Cow Turd Sink Revisited

[Mike]

I stood on the edge of the sink hole on Saturday wandering what happened to the water.
We were here last Sunday ( Skip, Marbry, & I ) & the basin was full, but today 6 days later it's down 5- 6 ft. by my caculations, the flow has slowed, big time.(They hit 60 ft. last week , at same place we had 50 ft.)
It's now Sunday , mid morning, Marbry & I are gearing up to go in to do more exploring, they have moved the gear eating cows to another pasture ( thank god ) Skip is absent having gone to Tallahassee to buy tanks for his new side mount rig, so will miss this push.
Marbry brought his video camara to shoot footage of the cave, so as marbry is crazier ... I mean better at running a reel in virgin cave than I, the plan is for Marbry to be the reel man & I will carry the camara & hand it to him After he cuts & ties off the line & we begin to exit the cave.
As Skip stated in his report as you enter the water you start to drop almost straight down to about 15 ft. with no discernable cavern,as you come to the cave entrance, I watched Marbry go in through the entrance through the the heavy silt, as I tried to enter , my back mounts banged against the ceiling & I remembered Skip said he could not enter where Marbry did( as he's a side mount diver ) ,as my tanks banged against the ceiling I realized I had to back out & move to the right away from the line they had set last week ,as the entrance is arched I knew I could get through there.
Once in to the cave I saw Marbrey's light , He was waiting next to his second tie off in the cave & was wondering what was taking me so long.
( I imagine he was saying " damn back mount divers" ).
Vis was pretty bad about 2 to 5 ft at most so was pretty much a braille dive, i could see the left wall as we were running right on it ,when I put my light out to the other wall or ceiling it turned to fog or just dark blue, I reached out off the line and didn't touch any thing so I know the passage is at least 8ft + wide .
We still haven'nt seen any cave species other than flashlight sized crawfish, mating every where & Sculpin, but if vis improves who knows whats in here.
Bottom is mud & small gravel which settles pretty quickly when disturbed so,bad vis is coming from upstream some where

Through the silt I saw Marbry making another tie off I checked my gauge & it was time to go, I signaled him to turn, handed him the camara & we headed out.( Not that we will be able to see anything on the video, but that was the plan & we stuck to it )
Along the way I thought about where we were how nobody had been there before, after all Skip & Marbry had only gone about 250 ft. in here last week, we had gone at least 500ft today.
Back in the early 80's I moved to Northern Ca. to a mountain top thinking I could find a place untouched by man, I learned there is no place untouched by man, or so I thought , although it was a little mucky, after all these years I finally found a place that was untouched by man in my own back yard.
DAMN I LOVE CAVE DIVING!!

Mike M

[Angie Reim]

Glad to hear that you got to make this dive. Congratulations upon being somewhere fresh and new like that!

That cow was just crazy......

Angie

[BradfordNC]

wow, way too cool.

may not be the next peacock, but hey, the be the first to explore the place, that is great.

[Webmaster]

I watched the video through the camera viewfinder, there's a lot of brightly illuminated mud floating around. I did shoot some artifacts and a little crayfish porn, at least I assume they were going at it. For what I know about crayfish mating habits they may have been trying to kill each other. I'll try and get something edited up and post it.

It was disappointing since with the lower water level I was expecting better vis, not worse. But, it's close enough we can check back regularly.

[skip]

most of the caves around here get clear as water level drops, lack of rain, etc. seems odd this one would have reduced viz with no rain and dropping water levels. why? are we looking at some different kind of system? what kinds of actions would create reduced viz with drier conditions? anyone have a theory?

-skip

[FW]

most of the caves around here get clear as water level drops, lack of rain, etc. seems odd this one would have reduced viz with no rain and dropping water levels. why? are we looking at some different kind of system? what kinds of actions would create reduced viz with drier conditions? anyone have a theory?

-skip

It takes awhile for vis to clear, after the high flow stops. I suspect there was still some flow, and pulling "cow" discharge in from another opening upstream

[Webmaster]

Ok, here is the video I shot of the dive. It's not the best in the world, I had to reduce the quality to get the size down and it looks like the camera wasn't quite lining up with the housing. And of course the vis sucked even for here as it was better last time, but you get the idea.

You may get the best results by right clicking on the link and saving it to your local machine before playing it. You may want to zoom the video as well once you open your player.

(9 MB) http://cavediver.net/pictures/TNSump..._6_18_2006.wmv

There's some surface shots, then it starts where we turned around and the underwater part is on the way out.

Marbry

[mwenner]

Great job shooting Marbry. I was getting that old TN cave diving buzz. I loved the OK signal, C fish, and your drysuit making noise in that restriction. Perfect! What a medium.

[Angie Reim]

Wow.....what an interesting dive! The cave was a bigger than I imagined. Good job. I really enjoyed that video.

[Webmaster]

Thanks, actually I think that was the camera housing scraping the gravel as I went through the restriction. There was enough flow I was trying not to get too positive and get spit out, unusual for most of the caves we've dove around here.

It's pretty good size passage, although for most of the dive you really have no idea exactly how big since you can only see a small part of it. If we can get some vis in a couple of caves like we had last Aug (40'+), I'll have some much better shots.

I didn't notice until I started editing it, but as I came up to the surface I could actually hear my sinuses equalizing on the tape.