Gold Line

[metaldector]

Can anyone with authority tell me in what year the concept of the 'Gold Line' was adopted for use in caves? Further is the gold line used today the same in appearance, weight, and diameter as it was when it was first introduce? If the line has changed in appearance are there examples of the earlier Gold Line in the Cave Diver’s Museum?

What was used prior to the gold line? In Sheck Exley’s books he talks about using a #4 line for exploration because he could get significantly more line on a reel using this thin line. Was this common or unique to Sheck?

[Kelly Jessop]

What was used prior to the gold line? In Sheck Exley’s books he talks about using a #4 line for exploration because he could get significantly more line on a reel using this thin line. Was this common or unique to Sheck?

In quite a few caves,including exploration by Sheck,you'll find a lot of #18 twisted.

[rjack]

In quite a few caves,including exploration by Sheck,you'll find a lot of #18 twisted.

Knotted #18 twisted is all over the place in MX. Probably half or more of the caves. They only use #42(ish) gold line for the cavern lines, a few caves do have #24 or larger braided in them, "Grand Cenote" being noteworthy for its large (#36 I think) white mainline.

From what I hear of French caves, they use awfully whispy stuff over there. So I guess I'm not so sure "gold line" as a concept has been adopted, certainly not internationally.

[DeepSea]

There is also a lot of "venetian blind cord" in Weeki Wachee past Sheck's Folly. The reason being is so that the explorers could carry far more line that a normal reel loaded with #24 or #36 could carry. There were several instances where our explorers carried over a mile of line on off-the-shelf Salvo reels.

[TraceMalin]

Knotted #18 twisted is all over the place in MX. Probably half or more of the caves. They only use #42(ish) gold line for the cavern lines, a few caves do have #24 or larger braided in them, "Grand Cenote" being noteworthy for its large (#36 I think) white mainline.

From what I hear of French caves, they use awfully whispy stuff over there. So I guess I'm not so sure "gold line" as a concept has been adopted, certainly not internationally.

The same is true on Grand Bahama Island. Gold line for caverns and you'll find the commonly used white line sizes in the caves.

[skip]

Come on. Someone must know how the use of Gold Line came about! Where are the good ole florida boys when you need them? Or maybe the NSS/CDS old timers can tell us? And those NACD fellows from back in the day.....? When did gold line first come to be used and why?

-skip

[Webmaster]

This has been discussed on here before. According to Forrest, it's only gold because they got a good deal on a bunch of gold colored cord at the time. It's more of a perpetuated happenstance than a standard, never rely on color or thickness of the line to necessarily guide you out of course.