The third week of the Wakulla Basin Mapping Initiative started at Whiskey Still Sink on the 18^th of May, to prep the cave for SUNFISH operations later on in the week. Whiskey Still is located on private property downstream from Upper River Sink, which provided the teams an entrance closer to the southern shallow passages where they would be operating for the next 2 days. Teams worked to replace line and install cave floats in Ashee and Innisfree Sinks not too far into the downstream passage, and deploy Cave Radio Locators (CRLs) to specific locations upstream of Whiskey Still. The SUNFISH crew joined us on Tuesday, focusing on imaging the upstream passage and AWL tunnel, where WKPP divers Chris Werner and Patrik Palm met the AUV to collect water samples. Special thanks to Teddy Tollett for all this support. 

By Wednesday, the team was moving to Turner Sink to begin mapping there. The cave around Turner contains some passages in the 0-100 foot range, but there are also passages that can drop below 290’ not far from the entrance. After careful planning and consideration, it was agreed that SUNFISH could operate up to a depth of 170 feet, which allowed for the mapping of significant portions of cave and still kept diving operations relatively straight forward. A team of Steve Cox and Taylor Schott jumped in first thing Wednesday morning to deploy cave floats in the entrance room, near the 190’ drop downstream, and upstream at the deco dome T. In the afternoon, Werner and Palm made two separate dives deploying CRL’s in the upstream passage for the surface team to find.

CRL’s emit a low-frequency magnetic field that travels through water and rock, and can be found using a receiver and set of headphones. Once that point is found, the coordinates are collected using a high-precision GNSS receiver (affectionately referred to as “the Gandalf staff”), which can then be integrated into the cave survey to make the map more accurate.

The rest of the week consisted of collecting additional water samples and cleaning up fiber in both upstream and downstream Turner. The team put in some very long days in very hot, very buggy conditions, and managed to accomplish nearly all of our goals. We cannot thank our volunteers enough for making this work possible, and for staying optimistic even in challenging conditions.

With only a little more mapping and clean-up to do, WKPP and SUNFISH decided to operate for 2 more days with smaller teams to wrap up a few remaining tasks. At the beginning of June, a small group of WKPP divers returned to Crawfordville to finish up: SUNFISH support, cleanup and water samples in downstream Whiskey Still Sink, and mapping in upstream Turner. The smaller teams were efficient and collected the data needed, however, some fiber was left in upstream Turner that would be collected the following weekend. A strong team of divers collaborated the weekend of June 13th and successfully cleared the Wakulla system of all fiber, cave floats, and any project related material.

Overall the SUNFISH and WKPP teams accomplished a great deal of data collection over the first 4 weeks of operation. Below are some basic stats:

Cave passage 3D mapped by Sunfish: 4.63 miles
Water samples collected: 14
New CRL positions gathered: 6

The WKPP had excellent participation from all ranges of divers and surface support personnel. We had a total of 22 individual Team members, including divers from 3 countries outside of the USA. We are greatly appreciative of all the WKPP participants, the Wakulla Spring State Park Service, and individual land owners who granted access to certain sinks. We look forward to continuing this project in the fall at Sullivan Sink. Please stay tuned for future updates as the project progresses.