of the connection and had just begun the survey work for the Hole in the Wall cave system in Jackson County, In September 1987 recognizing Bill’s skill and desire to make cave maps, I shared my vision of one day seeing an underwater cave map of Little Dismal Sink. This cave was one of my favorite cave dives in Florida. It was first discovered and explored by Bob Goodman and Kirby Sullivan in 1974. It was kept a secret for two years. I started cave diving during the summer of 1975 and immediately heard rumors of this cave system. During my cave diving training course in July, one of our training dives was in the shallow tunnel of this sinkhole with Janis Upton and Morris Letsinger, my classmates and with Barry Kerley our cave diving Instructor.
My first cave dive into the series of first five rooms was in the winter of 1976 with Matt Levin and Mitchell Potter. After the dive, we were stoked of what we had experienced. The water was crystal clear and the rooms were majestic and inspiring to view. I continued cave diving this cave often during the late 1970’s and into the 1980’s. When I became a Cave Diving Instructor in 1981 and gained enough experience teaching I started taking students into the cave system in 1983 as a graduation dive. One my favorite drills were having students do a share air – touch contact drill thru the restriction exiting the cave. It was a great confidence builder and every time students performed the drill it was very satisfying seeing the team actually hug and exchange high five’s after completing the drill. When I left Florida in 1992 I had performed over 112 cave dives in this cave system during my seventeen years’ cave diving in North Florida
To begin this goal for producing a map of Little Dismal, I suggested to Bill that perhaps the McBride’s Slough cave system would be a good start to gain practice and become more comfortable. It was shallower than most caves in the area and, at the time, not very long. Bill embrace the idea 100% and began the mapping project. So we started doing a few cave dives taking the measurements of the depths, width of the walls and the vertical heights from floor to ceiling. We asked Bill Gavin if he would be interested in helping.
One of the very first dives Gavin participated he swam to the end of the permanent line some 900 feet back where it ended in a little pocket room at a depth of 70 feet. He looked up to his surprise there was a vertical shaft sixteen feet high. It had no guideline. It leveled out and continued horizontally at 55 feet as a small passage for almost 200 feet, then…BOOM – it popped into a nice size room. During that fall of 1987, several exploration and survey dives were performed.