Andrew Pitkin and Brett Hemphill will be speaking at TEKDiveUSA.2016 on exploration of the Weeki Wachee and Twin Dees cave system.  Weeki Wachee Spring, a first-magnitude spring near the west coast of Florida, is home to an old Florida tourist attraction - live mermaid shows in the spring basin where a viewing theatre has been built to allow visitors to watch breath-holding swimmers perform a theatrical underwater show. The huge amount of water coming from the spring makes it impossible to enter the cave system except at times of exceptional drought, and even then it is a hazardous entrance that only the strongest divers are able to manage. Beyond that obstacle is over a mile of spectacular deep cave passage that has been seen by only a handful of divers. Tucked away in the woods on the same property is another much smaller spring, Twin Dees, that has a different entrance challenge: a 40 foot vertical body-tube that opens into a small silty cave passage. Eventually this leads to an enormous underground room which is fed by an equally enormous cave passage at depths of 300-330 feet. This is the story of the exploration of these two very different cave systems and their eventual connection in September 2014.

Photo courtesy of Curt Bowen of Weeki Wachee