The Hart of a Legend
Wayne Kinard is one of the finest people I’ve ever known. And that assessment comes before ever diving with him. Yesterday, I had the chance to fix that: Wayne took me to Hart Spring, along with his sidekick Jeff, and a veterinarian from Utah named Richard.
An afternoon with Wayne is only half about diving: The other half is about the camaraderie among four guys who have a mutual love for something, stories, laughter, sunshine and warmth in the middle of winter with no one else around. It’s also about BBQ ribs and more stories and laughter after a fantastic dive in a fantastic cave: Hart Spring.
After filling out the Hart Spring cave diving waivers drafted by what must have been a large battery of lawyers, we geared up on the solitary picnic table at the side of the Black Lagoon entrance to the system. After shuttling our vehicles back to the Little Hart spring exit pool, a nice guy with a truck drove us back to the lagoon. After a few minutes trying to find the resident alligator, it was time to submerge and commence our journey underground and underwater. I have to admit that I was a bit intimidated about diving with a legend of the cave community, and my plan was to concentrate on performing well.
The four of us dropped like rocks through the narrow fissure to the junction with the gold line where we hovered for a minute to check on everybody. We were good to go, so Wayne led us upstream for four hundred feet through gorgeous twists and turns, ups and downs, narrow slits and side tunnels. A fine layer of “dust” coated everything, including the line – apparently the system had not been dived in some time. I tried to minimize my movements to avoid disturbing it, although some “dusting” seemed unavoidable as even a fin stroke would leave a swirl of silt several feet behind in the prop wash.
We arrived at a jump to a side tunnel and a good place to turn around, which was accomplished proficiently by the four of us. We swam back through particulate matter that was in suspension due to our ingress, but it wasn’t enough to cause alarm. We cruised back to the Black Lagoon exit markers, and after checking each member of our team for an “OK” sign, continued downstream towards the Little Hart exit 2,000 feet away.
It was joy to see this section of the cave, which I had not seen on an earlier dive to Hart several years ago with the fabulous Cindy Butler. Wayne stopped on occasion to show us geological and paleontological features, which I will not describe further to give future Hart divers a chance to discover for themselves. Suffice it to say that there is much to see in a cave that has obviously seen so little travel. It remains in pristine condition, and I felt like an explorer, seeing the passages for the first time. (The guide system seems to work well to preserve the cave in its natural, wild state. What a difference it is from some of the area’s popular systems that seem more like crowded underwater theme park rides).
Again, there was a fine layer of silt on everything, but visibility in general seemed fairly good, perhaps 35 feet. When picking at the line to look at a distance marker, small “apparitions” (as Richard would later call them) jumped off of it. We relaxed and swam slowly, observing the numerous jumps off of the main line including one that could not be seen until you swam up to a small window to peer through it to the other side. Fantastic!
Finally, we came to a 90 degree turn to the right at the bottom of Big Hart spring, clogged up with the cinder blocks that swimmers throughout the millennia used to weigh themselves down for greater depths before releasing them to swim back to the surface. Oh, the stories and history those blocks could tell.
I hovered in an alcove out of the way to give the others a chance to look up into the blocked bottom of the spring, and felt a huge wave of sand pour over my back and rig. Time to move on. Another four hundred feet brought us to the ripping flow caused by the venturi effect near the end of the line at the bottom of Little Hart Spring. A quick look at my computer showed a four-minute decompression obligation, which I performed jammed into the middle of the exit fissure at 12 feet, after a robust handshake of congratulations from Wayne. That thoughtful gesture from him was a nice way to finish off one of the best dives of my modest career.
We de-rigged, and de-briefed by the picnic tables, hiked the boardwalk to look “way down upon the Suwannee River” for a few minutes, and then drove to Akin’s BBQ in Bell with the afterglow of the setting sun and the aftermath of one of the finest days of my life. There was only one thing missing that would have made it a perfect day: to have had Craig Walters, my regular dive buddy and friend along. At the outset of this report, I talked about the finest people I’ve ever known: Craig is also one of them.
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