What was the coolest dive or trip you did in 2007?

[Kirk]

My best dive this past year was at a place called Cow Sink, near Luraville Florida.  So named, because it is a sinkhole in the middle of a grove of trees surrounded by cow pastures.  One day, almost a year a go, some guy from Finland and I did a couple dives there.  The access to this cave is owned by a club, the National Speleological Society, Cave Diving Section (clearly they had no marketing people coming up with their identity, that is a rather long name for a small club).  So first we had to join the club.  A woman named Cathy, the owner of Luraville’s Dive Outpost, a dive shop / fill shop / mobile home park, sold us memberships and gave us a map to the grove of trees and a key to the gate.

The first dive was more of a “Try To Find The Dive-Site Dive”.  The entry is a sinkhole and not a headspring, thus the cave goes in two directions, one upstream and one downstream.  We were told the upstream was by far the most interesting, for the downstream passage soon becomes much too small for a human to squeeze through.  We asked a number of people how to get into the upstream cave, and even though we were given very thorough instructions, it was always finished with, “good luck.”  Luck we needed for the first dive lasted a good two hours, maximum penetration only about 300 feet, though in about 12 directions.  We looked into every little hole in the cavern and in the downstream tunnel but could not find going cave.  Then I remembered, someone told me to follow the dead tree trunk down all the way to the bottom, and go to the right.  It dawned on me, that the cave didn’t actually start in the cavern, but in the sinkhole itself.  I went back to open water, found the tree, and followed it down to the bottom.  I poked me head in a hole, and saw what looked like it might be going cave. 

After a bit of a squeeze, I entered a small tunnel, and came to an even smaller hole.  After a bit of body origami getting into this corkscrew like entrance, I squeezed through the second restriction, and quickly realized I found going cave.  The flow was ripping, and the visibility was great (not the gin visibility one finds in the Devil’s System, but certainly better than the visibility of Minneapolis tap water).  I exited the cave, found my buddy, still looking into little holes in the cavern, pointed the way, and reentered the cave.  Now I’m kind of a skinny guy, even though it is a bit tight for me to get into, I still managed, in a not so graceful way, to squeeze through.  The guy from Finland, however, is a Nordic type, kind of a big boy.  He was hopelessly stuck in the entrance to the system.  I hadn’t hit my thirds yet, but I wasn’t going to leave my dive buddy wedged in a cave, so I called the dive, pushed him out of the restriction, did a little deco, and then switched out our tanks. 

Dive 2.  I convinced my buddy to dump every bit of gas out of his suit and wing and dig (the floors of the entrance restrictions were sand).  After a bit, we were through.  Wow, what a beautiful cave.  Even though the entry was very small, this thing opened up nicely.  It had stratified gorgeous clay banks that took thousand of years to form.  Because of strong flow, a stretch of passageway is lined with a polypropylene rope, which is intended to give divers something to pull on, thus saving time, energy, and breathing gas, essentially a tow rope, also known as a “Poor Man’s Scooter”. 

A ways into the cave, one comes to another restriction called “Not My Fault”.  This is a hole in the floor, which drops down about 20 or 30 feet where it bottoms out to more going cave at a depth of about 105 feet.  At the bottom of the restriction, we did a jump to a tunnel to the right, then a tee to the left, which eventually brought us back to a jump to the main tunnel.  Everything back there is almost completely covered in goethite formations.  The cave floor, walls, and ceiling are this nice soft black color.  Early into this section you find some finger marks on some of the rocks, yet those soon disappear the farther into the cave you go.

Eventually we called it on thirds (though a month or two later, I returned with an extra aluminum 80 stage bottle, and did get to the end of the cave).  We turned around, and let the flow push us back out.  You realize how much flow there is when it takes you about 55 minutes to get in, but you are shot out in about 15 minutes.  We squeezed back through the restrictions at the entrance, and since the part of the system closest to the entrance was a bit shallower, and since our back gas was 32% Nitrox, our deco on Oxygen wasn’t excessive.  A lovely way to spend the day. 

Next week, I am heading back to North Florida for a few weeks, and Cow Sink is certainly on my “To Do List” - Kirk