Hello my friends!

Me again! So that you get to know all of what happened to me last week end: I dived Wakulla, Sally Ward and Peacock. Then I move out of St Petersburg and flew to San Francisco. How is that for a program?

I managed to escape from work on Thursday evening. They let me work four days in three.

So on Friday morning, 8 am I was up at Wakulla with Nanci to get some equipment out of the cavern zone. The water was completely black. Bellow the ledge it
was night zone. We were done with all that hauling by 11 am and proceeded to Sally Ward where a few people did some training gas dives, others did support,
and others just dived there for fun ... and also helped to take stuff out. I was doing support. I got to clear the restriction and go through it first. Anthony and I ferried O2 bottles and 70 foot bottles inside the cave. The 70 foot bottles go about 300 feet inside the cave. Another 200 feet further got us in the cube room where we  watched the gas divers drop their 120 bottles, and scooter down and upstream. We then exited slowly the cave -- job done. Other people did the rest. We finished the day at Lucy Ho's where most of us had Sushi.

Saturday morning, Nanci and I drove back to Gainesville. We stopped at Peacock to do a quick dive... There is so much of this cave that I have not seen yet. I really like the fact that each dive there can be a long one and all the dive time is bottom time. We can go on back gas only as the only limit is the primary light burn time. We started from the main entrance, jumped Pot Hole and took the first jump right: the Nicholson tunnel. I found this tunnel fairly different from the usual Peacock, or what I have seen of it. It is smaller: quite a bit of passage is only 4 feet high and not much wider. It makes a sharp turn left before the line ends. At that point we jumped on the line that came from the second jump from the main line (we took the first one). We passed the Wishbone but did not get into it. We came out into Cisteen. The lines are funny there. The upstream and downstream lines run out in parallel through that fissure restriction that leads to the surface. We then turned back but did not go back into the Nicholson tunnel. Instead we stayed on the line that would be the second jump from the main line. This passage is much bigger than the Nicholson tunnel. Much more Peacock like. I even did that little circuit close to the second jump. It's only 100 feet or so. We came out after a little over 2 hours as I was getting concerned for our primary lights.

Then we rushed to meet Erik and Tiffany to go to a Football match. This was the first one I saw. Erik - my brother from another mother - explained all kinds of stuff to me about the game. It was the Gators vs. some useless team. It was a lot of fun and learning. But boy was it long! 4 hours, when there are only 4 periods of 15 minutes to play. This is highly inefficient!

On sunday Nanci and I drove down to St Petersburg, packed all my stuff (Nanci did a super job -- she even marked the boxes with their content, like she'd one this all her life) and threw it in the van. We drove back up to Gainesville, got there around 4:30 pm and emptied the van. Then I rushed in the shower, packed stuff for a week in San Francisco and Nanci drove me to the Gainesville airport.

I'm in San Francisco now. Work stuff. But we visited a bit of the city, including Lombard Street. I even visited 2 hospitals!

I hope that your week end was great too!

Take care.

Herve.