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.
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