Missouri Cave Diving

[Omicron]

Part 1 of 2

Two years ago I went to Florida for my first cave diving experience – the NSS-CDS Cavern & Intro to Cave courses.  I passed those courses, and along with earning my Intro To Cave card, I developed what has become an obsession with the flooded subterranean world.  Since then I’ve been lucky enough to dive caves in Florida, Mexico and even here in Wisconsin.  Last week I went down to Missouri to finish what I had started two years ago.  I was going for my Full Cave rating.  Tami Thomsen from Diversions was our IANTD instructor, George Heeres was my diving partner in the class and Ethan Brodsky (from the board) and Keith Meverden went along for some diving.

We made the (relatively) short trip to Missouri and arrived in Waynesville.  I could barely sleep that night – I was nervous about the class, nervous about the new caves, nervous about everything.  Our first morning (Thursday) we got up early and jumped in our vehicles to drive to Bennett Springs (  Bennett Springs is a gorgeous state park that is also a trout fishery.  Bennett Springs was to be the site of the majority of our “basic” skill drills.  We started out our day with land drills.  It was mostly a review of what we had one in Intro to Cave.  We ran lines all over the park and and did land jumps/gaps/circuits as well as lights out stuff.  With that over with it was time to start in-water drills.

Bennett Springs is neat – great viz and very high flow.  It’s a small cave – maybe 300 feet long and it’s about a 45 degree slope from the entrance at 25 feet of depth to the bottom at 95 feet of depth.  At the bottom is a restriction and the cave goes for a little while after that.  We had the usual assortment of drills – out of air, lights out out of air, bc failures, line entanglements (cutting yourself out of the line), lost line and lost buddy.  We also had some “endurance” OOA drills that required us to swim set distances to reach our buddy while out of air, and then swim 10 minutes while sharing air.  We did those with lights on and lights out.  I especially enjoyed the line entanglement drill.  While it had been talked about in my NSS class we had never actually had to cut ourselves out of a line, and it was good to actually do it.  To do the entanglement drill my dive partner George had to run a line to the back of the cave (so we could get tangled in it) – while he was tying into the restriction at the back I was illuminating his work, while trying to stay in one spot.  The flow is so strong at this point in the cave that you have to use your hands to hold onto the gravel bottom (many Missouri caves require the pull and glide propulsion method).  I had both of my hands buried in the gravel bottom and the flow was still pushing me back as I left two trenches in the rocks as I was drug out of the cave.  It was VERY strong flow, and made our OOA drills difficult trying to maintain perfect trim while passing off a regulator.  The gravel in the cave made a neat sound as it was bounced all around the cave floor by the flow.

The next day (Friday) was spent at Roubidoux Springs (  Roubidoux is another fairly high flow cave with very neat formations inside of it.  The main tunnel runs at a depth from about 40 feet to 60 feet.  You then reach a pit that drops down about 80 feet and then you are in the bottom tunnel that just goes and goes.  The bottom tunnel contains lots of fossilized coral, and it looks really, really neat.  Getting into the cave is somewhat difficult – it’s a wide but very low opening.  You pretty much stick your head in, wedge your body against the rocks and start pulling yourself into the cave however you can.  Once you pop through, you pull and glide down a little ways and the flow dies out so you can start swimming.  You don’t really encounter flow again until you reach the bottom of the pit that leads to the deep tunnel.  Getting into the deep tunnel takes a good amount of negative buoyancy and a little bit of pulling.  We did lots of lights out air shares and line work in this cave.  We also did our lost buddy drills in this cave.  Since we had gotten a lot of our drills taken care of at Bennett the previous day, we focused mainly on diving and having surprise drills pulled on us.  Tami was constantly hovering near us, ready to tell us that we were out of air, or a reg or inflator was freeflowing or any other problem.  She kept us on our toes!  We did two dives in Roubidoux that day.