Tennessee Cave Diving
We stood at the mouth of the Tennessee spring. The shallow brook water was clear, but in the basin the water was a bit cloudy. "Last time Mike and I dove it, it cleared up pretty good about 300 feet in," Marbry said.
"Looks good to me, let's dive it." I replied. So we geared up and dove into The Cold Hole, also called The Three Sisters. It is a cold hole; 57F this dive, but with the air temp in the low 40's it felt warm. It has three "sister" branches from the main trunk, right off the entry. One to the right, one straight ahead, and one to the left. The main line runs into the right side. Straight ahead deadends about 60 feet in, but there is a shelf on the left wall, a fracture just wide enough for backmount, easy for sidemount. It might go somewhere. The left side is more scenic, table-flat it's not large, but has windows out into the basin. Fifty feet in, it narrows and fractures, and the fractures turn from horizontal to vertical several times as the passage winds back on itself and back out again, all rather haphazard. It might go somewhere. The right branch goes.
We followed the main line to the right. The poor viz kept us on the line. The water was dark and milky. The cave was very brown mud silt, the kind that makes clouds that bloom outward and don't settle. There was only a slight current, often none at all it seemed. I hovered a foot off the bottom waiting for Marbry to move on ahead. My light illuminated the nearest foot, the smooth brownness, the albino crayfish, nearly two inches long, frozen in place acting invisible, the isopods with cilia-legs wiggling like mad, darting them here and there in their small world. A few Bream swam into my light, making me jump reflexively at the sudden rapid motion of their swim-by. 'Bout had a heart attack! All this life bustling about in the dark muddy cold hole. And here we were too, bustling as much as any isopods, frog-kicking our way along the line until we passed the first T, a side-mount passage that is still going, unexplored. On we swam and at the second T, the one I put it, I recalled the lost line emergency that resulted in that particular T…. There were some scary moments. But that way may keep going to, although Marbry thinks it loops around to join back with the main passage.
We swam on pass the black bone, under the shelf, up the incline where the bottom goes from mud to coarse sand. Like humps on a camels back, this part of the cave rises, then falls a little, then rises again, then falls down and gets rocky. Parts of the system are fractures and parts are solution. Parts are the loosest sort of silt, the kind that seems to not form a bottom, but to be just a tad thicker than water; it appears to float. Parts are sand, parts rubble, and parts are rocky bottom, sides and ceiling. At the camel hump, Marbry ties off a reel to his previously line arrow marking the possible side passage, and we make the jump. Visibility is no better back here, although we stir up the silt that clings to the sides, our bubbles knock it down from the ceiling, and our own mistakes add to the mix, so this dive is spent real close to the line!
It's cool when you swim out of a silt cloud and the water all around suddenly opens clear, or milky, but dark and clean, even when the viz doesn't change much. Your light forms a beam traveling into the distance, instead of forming a short bright blur of brown chocolate milk. I followed Marbry as he dropped down and under a shelf of rock. Our depth dropped from 8 ft (2.5m) to 18 feet (6m). The floor was solid rock with a fine silt layer maybe a 1/4 inch deep; the rock was pocked-mark, but nothing solid stood up high enough for a line wrap. Soon it became rockier, rounded tips of rocks sticking up from the bottom, some like buttons, some like mushrooms. All small.
Then it opened up into a vertical crack and we were able to ascend a few feet and swim another 20 feet or more well up off the bottom. The crack narrowed and I watched Marbry descend and once again pass under the rock. It was close quarters again, a slit between ceiling and floor, when Marbry stopped and held his light on a knob of rock. An old line was tied around it! The line trailed off into the void. What the ? How did this line get here? My first thought was that someone had entered here long ago from upstream. There was another entry. Marbry's first thought was that we had circled back on the second T, the one I put in, since this large crevice tended to turn back that direction. Only thing is, the line I tied was on a knob on a wall in a vertical crack, not on the floor in a horizontal one. We were confused, so turned the dive.
We've encountered a mystery. I'll tell the tale. About 8 years ago we first entered this cave and found a stake with a twine-like line wrapped around it. One end was tied to a cement block near the entrance which led to the wound up line on the stake inside about 30 feet. Lots of the line was unwound and floating, and drapped, over everything. We cleaned it up. Perhaps this line was at one time tied to that one, a continuous guideline to the surface. Over the years the currents, and constant chaffing, cut it lose and moved it all in a ball to the entry. Perhaps in our clean-up, we cut the line without realizing where it led. So who was this mystery diver? Or team? Someone has been in here before, long ago…but who? When? As Marbry said as we loaded the truck to drive home, "Hope we don't find a body at the end of that line."
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