Simon Boyce, producer 14>>, has his work cut out for him: Capture a subterranean drama, much of which will unfold in total darkness, in a hostile, airless environment that he cannot personally visit. But Simon likes a challenge. With a background in newspaper and radio reporting as well as television documentaries, he has a journalist’s sense of the story. His documentary work on life in a hospital trauma ward—made from six weeks’ worth of tape shot around the clock in the ER—clinched him a spot with the EXPLORER team. Simon does all his shooting topside at Wakulla, high and dry. But he has some help.

Boyd Matson, EXPLORER host 57>>, is every insurance underwriter’s worst nightmare. From scaling frozen waterfalls to climbing mountains to racing through the Sahara, Boyd lives the adventures he reports. Wakulla Spring is no exception. Boyd will be the audience’s proxy and guide in this watery netherworld. To gear up for going down, he takes a crash course in cave diving, four days of intense training in this most dangerous of pastimes.

Wes Skiles, underwater videographer 37>>, knows north Florida’s freshwater springs inside and out. He started diving these caves as a child. And he knows their dangers: Over the years, Wes has helped to recover 30 bodies of cave divers who didn’t make it. Wes’s boyhood passion became a career, and now he travels the wet places of the world with cameras and a scuba rig. He is home in Florida for this shoot, and he’s brought a big team with him. Among them are a young apprentice, Joel Tower, and an intern, Kirsten Bassion 40>>, who is traveling the country for a year on a diving fellowship and showed up hours before Wes’s departure for Wakulla, eager to tag along and help out 148>>.

Kevin Krug, associate producer 34>>, does pretty much everything all at once. When it’s a fast-breaking scene, too much going on for one camera to capture, Kevin whips out a spare and starts filming. His waist pack brims with charged-up batteries and blank tapes. He’s scouted the scene and knows where everything is, what everyone does, and whom to call with a problem. If he’s not in sight of Simon, Kevin is in contact via the walkie-talkie he carries at all times. He records everything about the shoot—from names and numbers to quotes to the contents of each of the 20-plus tapes Simon shoots—in his little black book 79>>. What if he loses it? “Oh,” says Kevin, “I don’t lose the book.”

Bill Stone 46>>, project leader for the U.S. Deep Caving Team, is a man driven—to see inaccessible places, to test the limits of human endurance and technology, to solve problems. He’s been a cave explorer for decades, and took up diving because sometimes the caves have water in them. He knows there’s a cave feeding Wakulla Spring. He knows it’s a miles-long maze, big enough to drive a tractor-trailer through. Bill wants to map the maze. He has borrowed and adapted technology used by astronauts and spies, and is overseeing the efforts of more than 50 individuals, most of them volunteers donating time and energy to make a 3-D map of the cave.

Barbara am Ende, Ph.D., geologist 120>>, transforms data gathered on the fly by sensors attached to the team’s diving scooters into a detailed 3-D map of the cave and posts daily updates to the project Web site, www.wakulla2.org, which she created.

Linda Rinkinen 24>>, an experienced scuba diver, and M. Ford Cochran 95>>, a beginner, are on location at Wakulla Spring for nationalgeographic.com. Our job: to be your online diving buddies and flood your monitor with the Wakulla story.

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