the substrate.
I often find chirt flakes, tossed in the water during the knapping of arrow points by early man. Imagine a knapper enjoying the brisk morning air, while sitting over a boiling freshwater spring. All his mistakes and residual flakes get tossed into the water, for me to find thousands of years later.
I was preparing to dive a favorite local cave last week when a car drove up and the driver, seeing that we were serious divers, said he knew of karst features offshore. Of course we know of several, such as Ray Hole and Escudo, long suspected to include artifacts.
He expanded upon those we knew of, to include some reported to be bigger than Wakulla Springs.
Imagine what we will find when we get a chance to visit!

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October 13, 2011

When diving, we used to breathe a mixed gas called Air.
Air was cheap, plentiful and easy to compress into cylinders that we would strap on our backs, and carry beneath the waves.
This mixture has the same ingredients as what we breathe on land but underwater everything changes. Pressure increases rapidly underwater altering the Air mixture into a less useful medium.
Physics explains that each of the two dominant components of Air (Nitrogen and Oxygen), radically increase, the deeper we go underwater.
Nitrogen becomes complicated, causing narcosis below 100 feet, and accumulates in tissues over time to increase the risk of decompression sickness if not closely monitored. Even the prince of gases, Oxygen, can become toxic at depth.
Dr. Morgan Wells, diving officer for the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration, said Air was not the ideal breathing gas for divers.
In the 1950s, Andre Galern of the International Underwater Contractors, began altering Air by adding oxygen and feeding it to his commercial divers. This proprietary gas gave his company twice the bottom times over his competitors. His divers were more productive post-dive, so he began to make more money with fewer injuries.
During the 1970s, Dr. Wells studied this gas and adopted it for scientific divers, publishing tables for Nitrox in 1979.
By 1984, Dick Rutkowski, Wells’ assistant, formed the International Association of Nitrox Divers. Soon thereafter I was invited to survey the fish population on the Tenneco Template off Fort Lauderdale. We began the project breathing Air as it was our only protocol. The work was exhaustive, leaving us so fatigued that we could barely find our bunks to sleep between a round-the-clock diving schedule.
Mid-project we were invited to try a mystery gas. After the first dive, I recall the lights becoming brighter, the energy return and the survey come alive! We were supercharged.
Making Nitrox can’t be that hard, but it is.
The most hazardous aspect of Nitrox is blending the gas. We usually start with Air and either take the offensive nitrogen out or dilute Air by adding 100 percent oxygen to it. Either way we get a variety of “blends” — the most popular being 32 percent.
Pure oxygen is hazardous because it encourages fire. Provide a spark, a combustible material and your blending station is ablaze! Many homes were burned down before the diving community convinced folks to leave the blending to professionals.
We began to blend by cascading pure oxygen into an oxygen cleaned cylinder and adding Air to the working pressure of the cylinder. The math is simple. But the labor to clean the cylinders and mix the gas is costly. So we graduated to small and later large storage cylinders.
As Nitrox become more popular, we expanded and began blending the oxygen through an oxygen service compressor. And as demand continued, we finally graduated two weeks ago to using liquid oxygen (LOX).
Over the past two weeks we converted 180 cubic feet (cf) of liquid oxygen into 5,000-cf of gaseous oxygen; and we compressor-blended 50,000-cf of 32 percent Nitrox now stored in banks at the Wakulla Diving Center.
That is more Nitrox than we made for an entire year a decade ago. I think our fellow divers have discovered a better way to dive!
With Nitrox, at two cents more per cf, Air is no longer the preferred breathing gas.

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October 20, 2011

Government cutbacks are a part of our current economic landscape.
At an American Academy of Underwater Sciences conference I attended last week, I found our National Undersea Research Centers (NURC) had been shut down.
Indeed, the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration’s Diving Program itself has been curtailed severely.
What does this mean to us in Wakulla County?
In 1988, a fledgling NURC out of Wilmington, N.C., sent engineers and scientists to assist a struggling underwater achaeology project at Florida State University to find ways to safely work at 160 feet where they studied the remains of early man.
Florida’s first workshop on the application of Notrox and Trimix to underwater research was conducted at the FSU Marine Lab and validated at Wakulla Springs with Trimix dives to 150 feet. Attendees took design and practical information back to their Florida facilities that would not have been possible without the assistance of the NOAA NURC participation.
In 1992, this same NUR Center sent us a hyperbaric facility and staff to support a NOAA-funded diving physiology study conducted by Dr. Richard Vann and myself. These folks worked in Wakulla County for more than a month while we tested a theory that people could be subjected to three times the safe dive time and return to the surface without injury by breathing 100 percent oxygen after each exposure.
Forty subjects were sent to 120 and 80 feet in Wakulla Springs three times a day for six days straight. The NURC crew monitored the safety of these subjects around the clock. And the results were amazing, supporting a fundamental change in how we manage diving protocols nationwide.
These same folks assisted many other universities in the Southeast, ultimately sponsoring the only functional underwater habitat in the U.S., currently located in Key Largo. They will be sorely missed.
A habitat is an underwater house where diving scientists can live while exposed to pressure, in residence in the ocean. Every morning you go to work at a shop or office while they go to work on a reef. At the end of the day you both go home, the scientist swims while you walk.
I am troubled by our current economic distraction.
How many more futuristic programs will fall in the wake of our political discontent?

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October 27, 2011

Scientist in the Sea program.

I first lived underwater in 1974 as a new breed of underwater scientists during the U.S. Navy sponsored Scientist in the Sea program.
We spent three days in the Hydrolab at a depth of 50 feet next to a beautiful coral reef off Grand Bahama Island. I was thrilled to experience the three dimensional freedom and opportunity to spend an unlimited time studying sea creatures that had now become my neighbors. And they were as curious as I.
The sun rises later underwater, in part due to the angle of the sun’s rays, resulting in long dawns and dusks. After a quick breakfast in our single dry chamber habitat, we adjourned to the fill station next door. All you needed was a mask to see as we dropped out of our hatch in the floor and popped up in the fill station.
There, we filled a set of doubles for each of us, attached a regulator and fitted fins to feet before picking up recording slates, cameras and other data collecting tools and falling to the sand below to put it all on. My team was determined to characterize an anemone complex of associated creatures. The anemone looked like harmless algae, but stung like Fire Coral so we needed to hover above them carefully.
They were plentiful and lived all over the reef down to 90 feet.
The rest of the day consisted of searching for an anemone, describing the creatures that lived on it and its location on the reef.
Every hour I set my tools down and swam back to the fill station to recharge my cylinders, get a drink and a bite of food, then return to continue the search. It was not long before the sun could be traced across our horizon, rather like watching your ceiling as the shadow of the chandelier moves from one end of the room to the other.
Dusk meant it was time to go home, eat supper and share entertainment watching fish watching us through a giant window.
A bright light above the window brought all manner of creature by for a visit. Some ate each other while gaping at us watching them. Exhaustion would soon overtake us unless we could slip out for an evening rendezvous.
Our lights added color not seen during the day, but attracted too many plankton that would get into our hair. Still, our night creatures were as fascinating as our day neighbors.
I saw fish and divers doing silly things: both standing on their heads, chasing each other as in tag and picking on each other in search of food. Strange to think of yourself as a food topic.
In three days we collected enough data to publish a paper in the Bulletin of Marine Science, something I returned the next year to repeat from the surface using traditional diving, that took 30 days.
Inner space is right at our door and as wonderful as outer space.

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November 3, 2011

Jack Rosenau

Jack Rosenau turned 92 last Friday.
Many of you attended his party on Old Fort Drive in Tallahassee. He is best known locally for his many contributions to the U.S. Coast Guard Auxiliary at Shell Point, serving in nearly every capacity available including the evening Air Patrol.
Many of his exploits have been heralded by Sherrie Alverson in the adjourning column so I will not repeat them here.
What is less known, but equally impressive is that his “real job” was with the U.S. Geological Survey as the Florida’s hydrologist. Most of us searching for windows into the Karst relied on decades of Jack’s baseline water quality documents. He summarized them in a government printed book called “The Springs of Florida.” Those of us who could keep a copy were popular since the referenced springs had latitude/longitude GPS coordinates, as well as water quality data.
He visited as many of the springs as possible taking flow, chemical signature and morphological descriptions long before many of us were terribly concerned.
He worked with a few cave divers, but back then, cave diving was a secret society. He did discover new springs and once named one “Kini” in Wakulla, a Hawaiian name for his wife.
I discussed underground water flow with him, but had little to contribute until Parker Turner joined our program at FSU. By then Jack had retired, one step ahead of the computer, an unwelcome intrusion into his world.
I am moved to write this column about his contribution after attending Dr. Todd Kincade’s recent presentation at Wakulla Springs where his Project Baseline was discussed. The impressive Google Earth frame upon which the Karst features are overlaid represents technology not available back in Jack’s time.
But monitoring these features is not new, not invented by Global Underwater Explorers and certainly rich in historic interest. Project Baseline can become a very useful database if we see it as a continuation of previous pioneers.
And I am proud to call him Dad, the father of my wife. Happy birthday, Dad.

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November 10, 2011

DEMA

You may have noticed we were closed most of last week. We all packed out to Orlando to attend the annual Diving Equipment and Marketing Association (DEMA, of which we are members) trade show.
Every year the dive industry meets nationally to display wares, network to improve market share and visit with members from around the world.
This show means non-stop discussions ranging from the latest’s rebreather designs to the recent training and injury reports. We mostly try to catch up with friends across a wide spectrum of the diving industry to see how they are fairing in this trying economy.
For Keith, Travis and Joseph, DEMA was a chance to absorb the grandeur of the community.
Travis spent the week in training on every conceivable dive technology possible. His complaint was that he did not get much of a chance to walk the floor and visit the 660 booths representing dive manufacturing, distribution, testing and monitoring, innovation, training and travel.
Keith negotiated new purchases for the store, reminding everyone that I had turned the management over to him.
Our intern Joseph attended seminars and probed dive technology and techniques that he can use as he moves into graduate school. What they all bring back to Wakulla Diving will improve our service to Wakulla County.
On the top of everyone’s list of questions to us was progress on diving in Wakulla County. I reported that we recognize the vast offshore resource that is currently under-used and our interest in expanding boat/diving access. We are discussing expanding our training options to include boating and spearfishing next year.
In this manner, folks can reliably find a way to get offshore to dive our many natural ledges and artificial reefs. I also reported that we continue our work with the Florida Department of Environmental Protection to open Wakulla to equal access cave diving.
Making Wakulla County an international diving destination is not a difficult concept, but will bring millions of dollars currently going to surrounding counties. I even proposed we dedicate a travel booth at the next DEMA (in Las Vegas) to “Diving the Caves and Offshore waters of Wakulla”– much like they currently do for the Bahamas. I’ll bet I will find community interest in that project.
Dr. Hess and I had to rush home early to start a new class in Cave Rebreather diving for a Finnish person. More international rebreather classes follow nearly every week until April, suggesting the economy is getting better or our services are catching on.
Call me at (850) 545-9198 and tell me what you think.
It is good to be home.

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November 17, 2011

Travis Kersting and Gregg Stanton after a lionfish hunt.

The pony bottle.

By Travis Kersting

I would argue that most people driving a car do so with a spare tire, perhaps a few tools and even a flashlight.
These people may go their entire driving career without ever having a flat or some other roadside emergency, but they still don’t go without these safety precautions.
In scuba such a redundancy means having an additional source of sufficient breathing gas available.
To handle emergency situations under water, the technical diving community, including cave divers, wreck divers and those folks doing very “deep” dives, have adopted the rule of thirds. This rule means that they use one-third of their breathing gas for descent and exploring, such as a wreck. They have one-third of their gas supply for their ascent to the surface. This leaves a third, which is for emergency situations, unplanned decompression obligations, or any other issue which might prevent return to terra firma.
These “technical” divers usually have a minimum of two large cylinders and frequently upwards of four or five. Each cylinder goes one-third unused if the dive goes as planned.
In contrast, most recreational open water divers don’t carry much for redundant equipment.
Recreational divers frequently come in asking me about something divers call a “pony bottle.”
When I started diving about 10 years ago, the pony bottles I saw were small.
Divers in my local area carried the small “Spare Air” branded device which contains a mere three cubic feet of air. Some carried a six-cubic foot tank and fewer carried a 13 or 19 cubic foot tank.
I rarely advise a diver to carry a pony tank. In my diving past I did carry one at some point, and still own a variety of them, but I have not carried one in three or four years.
Why?
Because most divers look for a pony bottle because they are diving deeper and they want it to get them back to the surface in case of emergency. That makes sense until you start looking at the math:
Your average diver uses about .5 to .7 cubic feet of breathing gas on the surface. As we descend we use DOUBLE that amount of gas at 33 feet. An aluminum 19 cubic feet that lasts for 27 minutes on the surface now only lasts 13 minutes. At 66 feet your cylinder lasts nine minutes.
Now most people who want a pony bottle say they only want it for dives between 130, which is the recreational limit, and 150 feet. These divers may get five minutes worth of gas from that cylinder assuming their breathing rate has not increased due to panic or work load.
I took a “Spare Air” to 146 feet and calmly took one full breath while kneeling on the bottom, with three friends watching. I took one more small breath and was out of gas. I switched back to my primary gas supply to finish the dive.
That experiment proved to me that I could easily drain that cylinder just getting to the surface, much less try and solve a problem, complete any necessary decompression, search for a buddy, etc.
As a result, I tend to urge people to carry a redundant supply of gas that is proportional to the dive profile they plan to do. In most cases that means a tank of considerable size.
Some of you will argue that you have a buddy with additional air, and you might be right. I can almost guarantee that at some point you will be separated from them for whatever reason. That would be a bad time to need them and their breathing gas just to get you home.
Just because you have a buddy doesn’t mean they have the ability to get you both out of trouble. If you are both low on gas and nearing the end of your dive when a problem arises then the buddy will be of little help.
If you are frequently pushing recreational depth limits, or approach decompression diving, or have a higher SAC rate, then you are probably a candidate for larger bailout supplies or even double cylinders.
The good news is: these larger tanks, and the training about how to handle them, are available today, unlike 15 years ago.
Each diver needs to evaluate their needs. You can never go wrong with visiting your local dive store, physically trying a dive with a redundant gas supply and asking lots of questions.
It’s not if you might need it, but a matter of when.

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November 23, 2011

Difference between training and mentoring.

By Kurt Mondlak

Yesterday, at a North Florida spring, I watched a group of new diving students conduct their first dives under the watchful eyes of their instructors.
As I observed them conduct the various drills required for their Basic Open Water certification, I realized that they would all likely soon be qualified to conduct basic scuba dives at any recreational open water dive site in the world after only completing four dives under supervision in a very controlled environment.
While statistics show that most newly certified divers will either not dive regularly ever again or will only dive with all-inclusive resorts or dive centers that provide them with supervision similar to that provided by their instructors during these training dives, some will continue their diving careers in more complex environments – either in our fresh water springs, the Gulf or the ocean.
For this minority of divers, are they truly ready, mentally and physically, to conduct these dives?
I think the answer to this lies in the difference between training and mentoring.
Training is conducted against a set of minimum standards. Mentoring consists of everything that is provided to the student beyond those standards.
In diving, this training consists of both academics and underwater skills.
Satisfactory demonstration of the required minimum standards in each of these areas by the student, while certifying them on paper to dive in a variety of more challenging environments, in reality provides them with something akin to a learner’s permit, allowing them to gradually build experience over a lifetime spent in this sport.
Unfortunately, many newly qualified divers often find themselves in situations for which they are ill-prepared during their first five to 10 open water dives.
Although there are few reported accidents involving these new divers, these initial unpleasant experiences during which they realize they may not be fully prepared to accept the challenges of a rough ocean or cold water may be partly to blame for the low number of open water diving graduates that remain with the sport.
In the absence of an increase in the training requirements which have existed for decades, the only way to produce new divers that are well-equipped to meet the challenges of the various dive sites they may visit is through mentorship.
This requires the instructor to take additional time to teach the many subtleties of the sport that not only make it safer but also more enjoyable.
This requires training beyond the required minimums, involves a combination of forming habits for pre-dive preparation, providing hints for equipment configuration of maintenance and providing guidance for in-water activities, and requires the instructor to make him or herself available after certification to continue the mentoring process throughout the early, formative stages of a diver’s career.
All of this additional knowledge is the result of the instructor’s vastly superior in-water experience and might not otherwise ever be developed in the student.
While I have related this situation to new open water divers, this problem exists at all levels of diving instruction, although the ratio of mentoring to instructing increases with more advanced certifications.
In reality, all instructors train.
Only the best truly mentor their students.

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December 1, 2011

Jobs in Wakulla County.

We all want to create jobs in Wakulla County.
But to create jobs, we must provide service or a product to sell.
I spend much of my time underwater. When I travel to dive sites for training to the east and west of Wakulla, I encounter folks from around the world visiting our fair state.
In November, I again met with the contingency from Finland, nearly all diving using expensive rebreathers. As before, they inquired on progress opening cave sites in Wakulla County. And again I could not assure them access to our caves. So they turned the tables on me.
In real terms, they bring 10 to 12 people over from Finland (every year) and stay in a house in Fort White. They pay to rent the house for two weeks. All dive every day at dive sites on either side of Wakulla County. They never dive Wakulla County because there is no opportunity to do so.
They spend in the range of $350 per day for lodging, and about the same in food, eating out every lunch and supper. They purchase diving supplies that average $170 per day, and vehicle rent and fuel at about the same level per day. And they pay entrance fees to private and public parks that average $300 per day.
That comes up to an average spending of $1,340 per day for this party from Finland. At two weeks, the average total is around $18,760 that this one group from Finland spent in Florida in November.
They gave me a challenge: Find them 10 good dive sites in Wakulla County and they will stay in Wakulla County next November. But to do so will require Wakulla County to provide services to attract them.
The Wakulla Lodge will be pleased to accommodate them at the Park. Their restaurant will be pleased to feed them, as will the many restaurants in Crawfordville, St. Marks, Spring Creek and Panacea. Yes, Wakulla Diving Center will be pleased to provide diving support for these folks. Even the Wakulla County Dive Club will be thrilled to assist.
The big question remains: Will Wakulla Springs State Park be willing to open the park’s underwater trails to the public? Of course it should be for a fee.
The Lodge at Wakulla Springs can hire more staff as they will rent more rooms. Indeed, the Lodge will become a much desired diving destination, worthy of travel agency promotion. The local restaurants can hire more servers to accommodate more clients. Our center will hire more staff to service the diving activity.
If Wakulla County can attract one such group each month, each of these activities can hire more staff for the year.
Want more?
Dr. William Huth published a study on the economic potential to opening the Wakulla Springs State Park to equal access cave diving (Huth & Morgan 2011, Journal of Marine Resource Economics). His figures are impressive.
Like the rest of the county’s merchants and service providers, I want to hire more staff, I want to see Wakulla County prosper, I want to attract eco-tourism business to our beautiful and sustainable natural resources. And the Wakulla Chamber of Commerce may add a page dedicated to diving in the county, much like they do for kayaking, fishing and hunting.
Can we work on this together?

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December 8, 2011

Thank you, DEP.
This journey began several years led by a band of local people with a vision that equal access to our underwater trails would bring greater opportunity to our Wakulla community.
They first organized as a club open to everyone. Their membership soon swelled to 100, many from outside Wakulla County.
Some members channeled their energy into locating and working with land owners of dive sites who were willing to share their sinkholes with others. Access was made safer with erosion reduction steps, large safety gold line mapping the underwater passages, and gate keeper policies.
Others organized site clean-up events when they discovered these dive sites were repeatedly inundated by folks dumping trash to avoid paying landfill fees.
Two years ago a small group of club members began to analyze the local economic impact possible should Wakulla County become an equal access diving destination.
Recently, the Wakulla Springs State Park downsized their staff and turned management of their Lodge over to a private concession because of a number of economic challenges. Discussions with their new Lodge manager revealed his interest to make the Park into an international destination to boost growth. Current restrictions on diving limit his options.
This group found Jackson and Lafayette counties applied equal diving access policies resulting in millions of dollars infused into their economy.
Dr. William Huth documented their success and published papers in peer-reviewed papers.
As a result of this success, people who dive have made these counties diving destinations.
When they lined the two counties up on a map, they realized Wakulla County was right in the middle and that if you include High Springs in Alachua County and Eagle’s Nest in Hernando County, a Cave Diver’s Trail with hundreds of dive site opportunities became obvious, all but Wakulla County, with equal access gate keeper policies.
Armed with these revelations, presentations were made to the Wakulla Tourist Development Council, Economic Development Board, Optimists Club and this week the Rotary Club to alert Wakulla citizens of the economic losses currently going elsewhere because of dive restrictions at Wakulla Springs State Park.
An assessment of the caves under the control of Wakulla Springs State Park was conducted this past summer by the state Department of Environmental Protection in an effort to understand why their caves were closed to equal access diving policies.
Leaders from the diving community participated on this review committee and made numerous recommendations. All agreed that an equal access gatekeeper diving policy similar to that maintained at Peacock Springs State Park was applicable to Wakulla Springs State Park.
Careful monitoring of the Gem of Cave Diving, the main vent under the diving tower, was also recommended.
I began this column by thanking DEP for their willingness to host a public hearing to permit everyone’s input into this very important opportunity. I have been assured that a date in mid-January will be announced this week, the site as yet undetermined.
I know you will have more information as soon as it is released right here in The Wakulla News. I hope to see you there!

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December 15, 2011

It is cold outside again.
But underwater on-shore (under Wakulla County lands) the temperature is still the same. Underground, Wakulla County temperatures remain a toasty 69 degrees year around until you reach sea water (which is warmer).
A current meter I placed in Wakulla Springs several decades ago measured flow rate changes that matched local marine tides. At other cave sites closer to the coast we routinely encounter a salt water lens at between 160 feet and 250 feet below the water table.
This warmer body of water intrudes northward in Wakulla based upon rain fall, water use and tides.
Knowing this constant temperature 30 years ago, I built my home underground. With a plus or minus 10 degrees fluctuation of the 69-degree ground temperature, I need only heat the entire house in the winter with a small wood burning stove and dry the summer air with a dehumidifier to be comfortable.
But when we locals dive (spending 100 minutes underwater on the average) in our caves, most of us wear dry suits.
Our Northern European and American visitors on the other hand, find our water like a bath tub and LOVE IT! Thus, our winters are their summers.
Off-shore, Wakulla County is a different matter. Off-shore we refer to surface and below the thermocline temperatures within recreational diving depths.
A thermocline is a rapid change of temperature over a few feet and usually defines a different body of water.
Surface waters are dependent on seasonal surface air temperatures, which in the winter can get down around 10 degrees. Wind mixes the exposed surface waters dropping the water temperature down around 50 degrees above the thermocline.
Our off-shore depths of the thermocline will vary depending upon storm intensity and ocean currents. Usually below the thermocline down to preferred recreational diving depths (around 130 feet) in the winter we find temperatures warmer than surface temperatures.
But upwelling and ocean currents can bring in very cold waters at our deeper recreational depths. Winter diving off-shore in our area is far less stable underwater than the conditions under our county.
Summer off-shore underwater conditions reverse the temperature regime. Warm surface conditions, down to the thermocline, heat up to the mid to upper 80 degrees.
In the Florida Keys, that temperature exceeds 90 degrees. No wet suit is required if you stay shallow off-shore. But below the thermocline temperatures are cooler even though they may be warmer than the winter months and wet suits are popular.
Cave divers routinely wear dry suits year round while ocean divers have a much larger wardrobe to stay warm underwater. And they both have seasonal interests and pressures to diving in Wakulla County.
Our store at Wakulla Diving Center shifts our inventory from thin wet suits in the summer, when the ocean divers dominate, to thick wet suits and dry suits in the winter, when the cave divers dominate our attention.

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December 22, 2011

Brick and mortar vs the internet.

By Travis Kersting

We all know someone who probably wouldn’t know what to do without the internet.
Sometimes it’s a young person who grew up surrounded by technology and sometimes it’s someone who grew up with a slide rule. They have internet on their phone, their computer, their television and they use it to complete even the most remedial tasks.
For example, we all know what a calculator is but Google solves complex math problems too, so why own a calculator?
The internet seems to have no bounds, as of yet. Divers and hobbyists now have access to 24-hour online stores where they can order almost anything they could imagine. There exist vast forums where people from across the globe can communicate in real time about their favorite subjects. Video sites offer user submitted how-to clips on nearly every subject, and all that without ever leaving your home.
I’m one of those people.
I grew up with it and I lived in an area with few people and fewer resources for good information. I frequently turned to the internet rather than the library, for information and for goods.
As a diver I would have to travel about two hours to a dive shop to find out they didn’t have what I wanted or I missed their open hours or the person who could help me was out in the field teaching a class. Naturally the internet was my best resource for dive equipment. Many times I knew about a product before my “local” shops (called LDS online) had. Sometimes I even had the product in hand before the LDS was able to order it from a vendor.
And prices online were almost always better. Between Ebay, Amazon, and Google I could find almost anything.
The reality was that I was also getting advice on forums. You, the user, pay nothing for the advice you are getting and sometimes that is what it is worth. The result was me owning and buying a number of things I didn’t really need.
I gathered my receipts one year and discovered that I had spent nearly $12,000 in one year on dive equipment. Much of that equipment I had turned around and sold in that same year, usually to buy something else for diving.
The internet is still a great tool. Where else could you find a video for assembling your diving harness at 2 a.m.? Well, if you had purchased that dive harness at a brick-and-mortar establishment they probably would have assembled it for you or with you so that at 2 a.m. you could be sleeping instead.
Some training agencies even offer dive instruction online. Some people embrace it while others laugh at it. Our current open water course takes about six to seven days to complete and includes lecture time, pool training, and time at both fresh water and saltwater dive sites.
Time in class is interactive and immediate. Travel to the sites includes stories and talk on all things diving, the time you spend in the store is spent learning about equipment and trying it on. You don’t get those benefits online.
I once mailed fins back and forth 3 times to an online store to try and get a pair that fit. I spent $8-10 in shipping each time. If I had gone to a store and tried them on I could have saved that money (and time) or upgraded fins. When I got a new item I dove it untrained and usually alone, experimenting on my own to figure out the best way.
I could have learned in hours or days, with an instructor, what took dozens of dives on my own sometimes. I didn’t get the benefit of the little tips and tricks that a good instructor can throw you.
There is a time and a place for the internet, it’s a powerful and handy tool, but it shouldn’t replace your LDS.

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December 29, 2011

I Live the Dream.
When I was but a child, I too read the fantasy novel called “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” by Jules Vern. That people could walk, let alone swim untethered from the surface or their submarine, was so thrilling to me that I jumped at any opportunity to swim underwater. I saw myself on those reefs in front of the Nautilus living the adventure. Early on I read or saw the movie on anything available from Cousteau’s Adventures, Marine Life, Mike Nelson and of course SCUBA diving. Reality and fantasy often overlapped, leading to an abundance of day dreaming. By age 13 I was skin diving in the Bay of Siam, and by 17, a scuba instructor in Hawaii. In 1965 my first scuba class at my Freshman college (where I also taught) dragged me to see A World Without a Sun which was about the first habitats deployed by Cousteau. Here were real people living and investigating the underwater reefs, not returning to the surface to sleep or eat. Living underwater was no longer a fantasy. It became my ambition, my dream.
My focus at college was everything marine, something very easy when living in Hawaii. And my best employment was the study of artificial reefs under the Cooperative Fisheries. With a degree in Zoology with a marine emphasis, I turned to the mainland for my search of Diving Science. After a few non-starter jobs as employment in the early 70’s was not good, I was invited to work at Harbor Branch Foundation Lab, home of the 4 person deep diving submarine, the Johnson Sea Link. And the dream began.
Two sit in the front, inside a glass ball with near 360 degree vision all around. Two sit in the aluminum back with almost no vision, but with lock out diving ability. The sub drops to deep depths and their rear occupants swim out to collect and study the reef while those in front instruct. The Nautilus reborn, the fantasy becomes a reality. Several years later I was invited to participate in the US Navy’s Scientist-In-The-Sea Program where graduate students spend a summer diving USN technology appropriate for undersea research. And I lived in an underwater habitat, just like the 1965 Cousteau film. I soon after joined Florida State University to complete my graduate degree, then accept a faculty position, and go on to develop the very successful Academic Diving Program with like-minded dreamers, for future like-minded dreamers that lasted 3 decades.
There is nothing so special about my journey that any dreamer could not replicate with enough imagination to lay in a self-fulfilling path. I was reminded of this fact last Sunday when I drove down to Eagle’s Nest next to Weeki-Wachee Springs and soon found myself with a student at 250 feet underwater, in clear warm water, not unlike Jules Vern’s vision for his divers of a century earlier. Our pedestrian dive was as common place as what was presented by Captain Nemo of his crew’s performance in support of the Nautilus. My next challenge is to decide on where to dream next!

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