Cathedral Re-Visited

[kensuf]

The following was posted this morning on Facebook. Since it involves active exploration in a cave with some history, I thought it might be of interest here.

Yesterday, Jonathan Bernot and I made a successful dive to the end of the line (and then some) at Cathedral Sink. Our primary objective was to make repairs to the existing line. We had no idea what the condition of the line was between 10,500' and the end of the line at 17,119' but knew from experience in the system that we would likely encounter large sections of buried line.

For the most part the line was in good condition but we did go through several shallow areas where the line was buried in large dunes. This slowed our progress as we had to either patch the line or pull it out of the mud. Around 14,000' the existing line was broken in an area that looked like a large Henkel restriction with a rocky floor. Jon tied in and and the passage quickly opened up into a low wide room. We followed the right wall and the passage tapered back down to where we could easily see both walls. The 20' visibility was considerably better than the first half of the system, which was down to 5-10' after the recent rains. There was not a scrap of line to be seen in this remarkably clean floored passage and I got the sense that we were off on a side passage. As the passage opened back up and Jon's 700' reel ended, I spotted the broken end of the existing line tied off on the left wall. I did a double take on the arrow that appeared to be pointing into the cave but quickly realized it was on the broken end of line that had been swept in that direction.

We were back in business. The line from there to the end of the line was in good condition but still a ways off, which was fully realized on the way out. We reached the end of the line and tied in. Jon dumped a 400' reel and the I tied in. I dumped about 200' before we ended up in a series of dead end slot canyons. As I checked the last one Jon dropped down and spotted small but going passage. This was not likely the way on so we decided to tie off and back up to see if we missed something.

At this point we had a bottom time of 188 minutes and knew that our return trip would take at least 120 minutes. Having decided to keep our bottom time around 300 minutes, we decided to leave further exploration for another day. We made good time on the way out and had a 309 min bottom time at an average depth of 133 ffw. I had a 680 min total dive time with about three hours in the habitat.

Many thanks to Robert Schulte who ran the surface; Ted McCoy and Ken Sallot for dropping two xk1s at 8,000' on Saturday; and Alan Pelstring, Jack Leeth, Derek Ferguson, Howard Smith, Kristi Bernot, Meredith Tanguay, Steve Cox, Blake Wilson, and Casey McKinlay for support.

Special thanks to D3 Diving, Suex, and DUI for your continued support.

 

[PfcAJ]

That's a bad ass cave dive.

Congrats to to the entire team!

 

[ucfdiver]

Impressive, great work guys!

 

[kensuf]

My first text to them this morning asked how their trigger fingers felt today.

 

[BigTex1836]

My first text to them this morning asked how their trigger fingers felt today.

Not as tired as the Alcahua Sink Defense Team's middle finger. ;-)

 

[karstdvr]

Great report.

Can relate. Couple times I laid out 400+ ft of line thinking I was laying line in unexplored passage, only to stumble on a broken end.

Pity how viz really is poor. I remember dives there 15 to 20 years ago where 20ft would be minimum, and 60' would awesome.

 

[kensuf]

When we started diving in the system, vis was 40'. That lasted two weeks. It's been anywhere between 10-15' ever since.

The first month was spent trying to patch and fix the old guideline. It was buried several feet under multiple sand dunes and was such a mess that several people dumped hundreds of feet in patches, only to find the patches were buried on their exit.

After three weekends of that we retrenched and took on a new strategy, and just decided to install new guideline on silt stakes and cut out all of the old patches and old guide line that we could. We dumped 7000' of new line beginning at Falmouth in the system on three dives. By the time we did the last install, which was October 10th, the visibility had dropped to 15', but we had new line out 4500' past Cathedral and had already installed safety bottles at 2200' and 4400'.

The time between October 10th and this past weekend was spent learning our way out to 8k and 10k, getting the habitat operational, plus bringing several new safeties in (and cleaning out old safeties left in from 2005). Visibility has remained a whopping 5-15', and depths have averaged 140-150' (the stretch from 7000' to 8000' is affectionately known as the 30 fathom freeway because it's a constant 180'). Deco has been running about 1.5:1 (minutes deco for minutes bottom) for any run past 7k out to 11k, that stretch at 180' just racks up the time and all of us have had that 6.5-7 hour day in the water there.

For the most part, the old guideline had been in decent shape, we only need to do a few patches here and there, but when Ted and Charlie went out to 10.5 two weekends ago they ran into a break that took 300' of new line. So honestly, we were not sure what to expect on Sunday and they did pretty much everything we hoped for.

The project is still on-going, all of us are taking a down week for family/holiday, but are already planning a few other weekends. There's a lead at 11k we want to check out, we are going to run some radio location, and SRWMD has asked us to collect samples/run a datasonde.

Several people that were not mentioned in Charlie's post have contributed in one way or another to this project. That includes Jef Frank, Bob Beckner, Gary Donahue, James Draker, Joel Clark, and of course the BOD of the NSS-CDS as well as the management at the SRWMD. Inspiration came from Sheck Exley, who was truly a beast of a diver, and although I never met him, I have incredible respect for what he accomplished, and a photo published by Mark Long that got Derek to start convincing us all to check this place out.

 

[kensuf]

Update.

Another successful exploration dive at Cathedral yesterday (December 6th) with Jonathan Bernot moving the end of the line out to 18,789'.

On Saturday, Ken Sallot and Jef Frank hauled two more safeties out to 8k and dropped a Suex xJoy 37 at 4k on their exit. After they returned, AJ Gonzales and David Doolette hauled another two safeties out to 4k. Jon and I departed around 1000 on Sunday morning towing two Suex xk1's each and riding a third. On the two and a half hour ride to the eol at 17,682' we picked up safeties at 4k, 8k, 10k, and 10.5k and dropped them at 12k, 14k and two at 16k. We now have the cave set up with twelve safeties (one every 2k and two every 4k).

When we reached the end of Todd Leonard and Bjarne Knudsen's line at 17,119' Jon started surveying the 563' we put in two weeks ago while I scouted the walls for potential leads. While Jon was finishing the survey and putting away his survey notes, I spotted an obvious lead just to the right of our tie off. It's amazing how easy it is to miss stuff in this system. After going in about ten feet to verify it wasn't a false lead, I tied in and started adding line with Jon behind me doing wraps. The passage was somewhat smaller with several low areas that required a bit of finesse. I turned my xk1 down to 2-3 and just slowly motored while adding line. This allowed me to look around a bit before committing to a particular direction. I was a bit discouraged by the smaller size passage and every room seemed like it was coming to an end but it just kept going. I was convinced we were on a side passage but after about 1,000' it opened back up.

As the reel ended I noticed our time was 196 mins. We both wanted to keep our bottom time around 360 mins. and had determined that we needed to turn and start surveying out at around 180 mins. We were also a little apprehensive about surveying back through the low sections so we (Jon really) resisted the temptation to pull out another reel. The survey went fairly smoothly other than Jon's compass breaking. We were using the two compass method that KUR divers had perfected on previous dives. This method is very fast with two practiced divers and gives a high degree of accuracy since one person's job is nothing but going to the next station and dialing in the azimuth. The second person counts knots and records all the data. This became a little slower with only one compass but still worked well.

The survey and exit commute went quicker than expected. Our bottom time was 353 mins. at an average depth of 133 ffw. Same average depth as the last dive. My total dive time was 750 mins. with a max depth of 184 ffw. The last three hours of deco was spent in the habitat followed by a slow 30 min. ascent to the surface.

Thanks to Ken Sallot, Jef Frank , AJ Gonzales, David Doolette, Derek Ferguson, Howard Smith, Eric Deister, Meredith Tanguay, Kristi Bernot, Ted McCoy, and Roberts Culbert for their support in the water and on the surface. I know it's a cliche but it's true that these dives could not be safely performed without such a great support team.

Special Thanks to Faith Ortins at DUI - Diving Unlimited International, Casey McKinlay at SUEX - The Submarine Exploration Company and D3 Diving, Jon and Kristi Bernot at Cave Country Dive Shop, and Lamar Hires at Dive Rite for their materiel support.

This weekend we will be doing some science. Specifically, we will be dropping beacons and performing surface radio locations at 6000' and 10,900', as well as collecting biological specimens and water samples.

You can also find out more information on Karst Underwater Research at https://sites.google.com/site/karstunderwaterresearch99/home

Ken

 

[PfcAJ]

This is really a big accomplishment. Cathedral is a challenging system and even though vis has been "better" recently it's still far from decent. The black walls swallow your light, the line(s) are hard to see, there is fine silt on the floor, and the cave is very big, not to mention the depth.

Moving through some 18000ft of cave in those conditions and loaded with gear is no small feat. Huge congrats are in order for Charlie and Jon.

 

[karstdvr]

This is really a big accomplishment. Cathedral is a challenging system and even though vis has been "better" recently it's still far from decent. The black walls swallow your light, the line(s) are hard to see, there is fine silt on the floor, and the cave is very big, not to mention the depth.

Moving through some 18000ft of cave in those conditions and loaded with gear is no small feat. Huge congrats are in order for Charlie and Jon.

Great comment. Cathedral at one time had some "fair" viz,but conditions have deteriorated over the years,so this had to be an extremely challenging dive.

I am happy to hear some water samples were captured, and it would be very interesting to see water samples compared to beginning of the cave to where viz is lowest, to distant areas where viz has been reported to change, and correlate that to location relative to agriculture being performed. Where it was clearly linked that Wakulla viz diminished due to the Tallahassee spray fields, that smoking gun isn't there for Cathedral. Having this will be valuable, because we are seeing the insidious decline at places like Ginnie, Peacock, and Little River, such that a number of years from now they may look like Cathedral.