From: PFG@ICBR.IFAS.UFL.EDU Subject: Exploration at Twin Dees Cave Date: Wed, 17 Jan 1996 07:32:13 -0500 (EST) I had the oppurtunity to dive with the Twin Dees group last Sun. A push dive was done to explore more of the virgin cave passages in the back. Sheck had done the original cave exploration, but had missed most of the big/deep stuff. The push was done by Jeff Peterson and Dave Miners who added several hundred feet of line. On a later dive I did cleanup duty with Tom Stock. The entrance to Twin Dees makes diving logistics a nightmare. A 2-3 ft. wide vertical shaft goes to a depth of 30 ft. All deco bottles, stage bottles and scooters must be pushed down in front of you over several trips down the shaft. Meanwhile the silt from the sinkhole is raining down on you sometimes causing silt-out conditions. Worse, the 20 and 30 ft. deco stops can only be done by one diver at a time due to the severe restriction in the shaft. Consequently, only one team of divers can dive the cave at any time making progress slow. Once past the entrace shaft you must negotiate 2 more restrictions in cave passage at 55ft depth in clear blue out-flowing water. The passage gently drops to 130 ft over the next several hundred feet of small narrow cave. At 1500 ft. of penetration at about 175 ft depth the cave blows open to large passages and a room that Sheck named the Pleasure Dome. I swam to the new stuff and entered a HUGE room with a ceiling at about 200 ft. and the floor at about 280 ft. I never saw the walls of this room! On my way to the room I passed about 6 tunnels that had not yet been explored. The source of the flow has not yet been located. This cave has one of the most thriving crayfish communities I have ever encountered in a cave. In the big stuff the silt is undisturbed by flow and since only a handful of divers have ever been there the silt remains undisturbed. At first I couldn't figure out what all the 1" wide X 3" long depressions in the silt were from. There were hundreds of these marks on the floor; probably 3-5 per square ft. It became obvious that these were from a very large unpigmented crayfish population. From the orange pigments in the walls and silt I am assuming a large iron content of the water/rocks. Further, some very interesting bacterial mattes and biofilms seems to be growing on these minerals. Interestingly, some of these only seem to grow from the water coming out of side tunnels which is several degrees colder than the trunk passage water normally at 74 degrees F. Much work remains to be done on this interesting cave. Safe Caving, Pete Gomez