Ron's one of the best storytellers I've ever heard. In fact, last year he won the CDF "Best Dive Story" award, although he hadn't posted in well over a year. (He explained to me why he doesn't post any more: several years back, in an eight-hour workday, he had about four hours of work to do, so he spent a lot of time on the internet. Now, in an eight-hour workday, he has about ten hours of work to do, so he hasn't even logged on to the CDF on several years.)
But I e-mailed him and asked him to write up the story, so here it is:
Eddy’s Tunnel of Terror
I’m in a cave. I’m 500 feet from the entrance and I’m kneeling (yeah kneeling) on the floor wondering what I am going to do next. The reason I’m kneeling is that I am face to face with another diver who is apparently catatonic. I was taught in Rescue class (and I’ve seen this work in other situations), that you can calm a panicked diver by getting in their face and smiling. It’s the same reason that farmers put goats in with horses. A horse will hear an odd noise and its first impulse is to run like hell. But when the horse sees that the goat is just standing there chewing its cud the horse will calm down and go back to eating.
The problem is that a panicked diver will usually SEE that you are calm and smiling. Eddy has a 1000 yard stare.
Eddy shows no awareness whatsoever that he is kneeling in a cave with a dwindling gas supply or that I am right in front of him making funny faces. I don’t know about you guys, but I never learned anything about towing an unconscious diver out of a cave. I am sitting there wondering if I am going to have to haul him out and thinking about how I would accomplish that.
I’ll leave you guys to ponder that one. Let me tell you how we got into this predicament in the first place.
Russell and Eddy and I were at Jackson Blue to do a New Year’s Eve dive. Our idea on these dives is not so much to get a massive penetration as it is to just be in the water as the new year rolls in. Pursuant to this goal we were hitting all of the little side tunnels at Jackson Blue and not really making much in the way of penetration down the main line.
Well at about 550 feet of penetration down the main line at Jackson Blue there is a huge rock on the left. There is a little bitty tunnel behind that rock but that is not where we went. About fifteen feet upstream from the rock there is a line that goes up into a dome. You really need to enjoy yourself on the way up into this dome because you won’t be able to see much on the way back down out of it. I’ve gone up into this dome without touching a thing and I still come out pretty badly silted out. I finally realized that is because exhalation bubbles knock silt off of the ceiling.
Like I said; it is fun to go up into but usually not much fun to exit.
I believe that the crap raining down on Russell from all of our bubbles silted Russell out before he could even see much of the dome. So Russell backed out and it was just me and Eddy.
The Dome
It seems that any time you find a vertical passage in an underwater cave it will bear some similarity to vertical passages you’ve seen in other underwater caves. Specifically the walls will undulate in and out. These passages are formed the same way the rest of the cave is formed. Slightly acidic ground water will eat the calcium out of the rocks. Since the rock was laid in horizontally, there is generally more homogeneity within a horizontal layer than between the layers. So the cave has alternating layers that are more and then less resistant to the corrosive properties of the ground water. Hence vertical passages tend to be really wide and then really narrow and then really wide and then really narrow.
I think the reader will find it obvious that if this particular shaft were an exception to this generalization then I wouldn’t have mentioned it. The final wide undulation in this shaft is just above the final narrowing of the shaft. And although the final wide area is by no means the widest thus far encountered, that last narrowing is far and away the tightest part of the whole deal.
So Eddy and I are following the line up this shaft with the walls undulating in and out and the line ends right at the widest part of the last restriction prior to the final widening. This last restriction is a crack about twelve feet long but it is only big enough for a diver with a set of doubles at the extreme upstream side of the crack. Naturally I go up through the crack at this widest spot and Eddy is right on my heels. The only difference between us is that (as the vis is continuing to fail) I am very aware that we will have to return to this exact spot and Eddy doesn’t realize that.
Well the “room” we just entered really isn’t much. It is about three by three and fifteen feet long and of course the floor has about a twelve foot long crack in it that is too impossibly narrow to pass through except down there at the far end where we actually passed through it. Well I am barely moving my fins at all and take like a full minute to go the fifteen feet. We are basically in a room that is a real nothing but after we took the effort to get here I am treating it like it is really something. Of course fifteen feet later there is really nothing else I can do but turn around.
So when I turn around I am face to face with Eddy and he is eye-balling the crack in the floor like something with thirty foot long tentacles is about to come up through it.
So then Eddy and I have a conversation that consists of nothing other than facial expressions and pointing. My dog and I have conversations like this all the time and I think we totally understand each other, but Eddy and I each had absolutely no idea what the other guy was trying to say.
Eddy points to the floor and raises his eyebrows.
He is saying something like, “How in the name of all that is Holy are we supposed to get down through this crack?!?”
I interpret his meaning to be, “Do you want to go down now?”
So I shake my head yes and point down.
Eddy raises his eyebrows further and points more emphatically to mean, “Are you seriously suggesting that a person can fit through this tiny crack here?!?”
Which I interpret to mean, “You want to go down right now? You don’t want to stay any longer?”
I once again shake my head yes and point down.
Then Eddy did the most amazing thing.
He went down through that crack.
The wide spot was a good eight feet behind him and the spot where he went down was waaaay too small for a person to go through.
But he did.
My regulator nearly fell out of my mouth! I just shook my head in amazement. I am not even slightly tempted to try that. I head to the wide spot.
Well I already mentioned this, but that is where the line is too. So after making himself into a sardine, poor Eddy had to basically blind freefall through the shaft with no line and no sense of where he was until he tumbled out of the bottom of the shaft into the clear water of Jackson Blue’s main tunnel.
And that is where I found him catatonic kneeling on the floor and seeing nothing.
After about 30 seconds of making goofy faces and grinning like something really funny is going on Eddy’s eyes finally focused on me. Usually when a diver is freaking out and I pull this stunt I can get an answering grin in response to my antics. There was no amusement on Eddy’s face. He looked more like he was ill than like he was amused. But he did snap out of it and his only acknowledgement of my presence was that he shot an “UP” thumb. Russell and I returned the “UP” and we all exited the cave without further incident.
Obviously after the dive Eddy and I exchanged thoughts on what he was asking me and what he thought I was replying to.
I still have no freaking clue how he got through that crack.
Ron Bear
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