IRAP Administrator
08-03-2007, 09:46 PM
I am sitting in a tube that was marked as side-mount passage on the map; I am splayed out as flat as I can get with my doubles, and feet scraping the ceiling and the clay about an inch below my stomach. I am completely still and all alone. It's like my 140th cave dive and I have never experienced fear on any of those dives, but now I am beginning to understand what being scared is like
My 50-watt halogen light does nothing in the thick black silt; I can only make out the glow from the bulb when I put it directly in front of my face. I never experienced visibility this bad, even in lakes, quarries, etc., just utterly rotten black all around me. I am following the procedures from my training: stop, realize that you are breathing and that's all you need to live, and wait for the silt to clear some, don't make it worse banging around the cave.
I notice a tug at my left leg and realize that my p-bolt has caught the line again, I slide my hand down the line to free the snag, and I feel a clothespin that I probably dragged with me as I passed through the last T as we were exiting. I unclip it from around the line and hold my light and the clothespin up against the glass of my mask and read the initials, it belongs to "T" the 3rd member of our team that was leading that way back out. He missed it in the silt I tell myself, hell I barely managed to notice mine and pull it off the arrow as I passed it. Maybe it had blown up the line and he couldn't find it, maybe he left it for "A" the dive leader for some strange reason.
Things were definitely f^^^^^ up. As I stared at my friend's clothespin I realized I had let go of the line and I couldn't see two inches past my mask. My heart skipped a beat and I concentrated on breathing, and I reviewed the mental image of the cave I had developed from studying the maps and slowly exploring this maze of passages over the last two years. I knew where I was, but your head starts to f^^^ with you and it was increasingly difficult for me to keep my s^^^ wired and not panic. I felt something bump into me from behind and a hand squeezed my leg, I wasn't alone at least, it was "A" catching up to me as he negotiated the wormy silted out passage behind me.
Nothing ever was so sweet, to be with someone and not alone. I would have made it alone but now I didn't need to, and it was better, and I still to this day can't understand why you would ever want to solo cave-dive. I swept the tiny perimeter of the passage as he gave me a move-forward shove staying in touch contact. I found the line in a couple of seconds wedged into a tight little trap on my right side on the ceiling. I reached back and handed "A" the clothespin to see if he had any ideas, but it was so tight and silted there was little to do but move forward blindly, touch communications were it. Later he told me I gave the clothespin to him much later in the dive, my head f^^^^^^ with me, or his head maybe.
Turning back would have been worse I realized later as I ran the sequence of events through my head over and over again. There was no way we could have turned around and fumbling around in that mess would have been worse than exiting. We finally emerged from the tight little passage going through the last duck-under with my scooter ring digging up one last scoop of clay to throw yet another poof of silt into the junction point where we had tied in 400-500 feet of line (yeah, more than half of a 800 foot reel anyway). Just what we needed, some more silt. I saw SID on the reel and knew everything was going to be all right.
We had driven down that day from Tennessee for a long weekend of cave diving, and were looking for something that may or may not exist, some place that would be new to the three of us. The drive down was uneventful with the Power stroke loaded to the top of the bed with full gear for the three of us and most the stuff for two more of the group that would be diving with us the next day. We joked on the way down about my previous life 20 years ago working on a sod farm in eastern PA and me being the talker that I am kept describing the various tractors, large trucks and pretty much every piece of machinery that I had used while working there. My friends are from the south are pretty polite and will let me go on for quite a while before they tell me I need to shut up, politely of course.
We got stuck in some traffic below Atlanta and pulled up alongside an ancient 3 door (yes 3 doors per side) Ford truck with two kind of rough looking dudes smoking generic cigarettes, dressed in dirty camouflage décor. The back of the truck contained about 10 filthy kids of various ages and questionable genetics all sort of crawling around, eating sleeping, screaming and just what a pile of dirty little kids. The bed of their truck was filled with bicycles, stuffed animals, a rotten looking mattress with a gas can and tire tied down next to a lopsided computer (386 vintage it looked like). Everything was covered with a flapping blue tarp that really wouldn't have kept their stuff dry in the event of rain during their flight from Michigan to Florida (just a guess on my part). Behind the Ford the women of the of what appeared to be two families followed in another broken down hunk of sh*t Nissan truck, and when the traffic got to a standstill various representatives from the two trucks would run back and forth switching seats in the two vehicles, with cigarette smoke blowing out the open windows and trash falling onto the highway whenever a door opened.
Just hysterical. I came from a working class family and would never openly make fun of someone being poor, but this was just too funny and we laughed our asses off. We affectionately nicknamed them the "S^^^ Family Robinson", which may seem mean but it was too funny under the circumstances. I just kept on saying, " The kids come from f^^^^^^, you just need to quit f^^^^^^ or you will get more kids!" of course with the truck window shut.
We got into the Cadillac with out too much delay from the traffic and then after unloading our gear we weren't going to dive that night, we headed over to Devil's for a nice tune-up dive to explore some side passages a little off the beaten path within the first 1500 feet of the cave. We staged to give us a little bit more time to leisurely poke around in some areas we hadn't gone into for a while. We made an easy drop where Hill 400 meets the mainline, and headed up to the thousand foot marker for a peak into the LHS of double lines.
We entered the left-hand side via the siphon tunnel line running an 800-foot reel until we got to the T at the whalebone. We tied off to the left of the T. Why would we run so much line up there? Well someone thought it was a good idea to cut back the LHS to limit access to this part of the cave. This line didn't need to be cut back, and if it had been intact it would have saved us a lot of trouble. At the tie-in to the left of the whale bone we went left noted the two jumps on the right going through tiny duck-unders. We continued straight going past a blue "Byrd" arrow (thanks man that was nice to have there) and went to the EOL. "A" went under the duck-under at the EOL and to the actual wall of the cave to verify it ended. It was clean when we turned and headed back to our tie-in point. We got back into penetration order at the tie-in and "A" signaled he was going into the duck-under directly across from the whalebone, groovy circles of light from me and "T" and we put down clothespins at the T. He slid through the duck-under real slow and graceful with like a millimeter to spare. I went second and it was getting messy already, just barely big enough for backmount and we still had the third person going in. After a short distance we came to another T and went left after marking it, and now things were really getting tight, I was pretty much in zero vis for 50-75% of the time and we finally worked our way into a small dome room that was nice and clear and I turned and watched "T" get caught up with us and the cave behind us looked like s^^^. I asked him if he was OK, like do you want to keep going and he said cool, so I gave "A" and OK and we went left at another "T" and walled out again.
"A" called the dive. First time ever, I wasn't at thirds so I knew the guy who breathes like a fetus wasn't there, and I knew it was going to be ugly exiting since he was calling it on visibility. No big deal, we have done this before and these two guys go to mainland, so this was not anything beyond our training and I don't think anyone thought a thing about it. We went back through the last T in a couple of seconds and I saw "T" disappear into the crap ahead of us doing a line drill and I was on the line, and could still see "A's" light behind me. It took a lot of time to brail up to the next T and I managed to just see my clothespin and retrieve it before I was back into zero visibility, but no big deal we were all together although I still wasn't caught up with "T" we were still having a great dive with reasonable challenges which we had anticipated at the start. Then I found "T's" clothespin and felt "A" bump into me from behind and the drama began with me trying to remain motionless, like it was going to do anything to help at this point. I want to emphasize that I truly knew and believed that "T" was still in front of me leading the way out. It was probably lucky that I was wrong, because we might have had worse problems if we had gone back.
Well we had come out so slowly to my reel that it wasn't surprising to see "T" had already moved out, the vis was now about 5 feet as all the s^^^ we had stirred up was moving downstream past us. I got on our line and "A" started pulling the reel as I swam down our line through a catacomb of black, filthy side passages, there seemed to be an especially heavy gloom, almost a black smoke in the passages although the silt here wasn't stirred up, we had entered through here clean. Pretty soon we would be rolling out to the mainline and swimming out to the eye for about 40 minutes of deco and drink beer and eat peanuts afterward in the parking lot while we broke down gear and joked about the train wreck we had in the cave. We got within 75 feet of the tie-in point and still no sign of "T".
My pulse raced, he should be here, the vis was now pristine, 100 feet if not a infinite, and it was like a 1920's black and white movie was playing in front of me, flashing strobes of industrial light flashing in the back of my head as the filmstrip revealed individual images that moved in shudders and jerks. F^^^! he's missing I thought as I spun around and signaled "A", question marks with both hands and a buddy sign, and then the "what the f???" hand signal, palms up. "When was the last time you saw him?", he screamed into his regulator, I was sick, 15 minutes ago I told him.
The blind exit through the tube hadn't bothered either one of us and we knew that he was up in front of us, but we were wrong, real wrong. I looked at my gauge, well below thirds now with all the drama in the tube, my consumption hadn't been that good and now I was really getting jacked up as we started back the way we had come to go searching for "T". The reel kept jamming and I heard "A" yelling and cursing each time he would rip the line free from the worn-out piece of s^^^ reel. Time was screaming by and gas was getting chewed up fast. We couldn't find the exact route we had taken previously and backed up 3 or 4 times trying to retrace our path. I looked at my gage and now I am at like 1400 pounds, below half. I am ripping through the gas and still 1200-1500 feet in a cave looking for a lost friend.
Soon I was going to have to leave according to my training, it was now my decision how long I could keep looking, and no one could ever blame me for not dying. Maybe there was the one in a thousand chance that he had exited, but I knew that didn't happen because "T" would never leave us either, we said we would never leave anyone, and I really didn't know if I was going to be able to stay and die. I decided to wait till 1000 pounds and then I would leave "A" and swim down to the three aluminum 80 stages at 1/3rds at the 500 foot marker, I would drag all three stages back up to "A" who has incredible consumption and then make another decision to stay longer to help keep looking for "T", to exit on back gas and try to make a dash to my 02 with my doubles emptying out, or to take one of the stages with me.
I knew I could swim the last thousand feet on about 200-300 pounds of back-gas, I would have probably left it all for them and just cut it close. I settled down resigned to my plan, and then we saw a light, just a pinprick of beautiful white HID light and I screamed, I screamed so loud I thought the cave would come down on me, and I waved my light back and forth like a maniac to let him know we were there and I saw "T" come toward me, I couldn't stop screaming, I had never been so happy in my whole life. He later told me it would have been really good if he had tried to give me gas when I was waving the light to wildly, I am the child by all means. I grabbed his arm and hand and shook him, he was covered in clay and small streams of dust were trailing from his dry-suit/harness/belt, everywhere on him. He was moving slow and he looked beat up, he had been through a bad time.
We finally let go of each other, it was almost as though I was the one had been lost and needed to be in contact, to realize that we were all together again and we going to leave and deco and drink beer, and eat peanuts, and be grateful. I turned and slowly swam out and was afraid to turn my back on "T" so I think I made him swim out alongside or in front of me. I felt so guilty, we still didn't know what had gone wrong, where he was, but we had pulled the reel on him. It was terrible and great at the same time. We got down to the stage bottles and slowly hooked up, the deco was now getting on an hour, my back gas was probably 800 pounds, I was exhausted from the stress, and was so glad that I kept it together and didn't run or panic.
I got on my stage bottle and breathed and breathed and drifted out with two of the greatest people in the world. We didn't talk during deco like usual; everything was emptying out for me and floating pretty high during the hour or so of deco. I was afraid to talk, it was good just to see them with me and we brushed silt from our suits and gear and stared with that goofy through the mask-look, which hides emotions so well except when you look into their eyes. It was the longest deco I ever went through. We finally cleared and signaled to surface and I swam up the run and we were going to talk. I can't remember everything that was said, but nobody was mad, and I think I told "T" how glad I was that he was with us.
What happened? "T" told us he was exiting through zero visibility going back to the reel and never went off the line. The passage he was on became tighter and tighter until he got key-holed, and he had to wait for the silt to clear before attempting to free himself, he tried to back up but ended up piling clay behind him and was forced to wait for some vis, find the biggest part of the tube and plow his way forward. Finally after many stops and starts, he popped out onto the second T we had seen earlier to the left of the whalebone line and saw the "Byrd" line arrow (thanks again if you read this) and "T" immediately recognized where he was. He had missed the T where I had found his clothespin and gone right instead of left on the way out. A much tighter passage than the one we had entered through. His hand missed the line arrow and his clothespin somehow and this explained me finding his clothespin. He swam down to the whalebone and saw the reel was pulled, and realized we were gone and continued to towards the RHS of double line. He visual jumped to the RHS and started searching for us as he came down towards the entrance to double lines. This is where we finally saw him.
Somehow, I don't know how we all kept it together. "T" never lost his nerve through the whole ordeal, and his only concern hooking back up with "A" and me after he got himself dug out, talk about solid. I would walk through fire for him.
This is a dive where several mistakes were made, none of them being particularly awful, but taken together resulted in a bad situation that could have turned out much worse had someone panicked and disregarded their training. We went into known side mount passages that we knew were going to be silted out with back mount tanks, although possible, it wasn't the most prudent dive plan, and resulted in very bad visibility. "T" missed a T and got separated due to the bad visibility, and "A" and myself assumed that "T" was ahead of us and pulled the reel we had followed in. The latter mistake was in part caused by the fact that we had gotten somewhat complacent during the many cave dives we had done exclusively within our small circle of friends, we often were not doing a thorough head count at each jump as we exited and often would wait to rally at some point out of site of the other team members further down the line.
We have changed our operating procedures since this dive by adopting better awareness of our team members, not getting out of site or letting others get out of site, not going into areas with improper gear configurations, and always getting in touch contact in the event of deteriorating visibility.
This story was written to remember my mistakes and those of my team members and point out the little things that need to be taken care of. Many time people, myself included can be pretty cavalier about bad visibility, etc. and these situations are easily handled by following proper procedures, but as this story elucidates, small things can quickly begin to snowball during a cave dive and it is important to thoroughly be prepared for the worst. I was fortunate that I was diving with the some of the best people, who I know would and have gone the distance with me and I am grateful they were there while this taking place or things may have turned out differently. I see these guys every weekend, we workout together and ride bikes and help each other from time to time, go out to eat and drink beer at the fill trough on Friday nights. It's important to realize how different things would be without them around, and I think this has influenced the way I cave dive and generally feel about the sport.
My 50-watt halogen light does nothing in the thick black silt; I can only make out the glow from the bulb when I put it directly in front of my face. I never experienced visibility this bad, even in lakes, quarries, etc., just utterly rotten black all around me. I am following the procedures from my training: stop, realize that you are breathing and that's all you need to live, and wait for the silt to clear some, don't make it worse banging around the cave.
I notice a tug at my left leg and realize that my p-bolt has caught the line again, I slide my hand down the line to free the snag, and I feel a clothespin that I probably dragged with me as I passed through the last T as we were exiting. I unclip it from around the line and hold my light and the clothespin up against the glass of my mask and read the initials, it belongs to "T" the 3rd member of our team that was leading that way back out. He missed it in the silt I tell myself, hell I barely managed to notice mine and pull it off the arrow as I passed it. Maybe it had blown up the line and he couldn't find it, maybe he left it for "A" the dive leader for some strange reason.
Things were definitely f^^^^^ up. As I stared at my friend's clothespin I realized I had let go of the line and I couldn't see two inches past my mask. My heart skipped a beat and I concentrated on breathing, and I reviewed the mental image of the cave I had developed from studying the maps and slowly exploring this maze of passages over the last two years. I knew where I was, but your head starts to f^^^ with you and it was increasingly difficult for me to keep my s^^^ wired and not panic. I felt something bump into me from behind and a hand squeezed my leg, I wasn't alone at least, it was "A" catching up to me as he negotiated the wormy silted out passage behind me.
Nothing ever was so sweet, to be with someone and not alone. I would have made it alone but now I didn't need to, and it was better, and I still to this day can't understand why you would ever want to solo cave-dive. I swept the tiny perimeter of the passage as he gave me a move-forward shove staying in touch contact. I found the line in a couple of seconds wedged into a tight little trap on my right side on the ceiling. I reached back and handed "A" the clothespin to see if he had any ideas, but it was so tight and silted there was little to do but move forward blindly, touch communications were it. Later he told me I gave the clothespin to him much later in the dive, my head f^^^^^^ with me, or his head maybe.
Turning back would have been worse I realized later as I ran the sequence of events through my head over and over again. There was no way we could have turned around and fumbling around in that mess would have been worse than exiting. We finally emerged from the tight little passage going through the last duck-under with my scooter ring digging up one last scoop of clay to throw yet another poof of silt into the junction point where we had tied in 400-500 feet of line (yeah, more than half of a 800 foot reel anyway). Just what we needed, some more silt. I saw SID on the reel and knew everything was going to be all right.
We had driven down that day from Tennessee for a long weekend of cave diving, and were looking for something that may or may not exist, some place that would be new to the three of us. The drive down was uneventful with the Power stroke loaded to the top of the bed with full gear for the three of us and most the stuff for two more of the group that would be diving with us the next day. We joked on the way down about my previous life 20 years ago working on a sod farm in eastern PA and me being the talker that I am kept describing the various tractors, large trucks and pretty much every piece of machinery that I had used while working there. My friends are from the south are pretty polite and will let me go on for quite a while before they tell me I need to shut up, politely of course.
We got stuck in some traffic below Atlanta and pulled up alongside an ancient 3 door (yes 3 doors per side) Ford truck with two kind of rough looking dudes smoking generic cigarettes, dressed in dirty camouflage décor. The back of the truck contained about 10 filthy kids of various ages and questionable genetics all sort of crawling around, eating sleeping, screaming and just what a pile of dirty little kids. The bed of their truck was filled with bicycles, stuffed animals, a rotten looking mattress with a gas can and tire tied down next to a lopsided computer (386 vintage it looked like). Everything was covered with a flapping blue tarp that really wouldn't have kept their stuff dry in the event of rain during their flight from Michigan to Florida (just a guess on my part). Behind the Ford the women of the of what appeared to be two families followed in another broken down hunk of sh*t Nissan truck, and when the traffic got to a standstill various representatives from the two trucks would run back and forth switching seats in the two vehicles, with cigarette smoke blowing out the open windows and trash falling onto the highway whenever a door opened.
Just hysterical. I came from a working class family and would never openly make fun of someone being poor, but this was just too funny and we laughed our asses off. We affectionately nicknamed them the "S^^^ Family Robinson", which may seem mean but it was too funny under the circumstances. I just kept on saying, " The kids come from f^^^^^^, you just need to quit f^^^^^^ or you will get more kids!" of course with the truck window shut.
We got into the Cadillac with out too much delay from the traffic and then after unloading our gear we weren't going to dive that night, we headed over to Devil's for a nice tune-up dive to explore some side passages a little off the beaten path within the first 1500 feet of the cave. We staged to give us a little bit more time to leisurely poke around in some areas we hadn't gone into for a while. We made an easy drop where Hill 400 meets the mainline, and headed up to the thousand foot marker for a peak into the LHS of double lines.
We entered the left-hand side via the siphon tunnel line running an 800-foot reel until we got to the T at the whalebone. We tied off to the left of the T. Why would we run so much line up there? Well someone thought it was a good idea to cut back the LHS to limit access to this part of the cave. This line didn't need to be cut back, and if it had been intact it would have saved us a lot of trouble. At the tie-in to the left of the whale bone we went left noted the two jumps on the right going through tiny duck-unders. We continued straight going past a blue "Byrd" arrow (thanks man that was nice to have there) and went to the EOL. "A" went under the duck-under at the EOL and to the actual wall of the cave to verify it ended. It was clean when we turned and headed back to our tie-in point. We got back into penetration order at the tie-in and "A" signaled he was going into the duck-under directly across from the whalebone, groovy circles of light from me and "T" and we put down clothespins at the T. He slid through the duck-under real slow and graceful with like a millimeter to spare. I went second and it was getting messy already, just barely big enough for backmount and we still had the third person going in. After a short distance we came to another T and went left after marking it, and now things were really getting tight, I was pretty much in zero vis for 50-75% of the time and we finally worked our way into a small dome room that was nice and clear and I turned and watched "T" get caught up with us and the cave behind us looked like s^^^. I asked him if he was OK, like do you want to keep going and he said cool, so I gave "A" and OK and we went left at another "T" and walled out again.
"A" called the dive. First time ever, I wasn't at thirds so I knew the guy who breathes like a fetus wasn't there, and I knew it was going to be ugly exiting since he was calling it on visibility. No big deal, we have done this before and these two guys go to mainland, so this was not anything beyond our training and I don't think anyone thought a thing about it. We went back through the last T in a couple of seconds and I saw "T" disappear into the crap ahead of us doing a line drill and I was on the line, and could still see "A's" light behind me. It took a lot of time to brail up to the next T and I managed to just see my clothespin and retrieve it before I was back into zero visibility, but no big deal we were all together although I still wasn't caught up with "T" we were still having a great dive with reasonable challenges which we had anticipated at the start. Then I found "T's" clothespin and felt "A" bump into me from behind and the drama began with me trying to remain motionless, like it was going to do anything to help at this point. I want to emphasize that I truly knew and believed that "T" was still in front of me leading the way out. It was probably lucky that I was wrong, because we might have had worse problems if we had gone back.
Well we had come out so slowly to my reel that it wasn't surprising to see "T" had already moved out, the vis was now about 5 feet as all the s^^^ we had stirred up was moving downstream past us. I got on our line and "A" started pulling the reel as I swam down our line through a catacomb of black, filthy side passages, there seemed to be an especially heavy gloom, almost a black smoke in the passages although the silt here wasn't stirred up, we had entered through here clean. Pretty soon we would be rolling out to the mainline and swimming out to the eye for about 40 minutes of deco and drink beer and eat peanuts afterward in the parking lot while we broke down gear and joked about the train wreck we had in the cave. We got within 75 feet of the tie-in point and still no sign of "T".
My pulse raced, he should be here, the vis was now pristine, 100 feet if not a infinite, and it was like a 1920's black and white movie was playing in front of me, flashing strobes of industrial light flashing in the back of my head as the filmstrip revealed individual images that moved in shudders and jerks. F^^^! he's missing I thought as I spun around and signaled "A", question marks with both hands and a buddy sign, and then the "what the f???" hand signal, palms up. "When was the last time you saw him?", he screamed into his regulator, I was sick, 15 minutes ago I told him.
The blind exit through the tube hadn't bothered either one of us and we knew that he was up in front of us, but we were wrong, real wrong. I looked at my gauge, well below thirds now with all the drama in the tube, my consumption hadn't been that good and now I was really getting jacked up as we started back the way we had come to go searching for "T". The reel kept jamming and I heard "A" yelling and cursing each time he would rip the line free from the worn-out piece of s^^^ reel. Time was screaming by and gas was getting chewed up fast. We couldn't find the exact route we had taken previously and backed up 3 or 4 times trying to retrace our path. I looked at my gage and now I am at like 1400 pounds, below half. I am ripping through the gas and still 1200-1500 feet in a cave looking for a lost friend.
Soon I was going to have to leave according to my training, it was now my decision how long I could keep looking, and no one could ever blame me for not dying. Maybe there was the one in a thousand chance that he had exited, but I knew that didn't happen because "T" would never leave us either, we said we would never leave anyone, and I really didn't know if I was going to be able to stay and die. I decided to wait till 1000 pounds and then I would leave "A" and swim down to the three aluminum 80 stages at 1/3rds at the 500 foot marker, I would drag all three stages back up to "A" who has incredible consumption and then make another decision to stay longer to help keep looking for "T", to exit on back gas and try to make a dash to my 02 with my doubles emptying out, or to take one of the stages with me.
I knew I could swim the last thousand feet on about 200-300 pounds of back-gas, I would have probably left it all for them and just cut it close. I settled down resigned to my plan, and then we saw a light, just a pinprick of beautiful white HID light and I screamed, I screamed so loud I thought the cave would come down on me, and I waved my light back and forth like a maniac to let him know we were there and I saw "T" come toward me, I couldn't stop screaming, I had never been so happy in my whole life. He later told me it would have been really good if he had tried to give me gas when I was waving the light to wildly, I am the child by all means. I grabbed his arm and hand and shook him, he was covered in clay and small streams of dust were trailing from his dry-suit/harness/belt, everywhere on him. He was moving slow and he looked beat up, he had been through a bad time.
We finally let go of each other, it was almost as though I was the one had been lost and needed to be in contact, to realize that we were all together again and we going to leave and deco and drink beer, and eat peanuts, and be grateful. I turned and slowly swam out and was afraid to turn my back on "T" so I think I made him swim out alongside or in front of me. I felt so guilty, we still didn't know what had gone wrong, where he was, but we had pulled the reel on him. It was terrible and great at the same time. We got down to the stage bottles and slowly hooked up, the deco was now getting on an hour, my back gas was probably 800 pounds, I was exhausted from the stress, and was so glad that I kept it together and didn't run or panic.
I got on my stage bottle and breathed and breathed and drifted out with two of the greatest people in the world. We didn't talk during deco like usual; everything was emptying out for me and floating pretty high during the hour or so of deco. I was afraid to talk, it was good just to see them with me and we brushed silt from our suits and gear and stared with that goofy through the mask-look, which hides emotions so well except when you look into their eyes. It was the longest deco I ever went through. We finally cleared and signaled to surface and I swam up the run and we were going to talk. I can't remember everything that was said, but nobody was mad, and I think I told "T" how glad I was that he was with us.
What happened? "T" told us he was exiting through zero visibility going back to the reel and never went off the line. The passage he was on became tighter and tighter until he got key-holed, and he had to wait for the silt to clear before attempting to free himself, he tried to back up but ended up piling clay behind him and was forced to wait for some vis, find the biggest part of the tube and plow his way forward. Finally after many stops and starts, he popped out onto the second T we had seen earlier to the left of the whalebone line and saw the "Byrd" line arrow (thanks again if you read this) and "T" immediately recognized where he was. He had missed the T where I had found his clothespin and gone right instead of left on the way out. A much tighter passage than the one we had entered through. His hand missed the line arrow and his clothespin somehow and this explained me finding his clothespin. He swam down to the whalebone and saw the reel was pulled, and realized we were gone and continued to towards the RHS of double line. He visual jumped to the RHS and started searching for us as he came down towards the entrance to double lines. This is where we finally saw him.
Somehow, I don't know how we all kept it together. "T" never lost his nerve through the whole ordeal, and his only concern hooking back up with "A" and me after he got himself dug out, talk about solid. I would walk through fire for him.
This is a dive where several mistakes were made, none of them being particularly awful, but taken together resulted in a bad situation that could have turned out much worse had someone panicked and disregarded their training. We went into known side mount passages that we knew were going to be silted out with back mount tanks, although possible, it wasn't the most prudent dive plan, and resulted in very bad visibility. "T" missed a T and got separated due to the bad visibility, and "A" and myself assumed that "T" was ahead of us and pulled the reel we had followed in. The latter mistake was in part caused by the fact that we had gotten somewhat complacent during the many cave dives we had done exclusively within our small circle of friends, we often were not doing a thorough head count at each jump as we exited and often would wait to rally at some point out of site of the other team members further down the line.
We have changed our operating procedures since this dive by adopting better awareness of our team members, not getting out of site or letting others get out of site, not going into areas with improper gear configurations, and always getting in touch contact in the event of deteriorating visibility.
This story was written to remember my mistakes and those of my team members and point out the little things that need to be taken care of. Many time people, myself included can be pretty cavalier about bad visibility, etc. and these situations are easily handled by following proper procedures, but as this story elucidates, small things can quickly begin to snowball during a cave dive and it is important to thoroughly be prepared for the worst. I was fortunate that I was diving with the some of the best people, who I know would and have gone the distance with me and I am grateful they were there while this taking place or things may have turned out differently. I see these guys every weekend, we workout together and ride bikes and help each other from time to time, go out to eat and drink beer at the fill trough on Friday nights. It's important to realize how different things would be without them around, and I think this has influenced the way I cave dive and generally feel about the sport.