Since everything in cave country is almost blown out right now I decided to check out Apopka's very own Gourd Neck. This place is somewhat of a mystery; no one really knew anything about the spring except that a couple of open water divers had drowned there in some cave passage 90ft deep. Well, if open water divers can penatrate, shouldn't a sidemounter do just fine?
Our mission started off at some new development where you could kind of walk a canoe to the marshy, highly-infested gator hole some 300' downhill walk through brush. There is no good public canoe launching point. After an hour our so of hiking gear, we made it in the lake of countless gators; really, I've never seen so many wild gators. Now that we were in the lake I only have some slight idea as to where this spring lay hidden. Several hours slipped by before I waved down a single power boater.
These guys pointed us directly to it. Let me remind you this place is super obscure to find; we actually sounded the anchor several hundreds of times looking for a deep hole which we eventually found. It was the coolest thing-a super tannic lake with a very small occasional puff of blue cold spring water to the surface, "very obscure, highly missable". Anyway, we finally got in the water to do this dive! Upon descending to 37' of water we came upon the spring head which was covered in sticks and lake bottom. We penetrated about 4' to 5' of this tube "5' diameter" made of supension held open by the ripping flow. The cave suddenly opened into a gin-clear large cavern with a depth of 60' approx. After that the cave quickly was turning sidemount and eventually to probably no mount at 89' of depth. My better sense told me to take this place slow, so I let the raging flow back me out of the tight restriction. Any more info on what lies beyond, please drop me a line at [email protected].
Safe diving to all
Craig Gaffka
