Day 9 (Tuesday, July 14)
Reader, the conditions at Little River were not merely fabulous. They were close to the very best that Chris has seen in twelve years of Florida diving. It was so nice, we did guided dives twice.
I’m turning into a fan of same-day repeat dives for these new sites. Dive 1 is purely exploratory, so that I can take in the new cave. What’s it shaped like, how does the water flow, what is the substrate like, etc. Taking in all of these new stimuli is fascinating, but doesn’t do great things for my air consumption while I’m also trying to be a good diver and an attentive buddy. After taking a short break to hydrate and talk about the dive, I feel prepared to capitalize on the prior knowledge and enjoy myself more.
The basin at Little River was incredibly high when we arrived. The clear water from the spring was completely obscured by a layer of tannic water from the Suwannee that was about 3-4’ thick. Aside from jumping the tarp at Ginnie Springs to descend through Devil’s Ear, I haven’t spent much time diving in unsweetened tea before.
We tied off at the stairs and ran the line down to one of the logs across the entrance (
visual reference of Marissa Eckert there today, shot beautifully by one of her students). I wasn’t terribly concerned about the tannic on the way in because I was mentally preparing for new cave. However, once I had relaxed on the way out, it got weird. The morning clouds had disappeared and the sun was shining mightily into the tannic, rendering it a brilliant scarlet. Then I hit a warm spot and
ewwwww.
One day, I’d like to have dived in a non-aqueous fluid to say I did/have the experience. I am now quite certain that I do not want to go diving in a pool of blood.
Underneath the tannic layer, Little River continues to pump surely (the clarity was excellent), but ever so gently. I was ready for an Ear-type descent of awkwardly muscling myself around, but none of that was necessary. I enjoyed gently drifting down the (surprisingly!) steep passage with ease. It seemed like we had dropped from 20’ to the 90-100’ range in no time at all, even with a stop to clip off bottles around 55’.
We decided to bear left into the mud tunnel, which has abundant rocks across the floor – pulling saves a ton of air, which is helpful for me on Dive #1 at a new site. The passage has a very small slope, but does eventually hit 100-ish feet. On top of the New Cave Energy, I felt a little narked and a little nervous as we headed through a wide passage with low, low ceilings and what felt like a lot of bumps on the floor that narrowed vertical clearance. I dragged out my breathing cycle to the very Zennest calm that I could manage (7 counts in, 10 counts out) to cross it. The cave opened up significantly on the other side, which made me very happy. We managed a few jumps (the last one was just past a triangular plate on the line, if anybody can point that out to me on a map) before turning to head out.
The exit on the first dive was fairly smooth and uneventful. On the second dive (in which we made it past the triangular plate and made a hairpin turn into a wavy passage), the exit was a bit more complicated. I knew that my O2 bottle was going to be light when I picked it up, so I had been dumping air out of both my wing and drysuit in anticipation.
However, I wasn’t quite aggressive enough and had to take some extra, one-handed measures with my elbow and butt as far up into the air as I could manage. To the best of my knowledge, there is no footage of this particular manuever – and thank god! It probably wasn’t pretty. Once I had stabilized, I found a nice scalloped section of wall out of the flow, finished securing my bottle, and had a nice rest-of-trip up into the basin. We had a few minutes of deco and spent it taking photos of one another in the green-to-red transition layer:
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