A 2700' penetration wasn't enough for the day, now we wanted to go back to do King's Challenge and King's Canyon. When we were in South Africa we bought and imported a dvd of people swimming through King's Canyon in Jackson blue, and so it's been something we've wanted to do from the start. Now that we'd been passed the jump's start and end three times, we felt we were ready.
Blue Springs Park was getting really busy, there was a group from Atlanta on their monthly dive trip (they had also rescheduled to Marianna because of the flooding at Ginnie), there was a guy from Moscow (!) with a guide called Kevin from Alabama, Edd was taking a course, and there were a few more people who we didn't get to chat to ... it was a mad-house.
Amongst the chaos we descended for our dive. The front section of the cave was definitely milkier from all the cave diving traffic, but we were headed out to the King's Challenge jump at pace, so it didn't really matter.
The jump to King's Challenge comes at about 1550'. After you've swum down a breakdown after the 1200' T, you swim along a flat passage that opens out and up with a large limestone dome forming the floor and then a crevice in that floor to the right with a limestone wall forming up against the right. Just before this, as you're swimming upward along the main line, you will notice the jump to King's Challenge at right angles to the main line and about 2-3m below it.
We had left our scooters at the breakdown after the third T (about 1400'). Kev was leading the dive, so he tied off our jump reel and off we went into King's Challenge. From the jump the line cuts across open water and then follows the ceiling which slopes down and narrows. After 30m or so the line was hugging a horizontal crevice against the left wall and ceiling. The floor was a massive bed of deep thick silt. The line was about 1.5m to my left, my feet were touching the ceiling and my face was 20-30cm above the silty floor. It was hair raising. You always have to imagine the worst scenario and how you would recover from it while cave diving. The worst scenario in this case would have been a silt-out and having to squeeze ourselves further into the crevice and silt to get hands on the line, and then somehow follow it outwards with us on the floor and it tight to the roof. It would have been very tough, and was definitely something to avoid.
We followed that narrow passage around to the left and then we hit King's Canyon. The canyon towered above us. We followed the crack along the line upward from about 28m to 20m and when we started to swim forward again there was still a huge canyon above and below us. Spectacular :) Eventually we turned another slow bend to the left and there ahead we spotted the main gold line.
We were very naughty here in terms of cave diving. We knew from the maps and topography that the jump had to be to the main line. I even saw the arrows on the line, and it was gold with knots. But the rule is one continuous line to the surface. We should have either reeled the jump and then swum along the main line to find our first jump, or turned around and gone back through the canyon the way we'd come. But after hovering over a large limestone rock that the main line was tied on to, and chatting away at each other about whether or not to follow the line without putting in a jump, we decided to risk it. We both memorised that rock, and although we were 110% sure that this was the main line, we also spent the next few minutes in doubt, swimming along making sure that we didn't pass any other large rock tie-offs. I heard the whoop when Kev spotted our first jump reel and was washed with relief. We had made the circuit, we had seen King's Canyon! :)
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