CAVE DIVING IN BERMIDA 23 YEARS AGO
A Return to Bermuda
Deep Caves. Little Islands. Big Thrills
By Stephen Weir
Photographs by Jim Kozmik
On a square mile basis there is no other country that has devoted as much of its land to golf as Bermuda. While the likes of Ross Perot and Michael Douglas spend their days slapping a white ball around Bermuda’s terrraformed greens, one wonders if these famous duffers have ever lain down on the manicured grass and listened to the other side of Bermuda.
If their timing is right, and if the tin cup is deep enough, they will hear the sound of Andrew Mello’s bubbles percolating through the ground. When the president of the Bermuda Cave Diving Society isn’t building period furniture he is underwater mapping and studying the environment beneath the cleated feet of the well heeled!
Bermuda is a 181-island chain, 600 miles east of North Carolina. The British Colony is best known as a holiday haven for the well-to-do. It is so popular more than 95% of the 22-mile long group of islands have been domesticated. There is an untamed side to Bermuda, but to find it, you have to go underground and underwater.
There are 150 known caves on Bermuda with more being found every year. The longest cave is underwater – its tunnels stretch out a total of 2 miles – an amazing distance on an island that at most is 2.2 miles wide!
Bermudans have known about the caves that honeycomb their islands forever. Shakespeare's classic "The Tempest” was inspired by the shipwreck of Sir George Somers on Bermuda in 1609. The play takes place in and around an island cave.
Up until only recently, the deep blue water-filled holes have been regarded as a convenient place to hide bottles and cans. Nowadays, everyone from government to universities wants to study and preserve Bermuda’s last frontier.
This year the four member Cave Dive Association, Texas A&M and the Bermuda government have embarked on an ambitious Eco plan to explore all of the island’s underwater caves, look for new lifeforms and detail their findings in a Global Information Survey.
Twenty years a small survey of some of the better known underwater caves was conducted by Texas A&M. Now with better gear and better training and the cooperation of the Bermuda Cave Diving Association, the mission is to study every cave before the end of 2002.
The Dolly Parton's The limestone caves began to form about a million years ago, at a time when Bermuda was 300 feet above water and about 20 times larger than it is today. After the last ice age the water levels rose and the caves filled with water, halting the cave building process.
As a result, when Diver Magazine accompanied divers to take pictures in a cave system that has never been photographed before, we swam through corridors that are decorated with a forest of man-sized stalactites and stalagmites. Perfectly intact, they rise from the floor and drip from the ceiling. At points along the way, the passageways open into large ballrooms where the hanging stalactites and bottom stalagmites are of gargantuan proportions. At the roof of some of the chambers there are large pockets of prehistoric air, trapped thousands of years ago when the sea rose up and filled the limestone tunnels.
“ Almost all of the caves are on private land,” explained 40 year old Andrew Mello. “We have made arrangements with people to let us dive. We promise them that we will respect their property, not damage or remove anything and that only certified cave divers will be allowed inside the caves.”
"I expect that we will find more than a few champagne bottles in here," said Andrew Mello as he waded into the cool, brackish waters at the mouth of a cave. "I had a misspent youth. Bloody right! In the old days we would mark the end of a school year, or a soccer win by sharing a bottle or two and hiding the evidence from our parents in one of these caves!"
One man's refuse is another man's treasure. To make an Eco dive in the unexplored labyrinth underneath a private home, the divers swim down a mound of champagne bottles, 18th century pottery, hand-blown medicine bottles and work tools from Bermuda’s long-gone naval ship repairing past.
As the divers approach the bottom, the water turns from fresh to salt water and the bottles disappear. Even though it is totally dark, the water is crystal clear. The bright halogen dive lights shine a hundred feet or more without hitting a wall or obstruction. The divers are 60 feet below the surface and heading down into a dark rock tunnel into the deep unknown.
During the one-hour dive the team lay grid lines along the floor of the cave, to help measure the cavern and to help the divers return safely to the surface. The divers are on the lookout for lifeforms of any nature.
“We have already identified a number of species that are unique to the Bermuda caves,” said Dr. Tom Ilford, a cave diving researcher for Texas A&M. “of particular note are the crustaceans. Most of them have lost their eyes and pigments, but have bigger antenna and can easily sense both movement and chemicals. Since they are blind, they find their mates by releasing chemicals into the water.”
“We are going to soon be able to give the people of Bermuda a clear picture of the conditions of the caves,” continued Dr. Ilford. “Some of the caves are pristine, others have been contaminated by sewage runoff, blasting, and in the case of the dry caves, vandalism.”
“ Last week I was diving in a cave that no human has EVER seen before. It was quite a feeling,” said the Galveston based doctor. “ It was uncovered in a quarry. The government called us in to study the new cave and make a full report. The caves that we have already mapped have been visited by only a handful of people, but, now, that seems crowded!’
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