CAVE DIVER REACTS TO DANGEROUS TRUTH OF JACOB'S WELL

hello everyone my name is gus and i am the host of dive talk i'm also a scuba diving instructor and a certified technical rebreather and cave diver i wanted to watch this video called the dangerous truth of jacob's well it was posted a couple of months ago and somebody kind of shared with me and pointed out you know some inconsistencies they were like you should watch this and react to it live so i have the video right here we're going to be watching it live and i will be making comments along the way alright so let's get started located in hayes county texas about an hour outside of austin is a submerged sinkhole fed by a natural spring known as jacob's well this is interesting i'm gonna pause right right here uh really quick notice that he said that if this is fed by a natural spring when you look into caves to dive cave diving there's mainly two types of caves with flow one is a siphon which essentially has the water going into the cave very dangerous we never dive in siphons and the other one is the spring like jacob's well spring means the water is coming out of the hole which means that as you go into the cave you have to push yourself to go into it but if you have to come out because of an emergency or because your dive is over and you're coming out the water is actually pushing you along the way so actually i love that feeling in the caves that i dive there are springs because on the way out it's kind of like a conveyor belt so you find your way to swim into whatever your plan is so let's say your plant distance is to swim in 2000 feet into the cave and then on the way back out you just ride it out right the water is pushing you out which is great and the reason why i point this out about jacob's well is because you know the the title of the video is kind of misleading talking about the dangerous truth of it like the hole is going to swallow you it's actually trying to keep you out you have to fight the current to get into it because it's a spring so let's keep going the well draws both those looking for some cool water to splash around in and adrenaline junkies willing to risk it all for the thrill of exploration if you dive deep into the sinkhole you'll find an underwater cave system whose siren song has led multiple divers to their deaths according to heather alexander by the way this is not jacob's well this is massive this seems to be like a computer animation it actually reminds me of a of a cave slash cavern called beaufort springs if you google this beaufort springs it's beautiful it's way deeper than jacob's well by the way but it's a beautiful cavern of the houston chronicle at least a dozen divers have died attempting to explore the cave system which can be accessed at 100 feet down the sinkhole alexander spoke to don dibble now notice the map because we might we might you know come back to the actual map this is like a hand-drawn map of the well uh and one of the things that i want you to see is the the different i guess zones within within the actual cave itself so there's one right here and there's one thing he they talk about which is a fake chimney which is i assume is this thing up here so if you're in a hurry or maybe this one if you're in a hurry and you're trying to get out and you miss the exit you might you know get stuck there but there are things that we do as cave divers to avoid that and i'll talk about those along the way but you notice that there's like a place to exit there then there's another one and there's another one and then finally the last one the fourth one so when they talk about you know restrictions and areas within the the cave they talk about the first one the second one whatever it is that's what they're talking about so number one two three and four a diver local to hayes county who has assisted in searches for missing explorers in the cave system by the way there's so many good videos about divers out there why use a movie of you know some fake diving movie out there although i know the people that were consultants in this movie and there's actually a lot of legit uh diving going on and and technical diving specifically explaining why so many people have risked their lives at jacob's well dibble said it was the forbidden fruit the allure of doing something dangerous or as patrick swayze's bodhi put it in point break if you want the ultimate gotta be willing to pay the ultimate price unlike bodhi though there's nothing sexy about now notice that this diver right here which by the way i think i've seen this 60 minute special it was about cave diving at 60 minute australia and notice that she's using a line to get to go in uh this line is a little bit exaggerated i i realize they're using it for for the actual you know short that they film because when we cave dive you want to have a continuous line from the entry of the cave all the way until you go and come back you never not have a line it's one of the rules of cave diving but the line stops pretty much where the cavern starts the cavern by the way is where there's natural light so you can see natural light now obviously if you're diving at like midnight or something like that you're not gonna see light it's gonna be dark but if it's during the day and the sun is out then as soon as you see natural light creeping in through a hole or a gap uh in the you know the ceiling or whatever then that is a cavern and you don't really need a line because you're able to see your way out so we typically if we're gonna lay line from the cavern area you know it's gonna be from the cavern area to the line that goes into the cave i personally have never dove in a cave that doesn't have line i've been into several caves and they all always have a line uh into them which you can tie to from the cavern section but most caves do a good job you know laying the line so the line starts where the cavern is so you don't have to lay your online so they're doing this right in the cavern you can see the line because it looks good on tv the tragedy is at jacob's well on september 9th 1979 a group of friends from california arrived at jacob's well for a diving excursion it was almost midnight but as the group set up their tents two of them 20 year old kent maupin and 21 year old mark brashear decided they wanted to squeeze in a quick dive before bed i like that they say oh we're just gonna squeeze a quick dive there's no such thing as a quick dive like it takes a long time to get prepared to go diving um you know i i think the water at jacob's well is something like 68 degrees which is pretty cold uh for diving so this is not something where you have a swimsuit you just throw something on and let me go diving like it takes a lot of preparation to go on a dive um and you know the fact that they're doing it at midnight is kind of bizarre now from what i was reading about these guys they weren't cave certified they weren't cave divers by the way this happened in 1979 there were no dive computers um you know there's no spgs or submersible pressure gauges telling you how much air you have left you actually use something called a j valve which had a little bit of air left so when you run out of air you hit this j valve gives you enough air so you can come to the surface so the technology of diving wasn't really where it is today today is way safer right to go diving into caves um and you know these guys they weren't cave certified they didn't have the right equipment and they're gonna go diving in the middle of the night like that is that's just nonsense like the fact that they expected to survive this is beyond me but anyway that's one of them by the way was a scuba diving instructor and a lot of deaths when it comes to cave diving are from instructors because once they make it to instructor they feel like you know i'm an expert diver there's nothing that can go wrong i can dive anywhere which is not true don't go diving in caves if you're not cave certified despite the late hour there were other divers at the site who saw the two men descend to the depths of the well and maneuver themselves through the tight opening to the cave's deepest chamber i thought that was funny you said despite the late hour like there's a lot there's a light inside a cave underwater there's never a light so the cave looks the exact same whether you're going in at 10 in the morning 10 in the middle of the night whatever it doesn't matter as a matter of fact there's a lot of cave divers that like to go in at night because the cave is exactly the same it's pitch black but there's not a whole lot of people in the area where the caves are located a lot of caves that we go diving in are open to swimmers as well just like jacob's well so going in in the middle of night actually makes sense because nobody's gonna be swimming there but you have space to lay out your gear and set up and you don't have all these people jumping in from a rock into the well or whatever it is so it's not weird they're going in the middle of the night so they're saying like despite the fact that it was late it doesn't matter that it's late the cave looks the same regardless of the time of day which required them to take off their oxygen tanks and okay this is the one that bothers me the most with videos that are made by non-divers for divers the oxygen tank there's that's not a thing divers if you're not a diver a lot of people think that what we dive with is oxygen it's not oxygen is actually toxic past 20 feet 20 feet you reach a ppo2 or a percentage of oxygen on your blood essentially the concentration of oxygen that is it's 1.6 which means that you can start having convulsions after that so no one dives with a hundred percent oxygen in a tank we dive with air most of the time compressed air or the air that you breathe is actually 21 oxygen and roughly 79 nitrogen and other gases but nitrogen makes 78.2 percent i believe so when you go diving you have air it's an air tank it's actually an air cylinder we don't even are not we're not even supposed to call them tank but calling them tanks is not a big deal but it's air you run out of air you don't run out of oxygen so that's one thing that bothers divers a lot actually pull them in separately it was reported that one of the divers who witnessed the two disappear into the chamber noted that the men didn't have backup lights or a safety line how do you know they don't have backup lights that's what i want to know because when i see divers and caves i have no idea what lives they what lights they have i can see they have one light because they are you know as i'm swimming by them i can see that they have a flashlight but how can you tell they don't have backup lights it doesn't make any sense whatsoever that you can look at somebody and no they don't have a light here's an example all right so here's my primary light for cave diving this i wear on my left hand like this so i can light up and still use my hand it's not tight so that's why it's all wobbly but this light is 6300 lumen so it's super super bright then as a backup i actually use a very similar light on my right hand so it goes right here and again i can use my hands while the light is mounted in my right hand i never use this light this is just a backup light it's smaller still pretty big but it's smaller as a backup and this is 4200 lumen now watch this on top of those two lights i dive with two other lights which are 1200 lumen each these are in my pocket there's no way that you can tell that my backup lights are in my pocket because they're inside a pocket so if i didn't have you're you're supposed to dive with at least three lights i take four but and all of the bodies that i dive with we all take four lights but at least you're supposed to have three lights right so if your primary goes bad and in the process of you deploying your backup i don't know it falls into the silt and you you don't you don't see it anymore you lost it you still have another one and not only that your bodies also have three so there's plenty of lights to go with but there's no way you can look at me and know that i have more than one light because when i'm coming swimming at you all you see is one flashlight lighting the cave you have no idea if i have another one led along three more so i don't know it this it just didn't make sense that they're like oh somebody saw them going in and they noticed they didn't have a backup light what are you talking about now if you tell me they noticed they didn't have a light no not only a i you know i believe you because they don't have a light going in the cave but number two how can they see anything if they don't have a light so i think they had a light and there's absolutely no way you can tell if they don't have a backup light that's just that's just nonsense he said he attempted to get their attention by flashing his own light at them but that they didn't acknowledge his warning neither man resurfaced rescue divers including don dibble spent weeks attempting to recover their bodies but were unable to traverse the treacherous passage that kept the men trapped at the bottom of jacob's well by the way i read a lot about this accident or or this death this tragedy or however you want to call it again people that were not certified going in with you know the wrong equipment um but apparently they you know what what he's talking about the person that didn't see they had a backup light this person saw them going into the fourth chamber if you remember that map that we looked at earlier the fourth chamber which by the way is not super deep i think the max depth at jacob's well is 137 feet which again if you're a regular diver that's pretty deep actually your limitation is 130 but if you're trying to make certified we can go all to 330 feet so 130 it's not a whole lot um in the realm of things you know last month for example i had the opportunity to dive in what is known as the mount everest of cave diving which is called eagle's nest and you can look this up uh eagle's nest goes as deep as 320 feet or something like that and the cave doesn't start until around i would say around 180 feet so jacob's well max depth it's not even the beginning of the cave at eagle's nest um so you know depth is uh is a it's based on your opinion at the fourth chamber let's say that we're going into the 130 feet which to me it doesn't make sense and the reason why it doesn't make sense is because these guys were going in there with an air cylinder right a regular tank in on their back and by the time you make it to 130 feet on the fourth chamber you're so deep that you're breathing about if i had to calculate it based on my own internal surface air consumption rate or sack rate you're breathing about two cubic feet per minute uh essentially so if by the time you make it down there if you have a tank that is 80 cubic feet and by the time you make it down there let's say you have about 60 left well you're breathing two of those every minute essentially and that is assuming they're not freaked out they're just normal and they have the same sack rate i have my sack rate is about 0.44 liters per per minute so or cubic feet per minute rather so if i am freaking out and i'm breathing one per minute and i'm at four atmospheres or 130 feet now i'm breathing four cubic feet per minute so the fact that they would go all the way down there that is super deep and in regular air they're narc as well which is like being drunk in air nitrogen makes you drunk it's called nitrogen narcosis or narc for short then you know going into that fourth chamber with just a regular tank of air makes no sense for an instructor especially right someone that is an instructor i understand they shouldn't be in the cave to begin with but if you're an instructor you know at that point that look i i'm pretty deep i'm breathing a lot why would you push and go into a fourth chamber like that was just i mean full-on kamikaze like you just want to die at that point after his efforts to recover maupin and brashear's bodies dibble installed great over the entrance to the cave system in an attempt to keep more people from risking their lives however when he made a subsequent dive to check on the barrier several months later the grades had been removed and a note left that read quote you can't keep us out all right that is also total nonsense to me i could not find anything that talks about this great other than two articles which is i think what the person recording this video based you know the whole information on the video about when you install a grade i'm actually going to switch into my uh into my browser so you can see what i'm talking about when you install it great it looks something like this um so let me uh let's find a picture of a great all right so it looks something like this right it's full on rebar that has been welded together with an underwater well uh essentially um and is built into the rock like you cannot move it this picture right here is a picture of the great at genie springs a very popular cave and on the cavern side where you don't enter the cave system there's a grate and you actually go and hold like if you're uh if you're an open water diver you go in there and hold it's not very deep it's like i think it's like 50 feet or so and you go in and hold and the power of the spring all the water is coming out of that grate actually it's pretty cool to hang on to that and feel the power of the spring trying to push you away and then you let go and you just ride it backwards it's pretty awesome it's actually really cool and that there's absolutely no chance that you can just go and dismantle this crate and then leave a note like oh i just have my uh let me let me get my my cool note and write up you know you can't keep me out haha lol like what are you talking about that makes no sense like somebody's gonna be down there he's like oh no they install a great let me get my underwater plasma gun and blow out this like it doesn't work like that here's another one here's the picture of a greater vortex springs which is another known place for cave diving made famous by the disappearance of ben mcdaniel a diver that went into this thing and he was never found and i saw some comments on the video uh for jacob's well about this guy saying like oh people went in there and they never found him now that was actually a vortex prank there's a gate and you can see his rebar bolted into the rock i've been there i've tried to you know like move it or whatever and see if you can actually move it it's solid it's like a prison cell you cannot just straight up go and remove it like no big deal like in order to install it you have to have special machinery and a plan and measurements and stuff like that know what you're doing and you're going to tell me that some wrecked nature's when they're in there with a tank and removed it what are you talking about that makes no sense so anyway on the video the whole there was a crate there and now you know we just somebody went there and removed it and left a note like the joker like ha ha you can keep what are you talking about that makes no sense at all maupin and brashear are two of the many who have lost their lives in jacob's well two of the many 12 which they said at the beginning of the video maupin at least was an experienced diver who had been at it since he was 12 and was already a certified dive instructor what about the well is so hazardous that it claims the lives of even experienced divers in a 2001 by the way i don't know if you notice it i'm gonna rewind for a second it's diver who had been at it since he was 12 and was already a certified dive instructor what about the well is so hazardous that it claims the lives of even experienced divers you can see i don't know if you can tell there's a line there there's a line at the bottom it goes under the rock and you can't tell because it's not a a gray great quality this is not jacob's well by the way this is another cave again almost the entirety of the video does not show any video about jacob's well whatsoever there's plenty of it in youtube though if you search it diving jacobs well there's a lot of videos out there if you really want to see what it looks like and it gets pretty tight i think uh the toughest restriction is 16 inches which i wouldn't go through because i draw the line when it comes to removing equipment to fit through a restriction i'm not gonna do that if i had i dive rebreathers by the way i don't dive with a with a regular tank um if i had a side mount rebreather that would make me smaller maybe i would dare to go through a restriction like that but the the toughest one i've been through is about two feet so uh this one is a little bit less than that it's about eight inches you know smaller than that and on the one that i went through which was to woody's room at peacock springs if you want to google this and see where woody's room sits which is on the top left of the map that restriction was about two feet tall and i was dragging myself through the silt or bumping into the ceiling of the of the tunnel essentially at that point so it was pretty tight anything tighter than that i'm not interested i actually don't want to go back to woody's room after uh you know experiencing how tight that was in a 2001 article on visit wimberley author louis bond laid out the various difficulties of navigating the cave system in addition to extremely narrow passageways between the various chambers bond also refers to a quote false chimney of which he says it appears to be a way out of the well but has trapped at least one diver yep so that's what i was talking about like there's a chimney i'm gonna go up in it and surface but you are following a line like one of the rules of cave diving is you have to always have a line to the cavern or to the exit when i dive i dive with this thing right here which is a 400 foot line is my main line unless i don't need it because the entrance of the cave has a really good line and i don't have to tie to i sometimes don't bring this and the reason why i don't bring this sometimes is because i also have let me grab this i have two 200 foot lines with me or reels or spools however you want to call it this once i bring on every single cave dive that i go to so these are two 200 spools that i can tie you know if i want to explore a section of the cave that doesn't have a line in right so you always want to have a line that connects you to the main line of the cave they're actually called jumps you make jumps into other lines as well and on top of those two i have two of these these are 75 footers which i can use for jumps typically the main reels i want to keep and not use for jumps i want to use the smaller ones i have two of these two of these um and in addition to this i have two other ones that are 50 footers and i have three other ones that are 20 so if i have smaller jumps and by the way all of this is based on the planning that we do before we go in the dive if we have any jumps that are small like we need to jump 10 feet from one line to another i'm gonna use a cookie spool essentially or a jump line to go from one to the next one so you always plan your dives and bring enough line to make sure you always have a line to the exit so this fake chimney obviously would not have a line so i'm not gonna follow some lining to a trap because there's no exit there so you know that being the reason of why people die again makes no sense for our cave diver in deeper caverns tight spaces combined with gravel and silt flooring can make visibility a major issue particularly if the divers aren't careful not to stir up the loose material a more serious grate has been installed to keep non-authorized divers from the temptation of exploring the dangerous depths of the well but it didn't prevent 21 year old diver diego adami from near catastrophe in 2015. adami was doing a free dive and had descended to around 100 feet when one of his flippers came off great and he calls it flipper uh that's another thing we call them fins no one calls fins flippers there's actually a video of this on youtube if you search for free diving to the fourth chamber or third chamber something like that i watched the video where he loses the fin you can actually see it i wonder why he didn't use the actual video from diego uh in the video to show what happened but he wasn't close to dying like they prepared for this i don't know why diego lost the fin to be honest that should be the last thing you lose if you're a free diver you don't have a whole lot of equipment to be honest when you're free diving so but anyway i mean he went back to his training or his experience as a free diver and he just you know kicked up with one fin and he was fine i mean you're going on the way up you don't have an ascend rate to maintain which scuba divers have to you can just ball to the surface and be good to go which is what diego did like oh he was near catastrophe near catastrophe would be diego got caught up on something if his fin got you know tangled with fishing line for example which happened to me going into eagle's nest and then you have to you know you don't have a way to free yourself i dove i dive with a rebreather so i got tangled into fishing line at eagle's nest my body just cut it off the rebreather gives me an opportunity to be underwater for five hours so even if i run into an issue where i get tangled whatever it is i have five hours to figure it out something that open circuit divers which dive with a regular tank cannot have and obviously if you're a free diver you only have a few minutes uh to be able to do it so that's why i don't go into caves without a rebreather greatly reducing his mobility with his adrenaline surging and his lungs screaming for oxygen adami made the decision to leave the lost piece of equipment and try to surface with just one flipper flipper the other thing is the oxygen the the lungs don't scream for oxygen the what actually the urgency to breathe comes from co2 building up in your system not for lack of o2 or oxygen so your lungs are never screaming for oxygen your body's building co2 in your system and it's actually that's what makes you want to breathe but free divers know how to deal with it free divers actually do a breathing technique before they go on the dive to remove excess co2 so based on the video that i saw i don't think diego was anywhere near to running out of oxygen or whatever you know this guy said thankfully for adami his dive training kicked in and he managed to remain calm and focused he surfaced just as his body began to run out of oxygen and avoided becoming another casualty of jacob's well check out one of our newest videos right here okay so the video is clearly made by non-divers for non-divers too i think and and for some divers as well the bottom line is jacob's well as a cave is actually not very challenging it's not very deep it's not very big so as a cave i would love to go diving in it but i i it's not a it's not eagle's nest it's not one of these massive caves that are you know on the bucket list for people would i go into it absolutely would i be afraid that i'm gonna die or whatever no never because of the training that i went through and i've been in situations that have been pretty sketchy that i know for sure that if an open water diver you know was in that situation without training it doesn't matter if he's an instructor or not um they would have died for sure and only the training that i have was you know it's what allowed me to react to the emergency and perform and come out alive without any issues actually we didn't even call the dive off in most situations right so the bottom line of this video and every other video about cave diving is if you don't have cave diving training do not go cave diving it's as simple as that i mean there's a reason why cave diving is called the black belt of scuba diving there's a ton of skills that you have to learn and practice in order to get certified and be able to go and dive in cave safely so that is really the bottom line don't go cave diving if you're not cave certified that's it i hope you enjoyed this video please subscribe if you want to see more videos like this one especially if you have any recommendations that you would like for me to react to or maybe woody my co-host at dive talk to react to i'm happy to look at that and you know tell you my thoughts along the way on the air and live um you know here in the channel and again if you enjoy if you enjoy videos like this one please subscribe and hit the bell button to be notified when videos like this come out but for now i hope you enjoy this one and we'll see you in the next one

Channel: DIVE TALK

Views: 151,703

Rating: 4.8501835 out of 5

Keywords: Jacob's Well, Cave Diving, Texas, Scuba Diving, Scuba Instructor

Id: udKsIA5THIo

Length: 28min 7sec (1687 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 25 2020