Trip Report – Rick Aurich October 30, 2000
This past weekend (Oct 28-29, 2000) Robert, Chuck, Jonathan, and I traveled to Del Rio, TX to dive Goodenough Spring. Goodenough Spring is one of the few diveable Texas caves.
The cave is located in the middle of Lake Amistad along the Texas/Mexico border. The plan was for all four of us to load all our gear for two dives into Chuck’s new boat. This was a test to see just how much gear and people the boat could carry. <g> The boat handled all the gear and people just fine. However, our travel speed was reduced significantly compared to an empty boat. We loaded the boat and set off to the dive site with Robert as our guide. Robert was the only one of the four who had dived the site. We located the area of the springs and were to look for a marker buoy that was supposed to be on the site. Unfortunately there was none. It had either been removed or had broke loose on its own.
Robert located some familiar landmarks and we began search dives looking for the spring. While Jonathan and I were down searching, the wind picked up and Chuck noticed a slick spot on the surface about 500′ or so from where we were searching so he cruised over to check it out and could see the boil from the upwelling of the springs. He came back and retrieved me and Jonathan and we moved to the new search area.
Chuck located the cave entrance in approximately 108′ of water. He tied off a reel onto an existing line running along the bottom in front of the cave entrance and surfaced. We tied a small Gatorade bottle to the line to mark the cave. Jonathan and I went down for the first dive in the cave following Chuck’s line to the bottom only to find the line Chuck had tied off to had broken. However, it was tied to a big rock that also held a 1/4″ line Robert had placed several years earlier running into the cave.
We located Robert’s line and followed it into the cave. Robert placed the large line into the cave to assist entry into the cave. The flow coming out of the cave was quite possibly the strongest flow I have ever encountered; it was creating a boil approximately 40′ in diameter on the surface over 100′ above).
Jonathan entered first with me following. As we were entering the cave I was having trouble making forward progress and realized I was hung on something. I did a sweep of my gear and discovered my manifold was tangled in cave line. I signaled JG and he untangled me. We proceeded into the cave, followed the line to the left and quickly reached our maximum operating depth as the cave drops down real fast. We found ourselves in what Robert calls the fire hydrant tunnel which is a fairly decent-sized vertical crack-like tunnel with large golf ball sized gravel on the floor.
We stopped at a spot that was somewhat protected from the flow and checked our depth and gas. I was at 147′ and did not want to go any deeper and exceed my 1.4 P02 limit since I was having to work fairly hard against the flow. JG and I were on approximately the same gas mix. Robert had reported a max depth of 180′ on previous dives several years earlier, but web site reports, we estimated that the lake level was down significantly and the max depth of the cave would be much shallower. It was not.
Not knowing just what we would encounter, I had saved my deeper mix for my second dive when I would be more familiar with the layout of the cave. We thumbed the dive, exited and decoed without incident. This cave is unusual from all the other caves we dive in since the water temp in the cave is 85 degrees F. The website had reported the lake water temp to be 82. It was not. It was in the low 70’s. Since the cave temp was so warm and the flow so high we were wearing wetsuits for the dives so deco was a little cold.
We surfaced to discover our buoy was gone. We figured I had gotten tangled in the down line and pulled the buoy under causing the bottle to collapse and sink. Chuck and Robert were wanting to go back down but it was getting dark because of the time change so we got a good GPS reading on the site, packed up our gear and headed back to the boat ramp. I would like to thank Robert for his efforts in earlier years to explore and map this cave. His efforts were not an easy task as this cave is challenging do the high flow and lack of hand holds to pull and glide.
The walls of the cave are fairly smooth. Robert has explored the fire hydrant tunnel to a gravel dam restriction that is not passable on back mounts. Chuck and Robert were going to attempt to push the restriction with side mounts and if necessary dig out the gravel dam to open the restriction. This in itself will be no easy feat due to the high flow and lack of hand holds. This will be done on our next trip.