There’s no such thing as a routine dive—not even in open, shallow water. Thirty stories down with three miles (about five kilometers) of cave separating you from your next breath of fresh air...well, unless you can hold your breath and count to 100,000, let’s just say you’ll need some gear.

DIVING GEAR
MAPPING GEAR
FILMMAKING GEAR

DIVING GEAR

EXPLORER host Boyd Matson’s rig 34>> contains conventional scuba (Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus—air tanks, breathing hoses, an inflatable vest to control buoyancy) and then some: a brilliant light and heavy-duty battery pack to penetrate the cave’s inky darkness, backup lights in case the big one fails, and a spool of line to mark the route into the cave—and the all-important path back out.

At the pressures found under 300 feet (91 meters) of water—about ten times the pressure on land at sea level—ordinary air is toxic to humans. So exploration divers use mixed-gas rebreathers 09>> which combine helium and other gases with oxygen and recycle every breath. These rebreathers, good for 12 hours or more of “bottom time” without a break, were customized for the Wakulla project. After each mission, the rebreathers get hung in the maintenance trailer 30>> until the next deep dive.

Top

MAPPING GEAR

The outer limits in Wakulla’s roughly 13-plus miles (21-plus kilometers) of mapped passage range far from the entrance, so divers travel through the cave on torpedo-like scooters 47>>. Rescue isn’t an option—by the time an exploration crew went missing they’d likely be dead—so there are multiple redundancies and fail-safes for every critical piece of gear. Each member of a two-person team tows a spare scooter. The wall mapper 51>> at the front of one of the scooters tracks every move the diver makes and continuously fires an array of sonar signals off the cave walls for the 3-D map. And radio beacons 05>> dropped near survey points inside the cave send a signal to the surface, allowing a team up top to pinpoint positions in the cave through hundreds of feet of solid rock.

A quick trip to the surface after even a few minutes of a deep dive can cause potentially lethal nitrogen bubbles to form in the bloodstream—a horror known as “the bends.” To avoid this after a routine dive, a person might spend 20 or 30 minutes decompressing—rising slowly to the surface—in the water. At Wakulla, decompression can take 20 hours or more because of the incredible depths and times. So a team at the surface lowers the diving bell 21>> to a depth of 100 feet (30 meters). Decompressing divers climb inside 70>> through a hatch in the bottom and are hoisted to the surface, where they transfer to a decompression chamber 73>> to ride out their time under pressure someplace warm and dry.

A monitor 107>> in a small shed on the diving platform tunes in to any of three fixed underwater cameras trained on the cave mouth and the submerged diving bell. The team member on watch during exploration trips alerts mission control when divers emerge from the cave and begin their decompression ascent.

Top

FILMMAKING GEAR

Underwater videographer Wes Skiles packs his digital video cameras in watertight high-pressure housings 81>>. That’s fine for most assignments but too cumbersome to travel on a diving scooter and not rated watertight to the depth of Wakulla Springs. Because Wes wants to send his cameras farther than they’ve ever gone before, in an inspired moment he snags intern Kirsten Bassion’s ultra-compact video camera and matching housing 11>>, which fits snugly aboard a scooter.

A full-face mask 67>> allows Wes and Boyd to speak to one another while Boyd narrates the scene underwater. Back at the surface, Simon listens in and helps direct via remote radio 33>>.

Top