Without a doubt, Indian Springs is my favorite dive, and I think it's the best cave dive in Florida. It had been a few years since I've been in there, but this past Sunday the stars aligned and it was finally time to go for an Indian dive!
Brian and I had been upstream a ways in 2010, but this time we wanted to see the Power Room and historic Wakulla Room at 4,500ft. Along with guide-extraordinaire Merideth Tanguay, we elected to do a double stage scooter dive to give us enough gas to get there and look around with plenty of wiggle room. At the same time, Blake Wilson, Ken Browne, and Kirill Egorov were going to setup for a photo shoot at the Bone Narcosis room.
Conditions in the basin were "okay" with 20ft of vis down to Squaw's Restriction at ~120ft. Its impossible to move through Squaw's without thinking of WKPP founding member Parker Turner's tragic death in 1991. Past the restriction we had hazy but wall-to-wall vis through the Mud Tunnel at 150ft. After 500ft or so the cave shallows up a bit into a COLOSSAL upstream/downstream junction room where the vis became unlimited. A quick OK of the T and we hit the trigger on our Suex scooters. Mer was riding the small XJoy37, while Brian and I were on XK1 units. Mer and I were also towing Gavin scooters while Brian somehow finagled an XJoy37 to tow.
The upstream cave is just beyond words. The first room of note is the "Bone Narcosis" room (pictured below). White walls with stunning black geothite jutting out of the walls and littering the floor. We passed Kirill and the gang while they snapped pictures. After that that the cave maintains an average depth of about 140ft with passage wide enough to easily maintain a 3-abreast formation. Huge boulders the size of dump trucks are everywhere, and it looks like the walls are made out of vanilla icecream that some giant has come along and scooped out with a massive spoon.
We dropped our 2nd stage bottle just before "Jonah's Gate", two pitch black columns of geothite that go from floor to ceiling in stark contrast with the white cave. Past this point the cave gets smaller with some roller-coaster twists and turns before coming across another T. Following the plan, Brian dropped a cookie on the outbound side and turned left. After another minute or so of scootering at 160ft, the floor dropped away and the walls disappeared. We made it to the Power Room in a little over a half hour.
The Power Room had slightly worse visibility, maybe 70ft, but you could still appreciate the huge size of the room. A quick loop around the room and we headed back toward the T and banked left. Once again, the cave busted open into the slightly smaller but still impressive Wakulla Room. I didn't think it was possible, but the vis actually got better and we could see down into the ongoing passage below us at 280ft. After a few barrel rolls and loopty-loops we turned the show around with a max depth of 187ft.
We cruised out soaking in the pristine cave knowing it might be another few years before we had another chance to dive Indian. At 80mins of bottom time, we were back in the cavern at 70ft switching to 50%. Its tough to beat a dive like that!
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Originally Posted by PfcAJ
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