I’ve been slacking on my blog posts, but this weekend had an interesting find worth sharing. It went about like every other weekend around here, lots of diving with hopes of getting a cool project to work on. Here’s a brief summary-
Saturday we went to Wilson Springs. This system goes about 3600ft, with the original line laid by Kevin Jones. Here is about the only information you’re going to find online about it. I would ask that if you choose to dive here be very realistic about your experience in low viz caves, this one is very silty and viz is never really all that good to begin with. At the time of Claire’s article, viz was close to 20-30ft, but it hasn’t been that good in almost 5 years. We went in a tiny ways here and realized that it’s just 3-5ft, with no signs of clearing up. Once the viz improves, we’ll make a map of it. For now all I can tell you is that the first 400ft is gold line, shortly after it becomes white, with a T which goes a ways before the split meets up again at the 2nd T at around 1000ft back. If you’re interested in diving here, please contact me, I do have land access via a landowner, so there’s no need to trespass!
Sunday we decided to go to Vampire Sink. This site (I think) is owned by the city, and I’m not really sure if it’s legal to dive here or not. There’s a cable gate across the access road, but you can tell there’s trails around the sink as well, so I think you just can’t drive on it. It’s right by the road, so beware of toxic runoff during high rain periods. The water has a foul smell to it and the sink bottom is often littered with trash. This sink was featured on the Water’s Journey: Hidden Rivers of Florida, but I think that they just surfaced there, splicing the cave footage from elsewhere with a surface scene here, as we didn’t really find any cave. I have been told at one time it went a short ways under the road, but not much further. maybe a collapse has blocked that fissure, or maybe we didn’t see it with low viz, but either way, we didn’t get anywhere.
Frustrated, we decided to head over to a hole that we had heard about near Newberry. I don’t know what this one is called, and again I’m not sure about the access rights. Upon arrival, we were greeted with a very steep slope, which ended in a vertical drop into an underground cavern, with the bluest water and purist white walls you’ve ever seen! I’ve heard that many of these don’t go very far, but I’m very anxious to find out!
