Alachua Sink

[sdenney]

Wayne Kinard and I went for a dive at Alachua Sink today. We met up around 9am at Sonny's next door. We drove over to the sink and chatted it up a bit. We took a walk down to the water, admiring the lunacy of whoever designed the new steps. The water level is down a couple feet, as the end of the stairs is out of the water. The entire pond was covered in duckweed, so at first glance we couldn't see what the water clarity was.

We geared up and made our way back down to the water. As I fanned the duckweed out of the way, the visibility was quite clear as I could see at least down to the bottom of the pond. We checked our gear and proceeded on the dive. We dropped our O2 bottles and headed in. The visibility up to the syphon tunnel was about 40 feet. As we passed the syphon the visibility increased markedly; maybe 100 feet.

We turned the dive about 25 minutes in, just before the line dipped down past 190 feet. As we made our way back, we stopped in the first room to take another look, especially at the ceiling, and to help me clear my ears. We picked up our 50 percent bottles, poked into the syphon tunnel a bit and then headed out.

From that point until we exited, one of our goals was to clean out some of the garbage that had accumulated in the system. We found bottles and cans and dishes and all kinds of other junk. It's amazing all the junk we found.

Prior to the dive my trimix set of tanks were already full of 14/51 and I wasn't about to dump them to mix a new batch. My deco obligation for this dive was quite a bit longer than it should have been (by about 20 minutes), but nonetheless I had a great dive. If anyone is looking to dive this system, now is the time.

[aw]

Yet another dive I've been wanting to do. I've got a set of doubles filled right now to 15/58 I think. Way too deep a mix and expensive to burn on a 21/30 dive, not to mention the extra deco.

Maybe someday.

[CaptainSpeleo]

You guys really like a lot of helium in a deep mix. I've never used more than 36%, and that was to do a 270' - 300' profile at Eagles Nest.

My one and only dive so far at Alachua Sink was in 2' - 3' vis down to about 100' before it finally cleared up to 75' - 100' vis in the first big room. The return trip and the decompression was no fun at all. I was advised that the line from the surface was replaced with new, thicker line soon after that dive.

The wooden stairway isn't the best design in the world, but it makes it a hell of lot easier to enter and exit than it did when no stairway was there. That's what kept me away from diving there for so many years.