Little River Springs, Branford Florida
by Ron Bear

Little River Cave Dive. Weekend Report.

Hi All,
I wasn’t sure if I would get to go cave diving at all this weekend. My company had sent me to New Mexico on business and there was a possibility that I wouldn’t get home. My coworker and I got pulled over by the Border Patrol. Steve rolled down his window and the officer said “Hello seniors. Are jou both jou ass seed-a-zens?” I’m thinking, “Yes. Are you?” and “Jew Ass? Is that some kind of anti-Semitic bigotry showing through?” Steve managed to say, “Yes we are”. I was grateful because I was trying so hard to keep a straight face that the best response I could give was a nod.

Little River
Little River is just a few miles north of Branford Florida. The spring pool at Little River is the epitome of the Florida blue spring. The water is crystal clear and the middle of the spring pool has that glow-in-the-dark sky-blue color. Beautiful. It is extremely easy to enter. The shore offers good solid footing and many handy rock ledges to set your fins and stuff on. Oh, and the price is perfect. It’s free! A word of caution about the fact that it is free. We went at six in the morning and had the place to ourselves, but were told that if you go later the children swimming make it very difficult to get in.

The Dive
This was one of those rare (for us) dives that went exactly as planned, so I will just let it unfold the way it happened. I have written in the past that we make longer penetrations by sticking to a moderate pace. Lately we have had a propensity to swim too fast, so on this dive we were making a conscious effort to keep an easy pace. As we left the cavern zone, the cave corkscrewed down and to the left to a maximum depth of 100 feet. The cave was wide open with plenty of big rugged handholds to assist our forward progress. Once at depth, we only went about 150 feet before we jumped off of the main line to a side passage known as the mud tunnel. The mud tunnel is a good shortcut into the cave because it is a straight shot but the main tunnel curves. It is also good because there is very little flow. I have been told that this tunnel can get quite silty since it is small with clay/mud on the floor and no flow. Frankly I had to really think about why anyone would name it “mud tunnel” when I saw no silt at all and no excuse to stir up the floor. It was a little tight but it was a fun and rugged tight not a scrape the paint off your tanks tight. After the mud tunnel we jumped back on the main line with a very rocky silt-free environment. 150 feet farther along we came to an intersection with a very unique line arrangement. There is a triangular piece of slate there with a line attached to each corner. Each corner of the slate tells you where that specific line goes. We skipped the one marked “serpentine tunnel” and took the line marked “Merry go round”. We jumped off of the main line almost immediately into another “short cut”. This cave was amazingly silt free. I still can’t get over it. Usually in a side passage with a white line you need to be kind of careful. Here even the side passages were bare clean rock and the vis was perfect. Once we got back on the main line we soon came to another fork, which showed two ways out. One was the way we had come and the other was through the serpentine tunnel.

One hundred feet from there we entered the “Florida Room”. I have absolutely no idea why it is called a Florida room. Isn’t a Florida room a room that has lots of windows and gets lots of light? With this room being 1000 feet from the closest access to the sun it really doesn’t get much light [:}-). Regardless of the rationale behind the name this room is very cool. Imagine that your two hands are the rock over the room and your fingertips are the lowest that the ceiling dips. Now spread your fingers except for the thumbs. This gives you a good picture of the ceiling profile in the Florida room. Every thirty feet the floor to ceiling clearance is down to eight or ten feet. Then there will be a crack twenty feet wide that goes up forty feet. It looked like a stack of giant dominoes that were trying to fall but had nowhere to go. What happened to all the rock that should have been between the giant fingers of rock? At a penetration according to the map of 1130 we hit the end of the room and Kim called the dive on “almost used a third”. On the way back out of the Florida Room I did a lot of floating on my back and looking up into the giant cracks. I like scuba swimming on my back. It is harder to swim level though because the ceiling doesn’t give you a “level” reference like the floor does.

At the first fork we took the Serpentine passage instead of the passage we had come in on. The serpentine tunnel is very narrow with a high flow and about a dozen ninety-degree turns. John and I completely forgot our resolve to go slow. We developed a pattern. Grab the corner. Pull and Jack-knife your body around it. With the last thrust of your hand roll your body 180 so that you were aligned to grab the next corner. Repeat while laughing hysterically. After the dive Kim complained that we had sped up way too fast. She said she had felt like a pin ball bouncing off of first one wall and then the next. I tried to pretend that it was all John and that I was mad at him, but my grin rapidly gave me away for a partner in crime rather than a victim. I HIGHLY recommend this cave.

DSAO
Ron

If you would like to contact Ron, email him at ronald.bear@eglin.af.mil