While Weeki Wachee only has a ceiling in terms of discharge rates, Twin Dees has a ceiling and floor for limiting discharge levels. Because of the tight solution tube entrance, if the flow gets too strong, divers can't get gear in the system and if the flow drops down just a little, the spring will die again.

With Weeki over 150cfs for the past several weeks, Twin Dees is finally springing again after a nearly 3 years of general stagnation. We've begun "refresher" and "familiarization" dives on the complexities of entering this system and doing set up work in it. We hope to get a few exploration dives in from this entrance - hopefully to connect it to a Weeki Wachee line. We've also noticed that, presumably due to the extended stagnation and related proliferation of chemotrophic bacteria, the crayfish population expanded and has extended its range from The Beach all the way out to The Staging Room, right at the spring entrance. We'll see how long this wind of opportunity lasts.

Well, the rain finally came to west-central Florida again and it giveth and taketh away. The 2008 "season" at Weeki Wachee was was not what we hoped it would be - especially compared to how much we got done in the 2007 summer "session". The 70 days of exploration we had in 2007 turned into only 20 days during 2008.

This year the spring discharge level barely dipped down into the "viable exploration" range. To make matters worse, it hovered right on the edge of viability the entire time. Then the flow shot up earlier and quicker than last year. By Aug 15 the flow exceeded highest flow at any time last year (126cfs in mid October 2007)... and the normal fall flow recovery (or upswing) occurred much earlier this year than last year. The good news is Twin Dees is flowing again. But more on that in our next posting.

Just as the flow was starting to come down at Weeki Wachee, the team started experimenting with the installation of a decompression habitat that would sit 40 feet below the surface so the exploration teams to get a big break from being in the water. We did a few open circuit dives to get the support divers tuned up and ready to go and we managed to get a few other things done. We shot some photographs inside the system, tested transporting and doing instantaneous reading on the water sampling datasonde, built and tested very simple water sample collection tubes (for subsequent water analysis in the lab) and replaced the line through the Sheck's Folly restriction to make sure it was good for scootering and very durable. Just as the closed circuit team was planning the first distance dive to extract samples the suspected speleothems, the flow started to increase again. KUR has a safe working limit of 95cfs for mission dives. Beyond 95cfs, no mission diving is performed at Weeki Wachee. By July 1, we were already out of the safe working limit.