Un grand bonjour a mes amis Anglais! I still think of Rugby BSAC club as the best training organisation for thoroughness I have seen. It surely beats any PADI outfit.

Because I get sea sick so easily I only do cave diving these days. In the last 3 years I did 2 open water dives and that was with Chris Dandy actually. Also my number of dives per year decreased a lot these last 2 years: it went down from 100 to about 40. But the dives are virtually all deep, long and require much preparation work. I still log every dive in my BSAC log book that I started in August 1994. Today was dive number 516 since Sport Diver. 295 of these dives are cave dives. Most of the rest are wreck dives, though none were as impressive as that Scapa Flow wreck I did with Ian and Tracy on one of my first Nitrox dives. That was dive number 82, 17/4/1996 on the Markgraf. I hope that if Ian still teaches, people appreciate his attention to details and direct criticism. I learnt a lot from him because he would always tell me what I was doing wrong.

There are a lot of Ian's in the Woodville Karst Plain Project. The most famous one is the project Director George Irvine. George delegates to other Ians the task of training new divers like me to become fully productive members of the team. To join the project it is required that you be already fully cave trained and have about 100 cave dives. After a year of apprenticeship like training on the job you get to do progressively more difficult tasks underwater. But at the beginning even Sheck Exley ferried tanks and scooter on the surface.

This week-end was a very media intensive one. We had two camera crews at Wakulla Springs: a German one with a very high tech underwater camera and an American team: the Discovery Channel who were mostly interested in the surface happenings. We also had the Miami Herald on-site.

About 40 people from the WKP Project met at 7am in the Wakulla Park. Wakulla Springs is a very extensive cave system that runs mostly at 280-300 feet of depth. Video and set-up were the main objectives of the day. But this requires some set up work and a lot of support too. The team that went the furthest today did some video all the way out to 6000 feet in the cave: that was George Irvine, Jarrod Jablonski and Casey McKinlay. They were set up by 2 teams. One that went to 3500 feet to drop a total of 6 bottles: 3 stages and 3 safeties for further exploration. I was in the second team. We dropped 3 stage bottles at 2200 feet. This was the shortest dive I have done in Wakulla. It only took us 17 minutes of bottom time. Our scooters were in top shape today! For comparison, my longest bottom time in Wakulla is 55 minutes. It was a slow trip to 4500. Note that we consider bottom time the time spent at the bottom. The time to get down is not included.

Another brought down bottles to the first decompression stop at 200 feet of depth. Another team took care of the 120 foot stop. Another one covered the 70 foot stops and the habitat at 30 feet. Others shuttled all the bottles and scooters from the vehicles to the beach. All this activity was orchestrated by our Surface manager Dawn Kernagis who also records the time in and out of the water for each team.

I don't want to bore you with too many technical details but I will at least give the gases we used because I know that some of you will be interested. I was using a 10/65 (10% O2 and 65% Helium) trimix in both my doubles and one stage bottle. We do not breathe our doubles except in case of emergency. That may sound crazy to you guys: we carry these "twin 16 litres" on our back but we do not even breathe them! I actually used only 2 thirds of my deep stage bottle: a 12 L tank. We started our decompression at 200 feet of depth with a 18/40 mix. We then picked up the next deco bottle at 120 feet of depth. That one contained a 35/25 mix. Next bottle was at 70 feet of depth: a 50/25 mix (50% O2 and 25% Helium). The next one was at 30 feet and contains pure oxygen. We only breathe Oxygen at 30 feet when we are dry and comfortably sat in the habitat, which is a large container turned upside down. We normally remove our doubles, clip them off on the habitat and go in the habitat that we share with 2 other divers and where we have some food and drinks. Today however, the dive being so short I stayed in the water and started breathing that O2 bottle at 20 feet.

It had been raining for a while in Florida, but for some reason today the visibility was incredibly good in the cave. Imagine scootering in a tunnel large enough in places to fly a Boeing 747 through it and enjoying 150 feet of visibility. On the way back from the 2200 drop I was in heaven. I was carrying one bottle more than my buddies so I was a little bit slower. They were lighting the whole cave ahead of me with their HID lights. It was breath taking. So much so that I think that I forgot to breathe a few times! What I do in Wakulla in never very exciting: it is underwater Sherpa work. But today was really outstanding. And to top it off I did my shortest deco ever in Wakulla: just one hour.

On Sunday I will be doing something more fun. I will take another guy to my secret shortcut in a cave called Harveys; nothing to do with my first name. We need to move some rocks to make the shortcut passable. It will save us a lot of hassle to travel to an area of the cave that needs more exploration.

I hope that you enjoyed this little summary of my week-end. Feel free to contact me at hdeschamps@sprynet.com or to take a look at some pictures at www.iherve.com

Cheers.
Son of Jacques.

Hervé's excellent website also has lots of reports on his dives with the WKPP. There's also a table of his dive buddies and the number of dives done with each. Fletch, you're still top with 55! (Dave M)