Subject 585

Right now I'm taking a break from packing to get one final entry off before I leave for Europe.  My flight for Copenhagen leaves in five hours!  I had an awesome time at DAN in Durham last week.  One of their head trainers, Patty put me through a super-intense DAN instructor boot camp.  I also had a chance to take part in a medical study at Duke University as a volunteer subject.  The PI for the study is Dr. Neal Pollock, and he's examining the risks involved with flying after diving.  The test subjects were placed in a chamber and completed a simulated 60 foot no-d dive and then went back into an altitude chamber for a simulated flight.  Any formation of bubbles within subjects' hearts or pulmonary arteries are monitored the entire time using doppler and trans-thoracic echocardiogram.  It was really interesting to see first hand how this type of physiological science is performed.

I also had a great time hanging out and partying with everyone at DAN.  Donna, Eric, Scott and especially Dan and Betty were incredible hosts.  Hopefully I'll have a chance to get involved with some other DAN projects during my year.  I've got to get back to juggling stuff around between bags, dive gear is heavy and luggage restrictions are stricter than ever!  This time tomorrow I'll be from Copenhagen!

Mister Jamie

I'v been in Durham, NC visiting DAN for three days.  I arrived a little earlier then planned on Sunday afternoon, and got to hang out with Eric Douglas and his family until Monday.  Eric has two daughters, one of whom is also named Jamie (Jamison), so of course, I soon became 'Mr. Jamie'.  The Douglases are also the proud new owners of a totally awesome trampoline.  It didn't take much convincing to get me on it.

Monday and Tuesday I stayed at Donna Uguccioni's house and worked with Patty Seery, going through a really fun but intense DAN instructor 'boot camp'.  Yesterday, Kim Malkoski, the Scalli Intern joined us.  The two of us have been working with Patty, and on Friday we'll be participating in a physiological study at Duke University with Donna.  I've also just moved into the infamous 'princess room' at Dan and Betty Orr's house.  So far DAN has been great!

NEDU/Dive Lab

After driving up to Panama City late last night, I met up with JR Hott in the visitors' parking area of the Panama CIty Naval Support Facility.  JR works in the unmanned testing & evaluation department of the experimental diving unit, and had graciously volunteered to give me a tour of the unit.  After I picked up my visitors pass we headed through the base to the EDU.

The main event of the day was a series of dives being conducted for a dive table evaluation study.  I wasn't allowed to bring my camera along, so I watched from the back of the control room while the divers suited up and climbed down through the chamber into the wet pot to set up their gear.  The first group of divers dove to 190' for 5 minutes and the second group dove to 130' for 10 minutes.  They pedaled bikes at depth and then underwent a few hours of observation after surfacing.

Besides observing the dives I was able to check out all the various labs and test facilities at the EDU, and of course, the massive series of interconnected chambers that make up the heart of the unit.  The capabilities of the facility are impressive in themselves, but there's a lot of history behind the unit and Navy diving as well.  I also had a chance to meet a lot of interesting divers and researchers.

In the afternoon JR took me out to visit Mike and Rocky at Dive Lab.  Dive Lab is an R&D facility associated with Kirby Morgan that modifies or develops diving equipment for military divers.  Besides getting an up close look at all their cool toys, and some of the special projects they're working on for the military, I had a chance to try out a prototype surface-supplied diving system, the KM 77 helmet.  It was heavy, but also very shiny and impressive.

The next day JR and all his Navy buddies had to go jump out of helicopters and other fun stuff that I couldn't come along for, but the day I did get to spend at the EDU and at Dive Lab was incredible.  Lots of very interesting people and things going on in both places, and I'm very thankful to JR for getting me in and showing me around.  Next stop for me is DAN up in Durham, NC for a week, a few days at home, and then I'm off to Copenhagen to meet up with Eline and Steve for the European leg of my summer!

Silver Springs & My Departure From High Springs

Pete, Tom and Mark from Karst Environmental invited me to tag along on one more job before I left for Panama City.  We travelled about an hour south of High Springs to Silver Springs, home of the largest spring on the continent by volume.  The whole 'complex' was originally a 1950's era Florida tourist operation that went bankrupt and is now owned by the state.  It's an incredibly beautiful area that's actually composed of over 20 smaller springs, although only the largest, Main Spring has a real cavern and cave system associated with it.  

The springs are still a major tourist draw today, but unless you have special permission from the state you can't even get in the water, let alone dive into the beautiful cavern and the tiny side-mount fissures that split off from it.  I had never heard of Silver Springs before, but after hearing about how beautiful it was, and how rarely opportunities to dive it without ending up in handcuffs crop up I jumped on the chance.

The springs are beautiful, full of native and introduced life.  Crocodiles are common here, and although most are smaller and non-threatening, Tom told me about a 9-footer that likes to hang out in the springs and can be a little too aggressive when encountering divers.  The springs are also full of invasive Tilapia and giant tank-like armored catfish.  Rhesus monkeys run free throughout the park, remnants from a Tarzan movie filmed here years ago.  The mouth of the main spring is about 65 feet wide and 10 feet high.  An average of 550 million gallons of water flow out of the spring every day (varying with rainfall) making this the largest spring by volume in North America.  The water spewing out of the spring literally forms its own river, the Silver River.

Dodging the electric glass bottom boats that swept over our heads every 10 minutes we worked for two days setting up a carefully measured and marked metal scaffolding, and then measuring the flow of water out of the spring at about 120 points on the scaffolding.  Later, Pete will be able to calculate the output of the spring and map the flow of water exiting the mouth of the spring.  Not only did we get a lot of work done, but we had enough time to explore the cavern and caves, finding a whole lot of interesting trash that's been thrown into the spring, as well as several manatee ribs that could be thousands of years old.  I had a great time diving and hanging out with Mark, Pete and Tom, and I was glad I got another chance to work with them before I left High Springs.

After we finished our work, I had to head back to High Springs, pack up my van, say goodbye to the Skiles and drive up to Panama City.  I've been hanging out with Wes, Terry, Nate, Tess and Jaxster for almost a month, and it's been great.  Driving away made me feel like I was leaving home again, but I was excited to see Panama City, and I knew that I wasn't saying goodbye to the Skiles for too long.  

History Channel Shoot

A film crew from the History Channel stopped by the Skiles' today to interview Jill and Wes about their near-death experiences filming 'Ice Island' in Antarctica.  After interviewing them for a few hours about the dangers of diving inside caves within free-floating icebergs, we went over to Ginnie to shoot some B-roll.  I took a few photos of the shoot and some of the animals along the banks of the Santa Fe river.  Jill had a pretty serious ear infection, so they didn't do any actual diving, but just threw some gear on and pretended to be surfacing out of the Devil's Eye.

Spearfishing

I've been at Wes Skile's place in High Springs, Florida since June 26th and I've been having a really great time so far.  My first three days were spent with Jill Heinerth working on my cavern and intro to cave diving courses.  I had met Jill at Beneath the Sea in New Jersey, but it was really nice to have an opportunity to learn from her and go diving with her.  She's an amazing explorer, photographer and diver; check out her web-page at intotheplanet.com and her blog on rebreathers and advanced diving at rebreatherpro.com.  She's a fantastic instructor, and I'm a little worried I might be hooked on cave diving after only a few short dives.

After having completed my NSS-CDS intro cave diver certification I headed up to Merrit's Mill Pond with Pete, Tom and Mark from Karst environmental.  They had been contracted to place a variety of sensors into caves and springs, and invited me to tag along.  Since then I've been hanging out with Wes, riding motorcycles, visiting Dive Rite, learning about photography and cooking.  On Sunday Wes, Wes' son Nate, Mark and I went spearfishing, another first for me.  We caught a lot of big fish and had an awesome time.

With Hurricane Bertha heading our way, we might take a few days this weekend to go surfing and hopefully after that do a little more cave diving and photography before I take off.

June Journal Entry

            The beginning of June found me leaving Washington, DC for Wilmington, North Carolina, where I stayed with Doug Kesling, NURC’s advanced diving technology manager.  NURC stands for National Undersea Research Center, and is a component of NOAA responsible for running all of their advanced diving, ROV, and AUV projects, including the Aquarius habitat in the Florida Keys.  Besides having a really cool job, Doug was also the North American Rolex Scholar in 1983, so it was really nice to start off my travels with someone who knew exactly what I was up to, how I was feeling, and the kind of things I might be interested in.  Most of my time was spent working on my rescue diver certification with one of Doug’s scientific diving classes at UNCW.  It was fun diving with the other students in the class, and I really enjoyed meeting some other NURC people like Scott Fowler and Glenn Michaels.  Most of our skill work was done in the pool, but we moved out into open water for our last few dives, which was a lot of fun.  I also really enjoyed Wilmington; it seemed like a fun place with nice people, good restaurants, music, and beaches. 

            I had one final cool experience lined up before I left Wilmington.  Stefanie Misner (NA Scholar ’03) had arranged for me to visit the NC Cape Fear Aquarium and take a dive in their largest tank.  It was really cool to see how the aquarium was run, how divers worked both behind the scenes and in the public eye, and to have a chance to learn a little about the aquatic ecosystems in that area.  Stef also took me to the beach and I had a nice relaxing weekend with her and her friends.

             After my week in Wilmington I was headed further down the coast towards a little town called High Springs, Florida.  The average person would probably have a hard time finding High Springs on a map, but it’s a place well known to cave divers.  Although I wouldn’t be doing any cave diving during this visit to High Springs, I would be visiting Ginnie Springs, a collection of freshwater springs in the High Springs area with a group of divers from Divers Alert Network.  Eric Douglas and Ken Berry had invited me to work on a video shoot for a DAN training video.  Officially I would be working as a grip and as an actor, but it was also a great chance for me to learn about video production both above and below water.  Ken, DAN’s media manager, did a great job keeping everyone happy and on task, and the photographers, Tom Holden and Donald Tipton were both incredibly talented and friendly.  Everyone working on the shoot got along really well together, and I think that despite the inclement weather we had to work with, we got a lot of good footage in the can.  It was a shame that I was only able to stay with the shoot for a week, but luckily I’ll be able to meet up with almost everyone involved either during my upcoming visit to DAN or during DEMA.

            After my week in High Springs I continued my journey south, all the way to the Florida Keys.  I’d be spending almost two weeks at the Atlantis Dive Center, working on my divemaster certification and diving in John Pennekamp Coral Reef State Park.  After a long day of driving, I pulled into the parking lot to meet up with Captain Slate, my host and owner of the Atlantis Dive Center.  Right away he asked me if I wanted to jump on a boat for a night dive on the Spiegel Grove.  From that point on I spent most of my time either in the water or in the classroom with my instructor Skip, working on my divemaster.  It was challenging adapting to take responsibility for other divers, but very rewarding.  After I finished the DMC I took a few days to relax, practice shooting video and travel down to Key West, stopping off at the History of Diving Museum in Islamorada.  Slate, and the other Atlantis divers I had a chance to hang out with were a lot of fun, and the diving was incredible.  Before I arrived in the Keys I didn’t really see how a spot so close to a huge city like Miami could have beautiful reefs and such outstanding diving.  Staying with Slate and working on my divemaster at Atlantis was a real treat.

            On June 26^th I made my way back up to High Springs, to stay with filmmaker and photographer Wes Skiles for a while.  I’m beginning my cave diving education with Jill Heinerth, and hopefully we’ll have some great adventures in the springs and caves that are so abundant in the area.