After Martz's death, Mount decided he'd better take his premonitions seriously. Fifteen years later an eerily similar event reconfirmed his faith in his instincts and his commitment to maintain high operational standards. Set to go on his first trip to the Andrea Doria, regarded at the time as the Mt. Everest of wreck diving, he got that same bad feeling. This time he didn't make the dive. But Billy Deans and his best friend John Ormsby did. Ormsby drowned inside the sunken cruise ship.
It's hard not to think about dead people this morning, watching Tom Mount's student Steve Knox get ready for a training excursion into the caves of North Florida's Ginny Springs. Not because there's anything ominous about the atmosphere of the beautiful blue-green springs -- well, anything besides the large warning signs at the entrance to the water, which remind visitors that "Divers Have Died in These Caves." No, it's Knox who's responsible for the spooky atmosphere. As he squeezes into his dry suit, he's relating his family's 145-year history in the British funeral industry. "Knox's boxes, that's what they called me in school," he says cheerily. "Knoxes for your boxes, we do the very best."
Knox might joke about offering coffin discounts to his dive students back home, but he's deadly serious when getting his cave kit in order. On the picnic table in front of him, he's got two tanks, two regulators (the one that will go in his mouth has an extra-long hose; it's the one his buddy would go for if they had to share air), a buoyancy compensator specially designed for use with double tanks, a nitrox dive computer, two lights (main linked to a waterproofed lantern battery that will ride on his back, backup on his harness), two safety lines on reels, a pair of fingerless gloves, a compass, and a knife. As he dons his gear, he snugs everything to his body in such a way that it will create a minimum of drag while he swims and yet remain instantly accessible if needed. "Into caves," he deadpans as he takes the weight of his tanks on his back. "Boldly going where no man with a brain would go." Then, holding his swim fins in one hand, he kisses his wife and ten-month-old daughter goodbye and slogs the twenty yards to the water.
A few minutes later Mount and his other student, Australian diver Mirja Denlay, join Knox for a last check before submerging. Standing chest-deep on a shallow ledge, they go over each other's equipment with care, testing regulators and making sure they can reach air valves. Finally satisfied that everything is ready, they head off single file, already using the silt-free frog kick they will employ inside the cave. Their destination lies about a hundred yards downstream, where the clear water of the spring meets the Santa Fe River's tannic-brown flow. A tethered orange float marks a deep, oval depression in the rocky bottom. About twenty feet deep, split lengthwise by a pair of large tree trunks, this feature is known as the Devil's Ear. As the divers pass over its edge, they turn their lights on and descend past the sunken trees, dropping slowly through a powerful upward flow before frog-kicking straight ahead into the current's shadowy source. The Devil's Ear swallows them easily. In a matter of moments, only a few quick-rising bubbles remain to show that they were ever here. Somewhere below the riverbed, they have begun a descent that will take them more than 1000 feet into the dark and twisting corridors of the Floridan aquifer, bottoming out about 100 vertical feet underwater and underground.
Fifty minutes later the divers are back, their arrival announced by the alien-sounding beeps of their computers, clearly audible underwater outside the cave. The three of them then begin their decompression by hanging off the submerged tree trunks wedged near the bottom of the Devil's Ear, languidly breathing a special gas mix until they are ready to return to the surface about twenty feet above.
Afterward, reviewing the dive with his students in a nearby picnic pavilion, Mount dissects their performance detail by detail. Outside of a few minor foulups, such as Knox's jammed safety-line reel, only one thing really bothers him. On the way out, trailing Knox and Denlay, Mount turned off his light and waited to see if the other divers would notice. They didn't.
"You just let me die in the cave," he says gravely, pausing to watch horrified expressions spread across his students' faces. Then, after a few moments of silence, he lets them off the hook with a sly grin. "I usually die at least once in every cave course."
Next time they'll remember.
